20 thoughts on “Meeting Without Preconditions”

  1. Both sides are guilty of the “meeting without preconditions” flaw. The Democratic precondition is to keep what they have, the Republican precondition is to start over.

    Maybe they could both just meet and see what happens.

  2. Both sides are guilty of the “meeting without preconditions” flaw.

    But only one side is hypocritical about it. The current monstrosity should be, literally, a non starter. As the Republican leadership pointed out in their letter, it has been (rightfully) rejected by the American people. Time to scrap it.

  3. “This administration seems to be confused about who we’re at war with.”

    Naaahh, Bambi and his minions know exactly who their enemies are….

  4. I’ve no doubt that a plan popular with the American people can be created. But it wouldn’t use the current plan as a basis, and it wouldn’t be popular with the Dems, and particularly with the left.

  5. Just because I like a steak every now and then, I don’t want a whole cow crammed down my throat.

    There are several issues such as dealing with preexisting conditions that can be worked in single issue legislation. There is no need to massively overhaul the entire US health care/insurance system to achieve the goals. Once again, the Democrats over-reached and fell flat on their faces. If it weren’t so expensive, it would be comical.

  6. All I can say is that a key problem with US health care that almost everyone agrees on is that it costs too much for what we get. Lower cost would also improve insurance coverage, the windmill that the Democrat party (yes, I decided to leave the -ic off) has been tilting at for the past year.

  7. Also, I don’t know what claims have been made about the US being “ungovernable”, but it’s probably the case that the US government has been structured to keep the form of governance in question from being possible. In other words, if a president with a majority in both branches of Congress can’t “govern” the US, then they are doing something wrong, probably constitutionally wrong, and don’t deserve to have the power to govern the US.

  8. Rand – I’m not in love with the current plan either (largely because we lost the public option). Having said that, if you don’t start with something, it won’t get done.

  9. There is absolutely no reason for the GOP to negotiate on the basis of the pork-laden nonsense that emerged from the Senate and the House. Between the Louisana Purchase and the Cornhusker Bribe (not to mention Nancy’s 2000 pages of gotchas and hidden surprises), any GOP cooperation with an already discredited mound of legislative detritus should be an absolute non-starter.

    As for ‘some’ parts of the bill polling well, I am sure that when they are presented in isolation (no costs or details), you can find a majority of those polled to support almost anything, but if the last year has taught us anything, it is that the devil is in the details.

    If Obama wants the GOP to help him out, he will have to make concessions on those issues that are simply not defensible. Neither he nor the rest of the Democratic leadership has earned a scintilla of trust, and they are going to have to do better than simply offering to talk in order to get it.

    Start with a clean slate, no preconditions, and see what can happen. I rather doubt that much can (nor in truth do I believe that anything should happpen, the whole concept is misbegotten on the face of it), but certainly it does no harm to talk as long as it is clear that the existing mess is NOT acceptable in any way, shape, or form.

  10. You can’t do pre-existing conditions without an insurance mandate.

    If you do then the people that can barely afford insurance drop out.
    The sick do not drop out. This raises the price as the insurance pool gets sicker…. so the price has to go up so more people drop out and the only ones adding new insurance plans are the ones that are sick.
    This drives the price up and more marginal insureds drop out
    repeat until the insurance system fails.

    Insurance only works because some people will buy insurance and never need to use it, these people fund the ones that do use it.
    If there is no benifit to buying insurance before you need the benifit then it all falls apart.

    If the average 65 yr old uses 250/mo of perscription drugs then perscription drug insurance for a 65 yr old has to cost more than 250 a month for the plan to work. If it costs less the added $$ needs to come from somewhere else and now its wealth re distribution not insurance.

  11. …if you don’t start with something, it won’t get done.

    If you start with something that is a political non-starter, it won’t get done, either. You have a lot better chance starting with nothing.

    But you don’t want “something” to get done. You want socialization of American health care to get done. Sorry, but that’s not going to happen. At least not now. Though I’m sure that the plan is to continue to propagandize the school kids until it can.

  12. “If it costs less the added $$ needs to come from somewhere else and now its wealth re-distribution not insurance.”

    You know Paul, I’ve always felt like that regarding health insurance. I run a simple plan thats more like car insurance than health care.

    Accidental injury + catastrophic coverage. Its all you really need. Everything else just requires you to re-evaluate your current financial priorities.

  13. Gerrib “if you don’t start with something, it won’t get done.”

    You can’t make a crap sandwich palatable by scrapping half the crap off of it.

  14. But you don’t want “something” to get done. You want socialization of American health care to get done. Sorry, but that’s not going to happen.

    I say without any sacreligious intent: Thank God!

  15. You can’t make a crap sandwich palatable by scrapping half the crap off of it.

    In the case of ObamaCare it’s more like:

    If you add a drop of wine to sewage, you have sewage.

    If you add a drop of sewage to wine, you have sewage.

  16. “if you don’t start with something, it won’t get done.”
    If you start by doing something stupid, criminal and wrong… then all you’ve accompished is to move closer to finishing a stupid, criminal and wrong enterprise.

    But that’s okay with the Obamanaughts, as “stupid, criminal and wrong” is a feature and not a bug… as long as it allows public money to flow into the coffers of Democrat supporters.

  17. Chris,

    Just because 63% of Americans would like ‘some’ health insurance reform, doesn’t mean that they want THIS bill. What the GOP has stated is broadly similar to what a substantial majority of those polled has said…lets start again, and this time try to incorporate a wider range of views in the process.

    I must confess that I don’t want to see ANYTHING come out of this process, not out of any animus towards Obama, but because I believe that that almost every idea discussed so far (from both sides) will either fail or (if successful) will produce far worse results than the existing problems. There are a few minor reforms I could live with (tort reform, for instance), but ultimately most of the broader themes are not ones I support. With that said, I can see compromise on some issues, but to be fair to Obama and the Dems, very few of these principled objections could be met with any bill acceptable to them.

    The whole problem with the notion of the Dems and the GOP compromising is that some issues are simply not amenable to compromise, and this appears to be one of them. The Left feels betrayed that a state takeover of this industry isn’t in the cards (yet), and the right finds most of the watered down corporatism of the existing bill unacceptable for a number of reasons. There are partisans (not a dirty word) on both sides who hold principled objections, and pretending that they are going to drop them (or even that they should) is delusional.

    Finally, whenver I see polls suggesting that majorities support ‘health care reform’ (unspecified by type), I am deeply skeptical. The more that specifics become available for any policy, the weaker the support gets, and health care reform is a clear case of this. Like it or not, Americans want unlimited amounts of high-quality cutting edge health care and don’t want to pay for it. In the real world, no policy is going to deliver that, and most will restrict, degrade, or overprice health care in a manner unacceptable to broad swathes of the population.

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