I was asking for your observation.

The idea behind our system sprang from a need: Saskatchewan had a shortage of doctors and the province ended up subsidizing the doctors required to fill the gap. This eventually led to the first of several publicly funded universal health care systems in Canada.

The history of our system is based on a number of provinces building public options for health care and then finally receiving support federally to help cover shortfalls. It will be a much different history than what you'll see the States. That's a different creature.

I guess you could say we first focused on access to health care. Once that is out of the way, the ongoing challenge is to manage the costs and the funding, especially with an aging population.

I'm not saying it's easy, but I would say managing the costs and revising the system is a better option than pulling the plug on what's essentially a groundbreaking piece of legislation. It will reduce the deficit while removing millions of Americans from those who remain amongst the uninsured.

Should it be repealed? In my opinion, no.
Is there room for improvement? Yes.

then i'd have to say the cost of healthcare. I can't see any legitimate political party that wants to increase the medical costs of their own constituency.

so if I understand the canadian healthcare dilemma, it started because of a lack of doctors? why?

as large as this bill is, do we still really know whats all in it? I say it should be repealed and replace with a simpler piece of legislation that handles the immediate need of controlling the costs of healthcare.

Sigh. So, one guy who asks a somewhat boneheaded version of "When does my employer's health insurance plan kick in" DOES define a movement - but a guy who believes the government should not be the sole solution provider for our nation's problems and also dedicates a significant amount of time, money, and talent to helping those problems CAN NOT define that same movement. As I've said, that sounds fair. Because if you don't paint the TEA party as hillbilly baby killers, people might actually take the time to listen to their message...and we can't have that!

...and, I'm not tired of the way people respond to my posts. I'm tired of every thread being an unimaginative version of "tea baggers are evil!"

boo hoo, cimmaron.

your political viewpoint is based on an absurd anti-historical division between happy-face markety land and sad-face state-land. you seem to neither know nor care about the history of actually existing capitalism since, say, 1870, which is as good a marker as any for the point where capitalism veered away from the happy-face markety land ideology (by which i mean as an image of what capitalism is) not to speak of reality (1870 marks the creation of the stock market).

it's hard to talk with conservative libertarians beyond a certain point because there is a problem of what counts as historical reality. and this is not simply a matter of discounting what "someone like you" thinks because it's "different"---it's a matter of discounting it because it's factual basis is simply wrong. so it doesn't really matter the edifices that might be constructed from that point. the basic characterization of capitalism since the advent of heavy industry, so from the beginning of what they call monopoly capitalism, is wrong.

that means that the historical account of the development of capitalism as a socio-political order from the late 19th century forward becomes a problem for libertarian positions whereas for other folk it's a point of departure.

if we're in a position such that questions of reference to the empirical world and its system characteristics have to become a variable in order to get to some kumbaya point where any viewpoint, no matter how crackpot its logic and how debilitating its sense of history and the world, has to be accepted simply because it is held by someone, then i don't think we're talking politics at all any more. we're talking religion.


this applies to a much broader swatch of discussion than health care.
the problem seems to me to be that there's no agreement about what constitutes reality because there's no common basis for its historical antecedents.

admittedly this is a place where my academic training as a historian gets in the way of making all nice with people whose viewpoints i take to be whacked out, not because they're stupid or evil, but because their politics force them to play fast and loose with the factual aspects of a very complicated world.

what's at issue here is that you have nothing remotely like a coherent understanding of the intertwined nature of the state and happy-face markety capitalism at this point. you don't know about the last hundred years of intertwining.

that plus by all appearances you confuse ayn rand with a philosopher. that's just nutty.

Saskatchewan is a largely rural province, and was especially so in the '40s. (As a comparison, it is nearly the same size as Texas and has a lower population density than Wyoming.) Doctors needed an incentive to come to certain towns to practice, so the provincial government paid for it. They eventually rolled out a system to cover hospital costs as well.

I'm not sure what the best option is, but I'm doubtful that repealing the bill will lead to another one in the near future. This is why I'd rather see them work with it as a start and make improvements on it. With all the talk of "socialized medicine" and how it's such a bad thing, I think this is the best start we can reasonably expect.

I am no more ready to retract my "rebuttal", than you guys are to admit your unfair portrayal of all people "tea party".

roach -

I'm not quite certain how "I'm tired of you calling me a greedy, evil asshole because it is not true" has anything to do with your history lesson on capitalism, but you've never let irrelevance stand in the way of one of your soliloquies on why the government should own and provide everything to its subjects. I am happy that you were able to use my response as an inspiration, though.

You guys have a grand time. I've said all I intended.

typically, cimmaron, you only see what you want to see. it's kinda irritating that no matter what anyone actually says, you manage somehow to superimpose a one-dimensional libertarian la la-land interpretation. except this time you prove my point.

first off, it's clear that happy face markety-land mechanisms, whatever they are, has not, cannot and will not provide adequate health care access for all americans.

access to basic health care is a *political* matter. demands for it are *political.* so they are necessarily directed at the state, the function of which is not to do what libertarian dissociation would have you imagine, that is to "give people stuff" but rather to impose regulations and/or other mechanisms and institutions that change the ways in which economic agents operate. the state can and does control the rules of the capitalist game.

it's far **more** democratic to have the state explicitly occupy such a steering role than not to because the state is theoretically subject to political pressure. private firms are not. corporate oligarchy---which is the actually existing alternative to what actually existing capitalism looks like----is far less desirable and far less free than the current state of affairs---which is already not desirable and already not free.

providing free access to health care is a political goal that the rest of the industrialized world has embraced for 75 years or more in some cases as a way for capitalism to be forced to leave behind the dark ages of the 19th century.

and it was state intervention that has controlled most of the epidemics that used to work alongside capitalism to make sure that the lives of most people were alot more nasty, brutish and short than they are now. think about cholera. think about the health consequences of running water and sewage systems, of infrastructure development that was way outside the scope and vision of those heroic captains of industry blah blah blah.

if you want to argue against the need for state intervention in health care, at least have the integrity to embrace what it really means rather than substitute some absurd libertarian happy-face markety daydream for it.

but i don't think you can do it because if you did so, you'd likely not be able to maintain your own position.

i'm not terribly concerned about your objections to the way in which the tea party people are characterized. personally, i think there's a wide range of people who for whatever reason take leave of their senses and find aspects of tea partyness compelling. the one thing they share is that they're chumps. they're being used by the same old money people who funded the rise of the previous two waves of ultra-rightwing america. it's the same old same old, the principle function of which is to enable conservatives to pretend to themselves that they're somehow not the same old same old, which would require they accept responsibility for what conservatives have done once the american system had the tremendously bad judgment to let them near power.

and it's about to happen again.

so yeah, a whole happy diversity of people and viewpoints, from lots of places, all brought together by their commonality as fucking chumps.

If it were one just guy that would be a different story. But it's not. Rand Paul stated recently, when asked what he'd cut, that he'd cut across the board... except medicare payments to doctors. Seems Mr Paul makes a pretty good living on those payments and he's not in favor of cutting them. Michelle Bachmann has come out and joined the tea party and is calling for an end to ear marks. Well all ear marks except those going to transportation in her state, those ear marks create jobs. Miller in Alaska thought unemployment benefits were unconstitutional yet he and his family have received such benefits. He also thought social security should be phased out... you know after his parent were no longer in need of it.

I've listened to their message. I just don't believe them. I used to vote for GOP and conservative people quite regularly. Having seen what they do with the budget and spending I'm more then a little leery.

And who called TEA party folks hillbilly baby killers?

Plus if you're tried of people calling the TEA Party evil you should be on the other side where everything Obama does is EVIL. Hell he went to a oil spilled beach a few months ago and the clothes he wore were too nice. Had he shown up in shorts and a polo shirt I have little doubt it would have been "My God doesn't this guy know he's the POTUS!

For the most part, they have. Only when you look at verifiable evidence though. If you ignore evidence and only pay attention to political rhetoric, we're living under a black supremacist and social programs are really just a stop on the way to furnaces for us poor white folks.

Which so called tea party candidates have a stance on issues that is substantially different than the republican party? Which tea party organization has a significantly different position on issues than the hardcore republican party?

To be more specific, which tea party candidate or organization explicitly favors cutting entitlements (and no, privatizing social security isn't cutting entitlements)? Which tea party candidate or organization is in favor of reducing the federal government's involvement in the drug war, marriage issues, and foreign wars? Which tea party candidate or organizations have come out against the national security state we currently live in?

This isn't to indict the entire tea party movement. But if the only people who are actually for some sort of actual libertarian reduction of the state are people who attend the rallies but are otherwise absolutely powerless within the movement, then I don't see how the tea party can be seen as anything other than a de facto wing of the republican party. One that wants the same old Bush politics but less compromise.