Medicare Nonsense
As you've probably noticed, I've not written anything on this blog in a while. It makes me sick to my stomach. Every day more corruption, more insanity, more headlong rush into World War III and nuclear conflagration, and still there are about 35% of the people in this nation who simply won't open their eyes and recognize that the current leadership of this nation couldn't be more evil and damaging if they were in fact being led by the anti-christ of Revelations.
Today, I saw this article from the LA Times. The new Medicare plan, that President Bush keeps repeating parrot like "is a good deal for you" doesn't save anything on many prescriptions.
So, is the point just to line the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies with more money? It sure seems like the goal of this Administration and this Congress is to make more money for large corporations, and I can't see any other explanation for an "insurance" plan that costs billions of dollars only to pass on HIGHER costs to participants.
Either this is just a blatant attempt to further line the pockets of big corporate contributors over the American citizens for whom the politicians are SUPPOSED to work, or this is an attempt to be so transparently bureaucratic that the argument in favor of privatization sounds good by comparison.
Either way, nice to see what billions of our tax dollars can accomplish for our seniors.
Liam.
posted by Liam at 4/19/2006 10:59:00 AM
6 Comments:
"couldn't be more evil and damaging if they were in fact being led by the anti-christ of Revelations."
Will, I've seen Schindler's List, and I've read Revalations a few times.. I really think you could re-think this one.
I've read quite a bit of this page now and maybe you should consider moving a few miles north if conservatism is bothering you this much. Your outrage can't be healthy.
Cindy (yes, your SisInLaw)
and yes, still a RightWingedRepublican
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 10:58:00 PM
Cindy, thanks for stopping by.
Although it can seem like it, CONSERVATISM doesn't bother me much at all. I've written (but some time ago, so maybe you didn't get back that far) about being a centrist and how although most people consider conservative/liberal as a boolean value, I consider it a series of sliding scales. It is perfectly possible to exist somewhere between the two poles, and it is also perfectly possible to exist further to the left on one issue and further to the right on another.
As a result, anyone who decries "liberalism" or "conservatism" is being disingenuous. The gas tank is rarely 100% full or 100% empty.
But as to this medicare thing, one of the areas in which I'm the most conservative is fiscally. I absolutely abhor the level of spending in the government and find it only marginally more responsible to TAX and spend rather than to BORROW and spend. That's not to say that there aren't things I think are worth spending the money on, but I think we spend a lot that isn't worth it.
And it looks like the new Medicare bill fits that description. I think we should have a Medicare program and a Social Security program, if for no other reason than that you and I have been paying into both for something on the order of twenty years now, and so we're due something out of it. This isn't a hand out mentality, this is a very real return-on-investment. If neither program had existed, then we would probably have had about 15% more take home pay over the course of our lives.
I view those programs the same way I'd view a layaway program at a store, and with the same level of outrage if, once I'd made all of my payments and paid off the thing I had on layaway, the store said "Whoops, sorry, we sold that item, but we're keeping your money."
And to me, it is not fiscally responsible to pay large sums to put together an insurance package that can't even meet the un-insured price on many medications at certain stores like Costco. If Costco can negotiate a purchase price where they can sell a drug for [x] at a profit, then adding in some government subsidy, that price should be lower than [x], not higher. If it's higher, someone has screwed up.
The place they've screwed up, of course, is when the leadership in the Congress tacked on a rider into the Medicare approval bill that made it illegal for Medicare to negotiate better prices with the drug companies. So while a Costco or a Wal*Mart or any of the big chain pharmacies can negotiate bulk deals, Medicare has to pay the full, non-discounted price of the medication.
This is clearly not fiscally responsible and it is clearly a give-away to the drug companies. It's also a slap in the face to the free market economy, because instead of forcing the makers (for instance) of Prozac to compete against the makers of Wellbutrin, it puts both in monopoly status from a pricing standpoint. Why negotiate a lower rate to try to sell more of OUR product when the rules state the Government has to pay whatever we set our base rate at?
Oh, and while your sister and I might well consider moving out of the country for any of a number of reasons, if dislike of conservatism was among them, Canada wouldn't be our destination of choice, having just elected a new Prime Minister who ran on a platform extolling the virtues of President Bush and conservative principles.
Liam.
Thursday, April 20, 2006 7:49:00 AM
Oh, one other thing... I understand your frustration with the analogy.
It is the same frustration I feel every time some nut job on the Religious Right (note, I am not saying all of the Religious Right are nut jobs, only that as with any group of people there are nut jobs included within the Religious Right) starts asserting the existence of a war on Christianity in this country, as if preventing the government from tacitly endorsing one religion over another is somehow comperable to what Jews went through in Nazi Germany for their religion, or Christians in ancient Rome or (I dare say) a taste of what Muslims may be going through now in retaliation for what a few of there OWN nut jobs may have done.
I do think that some of what we've done in the "war on terror" is closer to the Nazis than we like to admit. Sure, we haven't done it within our own country (although there is a contract right now with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root to build "detention centers" the description of which sounds a lot more like concentration camps than prisons), but this whole business of defining a new category, "Enemy Combatant", and then claiming it is due neither the protections afforded by our Constitution nor those afforded by the Geneva convention is a bit sketchy. Defending torture as a viable tactic and/or defining certain obvious torture methods by other labels and thus claiming they AREN'T torture, that's certainly un-American.
This process of "Extraordinary Rendition" of prisoners to secret torture prisons in torture-friendly countries is not in keeping with American values.
Come to think of it, the fact that we've killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (many of those innocent civilians) as well as several thousand of our own in a war for which none of the arguments stand up to the cold light of logic and scrutiny... Since when are we the guys who START wars? We didn't start the war on the terrorists, they hit us first, but the terrorists aren't in Iraq (or weren't when we started the Iraq war), and while we've been putting in so much effort at killing Iraqis, we seem to have lost any interest at all in Osama bin Laden, who should be American Enemy #1.
There is a lot of reason to compare our current leadership to war criminals of the past. The specific techniques may be different, but the same disregard for the lives of others in pursuit of their own personal power is definitely there.
And all the while, for those who would say "Yes, but it's all for the benefit of America, so it's OK", our country is being driven ever further into debt, with record amounts of that debt now owned by China and other foreign nations. More and more money goes back into the pockets of the uber-wealthy as programs for every other class are cut for lack of funds. Which brings us back to Medicare. Reform, to be worth doing, should include some BENEFIT to the new version over the old. Making it cost more and provide worse service while the only benefit goes to drug companies who now get full asking price for their drugs from Medicare participants, that's not a benefit to the people Medicare is supposed to serve.
It is, however, a benefit to whom our leadership in both Executive and Legislative branches actually serve these days: Uber rich and big Corporations.
Liam.
Thursday, April 20, 2006 10:22:00 AM
I'm in wholehearted disagreement to your analogy of satan-and revelations, but as far as medicare is concerned, you are correct. BUT - BUT - think back a few years, and invest in some Kennedy history. Of course, only if you are looking for blame, not solutions. I do feel you must be looking for the latter, so I have to ask: What would Liam do? How do you propose we better effect the medicare situation?
Iraq is another deal altogether. As you know, I work with those soldiers, and I have lost personal friends there. But on the same note, I hear the first hand stories of the good and bad that goes on there, currently and in the past years, as far back as Karbala many years back, and OIF one. You can trust me when I tell you that the anti-christ evil you spoke of is there in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, the axis of evil. And now - Venezuela. (Don't shop at Citgo)
I still hold firm that our purpose there is ligit, our intentions pure and realistic for the good of mankind, not Halliburton.
And I add that Ann Coulter was right - people do use the word "Halliburton" as if it were a curse word nowadays.
Cindy
Thanks for a thought filled day.
Thursday, April 20, 2006 7:22:00 PM
Certainly no more so than she uses the word "Liberal" in the same manner, and with more implied cause.
Halliburton, like it or not, is tied together with Dick Cheney who continues to make money from stock options he got when he was CEO. It has also been granted large numbers of no-bid contracts (which at least LOOKS like Cheney influence), has been caught overcharging the government on numerous occasions (and yet somehow still gets performance bonuses) and by the way was recently caught providing criminally polluted water to some of your friends serving in Iraq.
Halliburton is a large corporation, interested first and foremost in its own profits. That's what we expect out of large corporations, and doesn't make them good or evil, just true to their own natures. However, knowing this, it is the job of our politicians to PROTECT us from the baser nature of large corporations (who have a level of power that ordinary citizens don't have), just as it is to protect us from the baser nature of each other.
What would I do with regard to Medicare? Hmmmm. That's an interesting question. First off, as I mentioned before, I wouldn't tie the hands of Medicare personnel when it comes to negotiating drug prices. I'm all for drug companies making as much money as they can, that's part of the free market economy, and because of the necessary costs we impose on them to ensure that their drugs are safe and effective, they have to make pretty good profits or no one would be willing to risk the huge outlay of cash for relatively meager returns.
On the other hand, they are again big corporations, being true to the nature of big corporations. They should not be forced by law to sell their product to Medicare at an artificially low price, but they should also not be protected by law from negotiation. Medicare patients are by and large elderly and take per capita more medication. Therefore, Medicare patients use a large volume of medications and so should give Medicare the leverage to negotiate bulk discounts that still turn a tidy profit for the drug companies. What benefit is there to anyone (except drug companies and then the politicians who get campaign donations in response) to protect the corporations from the normal market forces that are supposed to rule the American free market economy?
On the topic of Iraq, what, in your opinion, is our “legit, pure and realistic” purpose there? First, it was the supposed ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Whoops, they turned out not to be true. Then it was the WMDs. Whoops, we haven't found them, and even the few things we were told we found (mobile bio weapons labs, anyone?) turned out not to be what we were told they were, and in fact the Administration KNEW they weren't, but continued claiming they were. Was it bringing liberty to the Iraqis? Is that really something we should do unilaterally? Is the U.S. the world's arbitor of right and wrong, do we really have the right to unilaterally engage in regime change just because we feel like it? And if so, why didn't we go first into the Sudan, the Darfur region has it much worse than Iraqis did under Hussein. I have yet to hear a valid, good reason for us to be in Iraq that doesn't involve an argument that either should involve more than just a unilateral decision by one country, or doesn't apply a lot better to other places. Making us safer doesn't even rank, because Iraq was no threat to us UNTIL we turned it into a terrorist breeding ground.
(Janet tells me the WMDs were first, the supposed Iraq-al Qaeda connection second. The point being, should there be so many different reasons we've been given that we can't even still remember which one followed the disproving of which other one?)
So far, no one has given me any good reason why we've decided to completely ignore Osama bin Ladin, under-staff the effort to find him and keep Afghanistan from falling back into the hands of the Taliban, and instead started this (what seems to me) ill conceived war in Iraq. I'd be interested in hearing what the good reasons are to you.
Liam.
P.S. I'd avoid quoting Ann Coulter if I were you. She's made some seriously heinous and hateful, insane and borderline criminal statements. You aren't going to get any further with me quoting her than you would quoting Michael Moore.
Thursday, April 20, 2006 8:28:00 PM
I must have given you the wrong impression. I never implied ignoring Bin Ladin or the Taliban are good ideas.
Cindy
PS. I'm sorry you don't like Ann Coulter. It's just satire. She's not a politician.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 9:21:00 PM
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