American Politics during the Obama Presidency

[QUOTE=AllIWantisLove]I suspect that part of the answer is that we are lazy and fat. I doubt that the statistics we are seeing take that into account.

Bob[/QUOTE]That s another positive effect of a government in charge of citizens health insurance. The government becomes responsible for the costs and needs to act to offer preemptive solutions, rather than waiting to cure, which is always more expensive.

A federally coordinated preemptive war on the obesity pandemics in the USA with information campains on daily basis would actually save money and lives.

[QUOTE=Miami Bob]The link you provides leads to a National Institute of Heath survey--most of which are done as telephone interviews. People without listed telephone numbers do not participate. The definition of "health insurance" includes all forms of accident insurance.[/QUOTE]Okay, let me draw another conclusion from the same statistics: If they can afford to own a car and pay for auto insurance, then they can afford to pay for their own fucking health insurance.

Thanks,

Jackson

Obama's arguments must be pretty weak if he has to use a supporter's 11 year old daughter as a set piece to read a prepared question for him to field during his town hall meeting recently. After this little get together reporters found at least 20 major contradictions between what Obama said was in the bill and what was actually written. Even the great Obama doesn't know what is in his own legislation! Can you say "pig in a poke"?

Most folks are happy with the coverage they have and don't want the government to step in and take it over after such sterling examples as the US Postal Service, Welfare, Medicaid, and Medicare. In case you didn't know, Congress has a separate healthcare and retirement system in which we lowly taxpayers who fund it are not permitted to participate. Now if Congress were FORCED under the same healthcare plan they are trying to force upon us and Congress was also FORCED under Social Security you can bet the healthcare plans being floated now would change drastically and suddenly Social Security would become a gold plated plan.

Doesn't anybody snap to the fact Congress never participates in the great social planning experiments they force on the rest of the country? Don't you folks realize there is a two tier system at work here, one for those who govern and the second lower tier for those who are governed and forced to pay the bill for all?

You might convince me to go with nationalized healthcare if Congress and do mean all of them (including those retired and living off the fat of the land) had to come under it as well.

This an old speech by Hoover, way back when (1928): Rugged Individualism. Think it is a timely piece. Am an Obama guy, but the idea of government getting bigger does scare the hell out of me. No easy choices. Maybe it is worth a read for some.

[QUOTE]I intend to discuss some of those more fundamental principles upon which I believe the government of the United States should be conducted.

During one hundred and fifty years we have builded up a form of self government and a social system which is peculiarly our own. It differs essentially from all others in the world. It is the American system. It is founded upon the conception that only through ordered liberty, freedom and equal opportunity to the individual will his initiative and enterprise spur on the march of progress. And in our insistence upon equality of opportunity has our system advanced beyond all the world.

During [World War I] we necessarily turned to the government to solve every difficult economic problem. The government having absorbed every energy of our people for war, there was no other solution. For the preservation of the state the Federal Government became a centralized despotism which undertook unprecedented responsibilities, assumed autocratic powers, and took over the business of citizens. To a large degree, we regimented our whole people temporally into a socialistic state. However justified in war time, if continued in peace-time it would destroy not only our American system but with it our progress and freedom as well.

When the war closed, the most vital of issues both in our own country and around the world was whether government should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many [instruments] of production and distribution. We were challenged with a. Choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of self-government through centralization. [and] the undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness.

The Republican Party [in the years after the war] resolutely turned its face away from these ideas and war practices. When the Republican Party came into full power it went at once resolutely back to our fundamental conception of the state and the rights and responsibility of the individual. Thereby it restored confidence and hope in the American people, it freed and stimulated enterprise, it restored the government to a position as an umpire instead of a player in the economic game. For these reasons the American people have gone forward in progress.

There is [in this election]. Submitted to the American people a question of fundamental principle. That is: shall we depart from the principles of our American political and economic system, upon which we have advanced beyond all the rest of the world.

I would like to state to you the effect that. [an interference] of government in business would have upon our system of self-government and our economic system. That effect would reach to the daily life of every man and woman. It would impair the very basis of liberty and freedom.

Let us first see the effect on self-government. When the Federal Government undertakes to go into commercial business it must at once set up the organization and administration of that business, and it immediately finds itself in a labyrinth. Commercial business requires a concentration of responsibility. Our government to succeed in business would need to become in effect a despotism. There at once begins the destruction of self-government.

It is a false liberalism that interprets itself into the government operation of commercial business. Every step of bureaucratizing of the business of our country poisons the very roots of liberalism that is political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press and equality of opportunity. It is not the road to more liberty, but to less liberty. Liberalism should not be striving to spread bureaucracy but striving to set bounds to it.

Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit, a force proceeding from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved. [An expansion of the governmentís role in the business world] would cramp and cripple the mental and spiritual energies of our people. It would extinguish equality and opportunity. It would dry up the spirit of liberty and progress. For a hundred and fifty years liberalism has found its true spirit in the American system, not in the European systems.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. I am defining general policy. I have already stated that where the government is engaged in public works for purposes of flood control, of navigation, of irrigation, of scientific research or national defense. It will at times necessarily produce power or commodities as a by-product.

Nor do I wish to be misinterpreted as believing that the United States is a free-for-all and devil-take-the-hindmost. The very essence of equality of opportunity and of American individualism is that there shall be no domination by any group or [monopoly] in this republic. It is no system of laissez faire.

I have witnessed not only at home but abroad the many failures of government in business. I have seen its tyrannies, its injustices, its destructions of self-government, its undermining of the very instincts which carry our people forward to progress. I have witnessed the lack of advance, the lowered standards of living, the depressed spirits of people working under such a system.

And what has been the result of the American system? Our country has become the land of opportunity to those born without inheritance, not merely because of the wealth of its resources and industry but because of this freedom of initiative and enterprise. Russia has natural resources equal to ours. But she has not had the blessings of one hundred and fifty years of our form of government and our social system.

By adherence to the principles of decentralized self-government, ordered liberty, equal opportunity, and freedom to the individual, our American experiment in human welfare has yielded a degree of well-being unparalleled in the world. It has come nearer to the abolition of poverty, to the abolition of fear of want, than humanity has ever reached before. Progress of the past seven years is proof of it.

The greatness of America has grown out of a political and social system and a method of [a lack of governmental] control of economic forces distinctly its own our American system which has carried this great experiment in human welfare farther than ever before in history. And I again repeat that the departure from our American system. Will jeopardize the very liberty and freedom of our people, and will destroy equality of opportunity not only to ourselves, but to our children.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Miami Bob]The link you provides leads to a National Institue of Heath survey--most of which are done as telephone intervews. People without listed telephone numbers do not participate. The definition of "health insurance" includes all forms of accident insurance.[/QUOTE]Miami Bob,

I believe you may have mis-read the report. I couldn't find any reference to "auto insurance" anywhere in the text, although this note was included at the bottom of every table in the report:

[quote=CDC Report: Percentage of persons of all ages without health insurance coverage]A person was defined as uninsured if he or she did not have any private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) state-sponsored or other government-sponsored health plan, or military plan at the time of the interview. A person was also defined [u]as[/u] [u] uninsured[/u] if he or she had only Indian Health Service coverage or had only a private plan that paid for one type of service such as accidents or dental care.[/quote]

Most people that have health insurance are happy with it because only a small percentage of people are getting screwed over by their insurance company or employer at any point in time.

It would be hard to deny the existence of two serious problems:

1. Per capita health care costs are increasing faster than we can pay for them as a society.

2. Many people don't have access to affordable insurance plans.

We can continue to ignore the problems or we can try and solve them. Pick a side and argue it but don't try to pretend the problems don't exist.

Accident insurance includes what you credit card provides when you buy a ticket with the credit card and motor vehicle insurance is for accidents and almost all staes in the usa require PIP which is health coverage for injuries resulting from any accident involving your motor vehicle and possibly any accident invioling you as a passenger in another person's vehicle or a pedestrian hit by a motor vehcle. This is the definition in the small print.

Your position may fit into your world view in a nice package--the market is a gift from god which puts everything right. Talk to people who need their health insurance or have to pay for it in the usa and you will hear a different story.

I'm shure that you will call me a socialist--I am in a sense. Just like richard nixon was a socialist in a sense when he fostered medicare and regan was for not fighting against medicare. And you will be when you accept medicare benefits, if you accept them. If you think social security and medicare are morally wrong--refuse the benfits.

We live in a social democracy as does western europe and most of the first world. The usa is the odd man out, not everybody else. There are some socialist elements in our society and almost all first world societies.

They're going hard. Looks like it's going to pass. All you buckslaps in Argentina forced to return to the USA because it's all good.

I thought they said it would pass but maybe it won't pass or a co op. They're talking about the Obama assasination a lot on Drudge Report. He posts articles on it all the time. Send some cash to the DNC to keep Obama going.

I just sent a copy of this fishy post to [email]flag@whitehouse.gov[/email]. I think it's important for the government to keep track of such things and the people who would say them.

[QUOTE=Sidney]TEN FACTS EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS' TRILLION-DOLLAR "STIMULUS" ON ITS SIX-MONTH ANNIVERSARY.

Sick Sid[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Sidney]Even though SEIU kept coming over and walking through, continuing to be very intimidating and aggressive at the direction of the one SEIU man.[/QUOTE]Obama is taking lessons from his friend Hugo Chavez - unleashing the "union" thugs on opposition. Not just in Montana but all over the country. SEIU goons badly beat a man at a town hall in Missouri when the man dared have an opinion different than that allowed by Disciples of Our Savior.

This is, of course, "The Change We Were Waiting For!"

So now O is a good friend of hugo chavez?

What happen to the people who brought fire arms to the town meetings[strongly anti o+ mouthing obvious misinformation propagated by ms palin]

Hate o--that's your right, but you are too intelligent to spread misinformation. Were you joking about o being a good friend of chavez or employing hyperbole to make a point of some sort?