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I choose other. The majority of Americans are opposed to cuts in medicare.
New Poll Show Americans Oppose Cuts To Medicare, Medicaid - Kaiser Health News
I choose other. The majority of Americans are opposed to cuts in medicare.
New Poll Show Americans Oppose Cuts To Medicare, Medicaid - Kaiser Health News
Kandahar, you surprise me;
why do you think that a board imposing one-size-fits-all decisions by fiat is better than means testing to allow for our poorer seniors to get more support, and then letting all seniors make their own allocative decisions?
yes, shocking I know, the majority of Americans want a cut in spending, want to get the debt under control, but don't want cuts taken out of some of the largest expenditures the government has...oh, and they don't want their own taxes raised.
So obviously, we should bow the desires of the people who refuse to give up stuff they're getting or give up any of their money by taking from the "greedy" rich.
I choose other. The majority of Americans are opposed to cuts in medicare.
New Poll Show Americans Oppose Cuts To Medicare, Medicaid - Kaiser Health News
Because their own decisions may or may not be cost-effective from the government's perspective
and since the primary goal is to control the cost of health care, the government absolutely has an interest in regulating the way it allocates its scarce health care funds.
All the cuts do is continue to kick the can down the road. The welfare state can no longer be sustained, Im tired of being stolen from for services Ill never end up using. Its way overdue to get rid of them and let private charity take over.
but since the money they are recieving is fixed; then it makes no difference to the government whatsoever if their chosen cuts are cost-effective.
cpwill said:but the CBO scored the IPAB as saving no money;
cpwill said:and Ryan's plan as saving lots of money;
cpwill said:and the method of payment continues to drive up the cost of healthcare,
cpwill said:while Ryan's method of payment is designed to drive down the cost of healthcare
.... or make the system self-sustaining, as Harry Guerrilla and I have proposed.
The government wants to limit costs, but it also wants to provide the best quality care possible. For evidence of this, I present the Medicare program itself. If the government was solely interested in its balance sheet, it never would have created the program.
Let's be clear about how CBO scoring actually works. It looks at the baseline numbers (i.e. what our national finances would look like without any further action, or in this case, what it would look like if there was no IPAB and everything else stayed the same) and compares them to the numbers of the policy in question. The other provisions of the Affordable Care Act, for example, are not included in the CBO's calculations for the IPAB because it's already a law and therefore part of the baseline.
Furthermore, the CBO tends to score proposals under the most pessimistic approach that's reasonable
That's not necessarily a bad thing and in no way discounts the work that the CBO does, but we have to remember that when discussing policy. For example, if you have a bill with hundreds of mechanisms to reduce costs but the scope of the reductions is unclear (like, say, the ACA) the CBO will tend to score them ALL as low as possible
As for the IPAB specifically: It's a fundamentally sound idea to pay hospitals for results rather than procedures
By analyzing what works and what doesn't, the IPAB can allocate the government's resources more efficiently.
The problem with IPAB (and the reason why the CBO is unsure if it will actually save money) is that Congress tied its hands in the ACA because they didn't like the idea of giving up their own power to an executive agency. For example, many Medicare operations are explicitly exempted from review by IPAB, and IPAB will not be able to use any cost-sharing or care-rationing mechanisms that could substantially reduce costs
That depends what you define as "saving" money
and I think is the fundamental problem I have with the Ryan approach. Many conservatives believe that the main problem with health care is the rising cost that ends up on the government's budget.
I believe that the main problem with health care is the rising cost, period.
Ryan's plan "saves" money by removing the costs from the government and transferring them to the private sector.
This doesn't do anything to correct the fundamental problem, which is that health care costs are eating up a larger and larger fraction of the economy and the end result will be to limit access to health care if nothing is done to stop it.
The problem with payment methods - whether public or private - is that the patient doesn't see enough of the cost.
I support high deductible coverage plans (subsidized for low-income patients), so that people are protected in the event of a catastrophe and have access to care when they get sick, but have to pay for at least some of their own procedures
This is true whether the plans in question are public or private. From an economic standpoint, a consumer doesn't care whether the entity paying for his health care is Medicare or a private insurer, as long as it isn't him. There's no fundamental reason that the private sector should necessarily do a better job than the government, if it's not the consumer who is paying for the service in either case.
It's designed to drive down the cost of health care for the government, by indiscriminately slashing costs and transferring them to patients. For example, the CBO estimated that Ryan's plan would increase total health care costs for seniors (relative to the baseline) by 25%.
http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/121xx/doc12128/04-05-Ryan_Letter.pdf
yes, shocking I know, the majority of Americans want a cut in spending, want to get the debt under control, but don't want cuts taken out of some of the largest expenditures the government has...oh, and they don't want their own taxes raised.
So obviously, we should bow the desires of the people who refuse to give up stuff they're getting or give up any of their money by taking from the "greedy" rich.
Maybe some of us are tired of getting stolen from, you may like getting your check raped by entitlement bull**** but I dont.
Or, we can do what the We the People decide is important. 30 years of tax cuts to the rich have not helped the middle class improve their lot. It just increased the public debt which the middle class and their heirs are now on the hook for. The other big issue is unnaffordable health care costs, it is one of the issues that swept Obama into office. The GOP comes down on the wrong side of both of these issues from the perspective of the middle class.
Orr we could seize the oil revenues from Iraq and Afghanistan that are owed for saving their sorry asses and give our seniors better wheel chairs and bingo boards.
Or, we can do what the We the People decide is important. 30 years of tax cuts to the rich have not helped the middle class improve their lot. It just increased the public debt which the middle class and their heirs are now on the hook for. The other big issue is unnaffordable health care costs, it is one of the issues that swept Obama into office. The GOP comes down on the wrong side of both of these issues from the perspective of the middle class.
I'm in the middle class, and I disagree.
You are in the minority opinion then:
Large Majority Of Americans, Including Most Republicans, Support Raising Taxes On The Wealthy
An option for privatizing should be on the table for people who want to do it.
That is the republican's plan. Privatizing it and giving coupons.
The tax cuts of the past 30 years have helped the middle class. It has reduced their tax burden and allowed for more individuals within the middle class to move up into the upper middle class or hire.
A legitiamte argument can be made that they've helped "the rich" far more than the middle class, and that would be a logical and common sense notion since the Rich was taxed significantly higher than the middle class and thus would feel the affect of a tax cut far more. But the middle class not being helped as much by tax cuts is not the same as not being helped at all.
You can try the "We the People" line with me all you want Glenn Beck, but sorry...you're not going to sway me. "We the People" as a collective are, looking at nothing else, human and thus generally a selfish lot worried primarily about what benefits us in the short term. Its why we're a Republic and not a Direct Democracy. We are not, and should never be, a country governed by polls telling us what "We the People" want.
Somehow I don't imagine you standing here talking about doing what "We the People" wanted when they said to repeal Obama's Health Care law.
We'd have invaded Iraq in 2001, when a majority of "We the People" favored that. "We the People" decided that at one point George Bush was the most approved of President of all time.
"We the People" have stated gays shouldn't be legally allowed to marry.
"We the People" are more pro-life than pro-choice, so perhaps we should ban abortion since all you care about is "we the people's" polling data.
"We the People" favored extending ALL the tax cuts in December of 2010, I guess you believe that was right as well.
We definitely need to listen to the citizens of this country, unquestionably. But what they're saying can only be one factor in regards to how our representitives should be acting. And its foolish, in any walk of life, in any situation, to absolutely ignore all surrounding context.
The blatant and obvious cherry picking you're doing to validate your point of view by not even applying your own extremely narrow and childish view of the situation in an even way is decisively dishonest in method. "We the People" need to be heard, but need to have all they say taken into account, and need to be looked at realistically, and need to be balanced against the interests of "They, the next group of People" and the needs of the country.
In reality no one in congress currently (except one) has the actual balls to eliminate medicare.
That is the republican's plan. Privatizing it and giving coupons.
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