Should I read the new healthcare bill or finish Remembrance of Things Past?
I understand the healthcare bill, in its current iteration, runs 1990 pp. That’s a lot of pp., even for an Evelyn Woods graduate, which I’m not, and, to be honest, I never did finish Remembrance of Things Past. I want to be a good citizen, but if I ever get the extra time, I suspects I’ll choose Proust’s epic, which probably contains more information about health (among many other things), over Pelosi’s. Somehow the French masterpiece seems “more considered” and the first volumes, which were assigned in my college comp lit class, were pretty damn good.
And I think that’s the point. Healthcare needs improvement. What doesn’t? But what’s the rush? At present it is far from a catastrophe. The law of unintended consequences tells us a precipitous move may only make things worse. Why not move step by step? I am enough of a pragmatist to follow that where it may lead, even to a single-payer plan, even though I strongly doubt that would happen. But the current method seems so driven by politics it’s no wonder the public seems about to throw up. But the backers of this bill don’t seem to care. They are so locked in their own ideology they seem unwilling to test it. A gradual approach could, of course, reach their desired result, if it proves to be correct. But I suspect many of the people behind this distrust their own ideas. They don’t really believe themselves. They are only interested in power.
As for Proust, at this moment the collection of Remembrance of Things Past is number 672,039 on Amazon. I’m thinking of buying it and kicking it up a few notches. It’s either that or the Pelosi bill. Which do you think is more nourishing?
I think this “victory” (should it materialize) will cost the Dems a lot. They have lulled themselves into a drunken stupor with the idea that the polls say a majority of people want the public option (I have heard that on every liberal NPR/PRI show imaginable). This is a mess, as is the jobs picture, as is the national debt. These folks will wish they remembered, “it’s the economy, stupid”. Even though some stats might look a little better next year, as we have a natural recovery, this crowd has done a lot of damage that will show up on the balance sheets.
At present it is far from a catastrophe.
How much worse would it have to get for you to consider it a catastrophe?
Almost 2,000 pages.
Wow.
Anyone think there’s even a single page devoted to anything remotely resembling a reference to Congress’ authority to sell insurance? Or to fund individual health health care out of the Treasury, at Taxpayers’ expense?
I have the link to the PDF, but the comment submission fails if I include it.
Can someone explain why SOME articles/blogs on this site are completely brain-dead when it comes to posting a link in a comment and others are just fine? Is WordPress really that difficult to administer?
Testing… 1, 2, 3… is this thing on?
Can anyone explain why SOME articles/blogs on this site are completely brain-dead when it comes to posting a link in a comment and others are just fine? Is WordPress really that difficult to administer?
Oy. PDF is linked in my handle. Out.
Nancy wants it debated and passed by this same Saturday. She promises that it will be a deficit neutral plan.
You ought to start with a more modest tome. I’d suggest On the Origin of Species, given the 150th anniversary next month. Start small.
Peace.
DS
I really don’t think Nancy Pelosi can whip the Democrats to get her monstrosity read & debated in one week, although she will try her plastic surgery best; the Democrats–even in the House–are pulled into too many directions. The same applies for the Senate & their monstrous knot of a bill.
So I scroll to a random page (1347) and the first thing I glance at is, “The imposition of sanctions in the form of civil monetary penalties, which ‘‘(I) shall be assessed according to standards and procedures established in regulations to be promulgated by the Secretary within one year of the date of the enactment of the Affordable Health Care for America Act”. This refers to something about drugs and drug companies.
So if this passes at some future date someone will develop a regulation specifying civil penalties according to standards that will be determined at some future date. Does it get any more open to abuse than that? And that is just a single random glance at a single page of this horror. I think we have no idea just how bad this is going to be.
None of this concerns the health plan. That will be written later by the 500,000 person bureaucracy set up by this bill. There are a couple of basic rules that are being ignored. There are not enough bureaucrats in Washington to control the health seeking behavior of the population. Command economies don’t work. Ask Gorbachev who tried to make one work.
We cannot afford a Medicare for all, which is the purpose of this bill. In fact, we cannot afford Medicare for the present beneficiary list. It goes broke in 2017.
The only way to reform healthcare is to allow doctors and patients to establish a free market relationship. Insurance can do what insurance has always done; help pay for unexpected events.
The pre-paid care model we have had for the past 40 years has failed. We cannot afford it.
What the Democrats are doing is irrelevant. It is not a health plan and will kill the economy. The first five years are just taxes and regulation. They will never get to the second five years.
“I understand the healthcare bill, in its current iteration, runs 1990 pp. That’s a lot of pp.”
Gee, sure is. Makes you miss the days of W, when his Sec. of the Treas. could ask for 80 billion on the basis of a 4-page memo.
“Healthcare needs improvement. What doesn’t? But what’s the rush?” asks Mr. Simon. “I mean, I’m in good health, I have good insurance, I have money….”
“…it is far from a catastrophe” you say! Don’t you realize that, according to many of Pelosi’s minions, if it is not changed we face a “holocaust”?
The Red House doesn’t care if 600 pages in the bill, as drafted, are straight out of Proust, or if anybody actually reads any of it, as long as buried in it are sufficient clauses that permit them to sufficiently revise it prior to November, 2010 that it will be virtually irreversible.
Passage of a new healthcare act is central to their statist agenda. Health care, for Communists, is simply livestock management: obligatory registration, controlled feeding and sheep-dipping, annual shearing, mandatory medical procedures, culling the feeble and unproductive, termination on schedule. Rigid training after weaning to assure passive response. Knock off the mavericks.
Hey! Running a country is a piece of cake. Just ask Castro.
So bibio44, does this mean you think it is good policy to through out a 1900+ bill and have everybody vote on it without knowing what is in it? Remember, Obama wanted to ram this thing through in August. Why is this good policy? Is this what Dems consider transparency?
Sorry- “Throw” out
Biblio44 trusts government to do the right thing and has little interest in the details of the bill. I’ve seen this again and again with lefties. They make such nice sheep.
Unless the Gov’t is controlled by Republicans, then decent is patriotic!
It is too bad these tomes are not available for Kindle.
Proust’s epic probably contains more information about health than the 1,990-page measure.
Here’s a Proustian health tip: eating madeleines causes prolonged mental flashbacks. The hippies could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had downed French cookies instead of blotter acid.
“Remembrance of Things Past” is quite rewarding. If that’s your choice, Roger, well, we’ll see you in about 5 years. Actually, immersing yourself in an epic tome might not be a bad way to get through the era of The One. It’ll keep your blood pressure down.
Actually I think you probably need to re-read “BRAVE NEW WORLD” by Aldous Huxley written in 1931 and published in 1932. The current situation. The news yesterday of artificial sperm and eggs. The Government Controlled Health Care. That book is more like
a travel guide to the next year if things keep getting crazy.
If you tried to read those 1992 pages that would not be all you have to read because they always refernce section 5 subsection D page 56 paragraph 6 or some such drivel. This makes understanding any legislation impossible without a complete Federal Register the 2008 version is over 80,700 pages. No one knows the implications, it is impossible to know.
ts @3 – If you think health care in the US is bad now (and I would strongly beg to differ) wait until the government gets its hands on health care (heaven forefend). Remember, governments have problems doing simple things, like fixing potholes, how do you expect a government to do a complicated thing like health care? Just look at the UK or Canada (or even Taxachusetts). To wit, in the UK survival rates from prostate cancer are 43%; in the US they are 81%. Where is the catastrophe? I guess we should try to match the UK. And in Taxachusetts, health care costs are (I think) climbing faster than ever and probably faster than the rest of the US; tastes of things to come. Oh – and thank you Mitt Romney.
And don’t forget – the Pelosi bill may only look like it’s 1990 pages long; wait until the Administration gets through writing all the rules and regs; we are probably looking at at least 100,000 more pages, and who knows what evil will be in there. ts – remember the IRS code everybody hates? Wait until we get the health code, and then you and I everybody else in America will have a real catastrophe on our hands.
Jack in Silver Spring…my CPA has a shelf filled with volume after volume of tax court cases & decisions. If this thing passes, then in a few years there will probably be an equal volume of “health care court” decisions.
14. TriGeek: “So bibio44, does this mean you think it is good policy to through out a 1900+ bill and have everybody vote on it without knowing what is in it?”
“Everybody” doesn’t vote on it. And if the congressmen who do don’t know what’s in it at this point, well … tant pis! as Marcel would say.
16. Mike K: “Biblio44 trusts government to do the right thing and has little interest in the details of the bill.”
On the contrary, Mikey. Not only have I read the bill. I’ve also translated it into Yiddish for my grandmother.
17. TriGeek: “Unless the Gov’t is controlled by Republicans, then decent is patriotic!”
An interesting admission from the semi-literate right: Dissent is patriotic when the Dems are in office; unpatriotic when the GOP is in office. Hmmm … just as i suspected.
Just because a general is losing troops, doesn’t mean he doesn’t “fight on.” And, push his troops into battle, anyway.
What if Pelosi doesn’t have a downside, here? From the tea parties that started in April, you know she’s had losses! That’s why Obama “drawing a line in the sand” for a health bill to come out of congress by August 6th, missed its deadline.
Now she’s getting internal polls telling her the worst news. She’s also hearing from her own House members, who together gave her the majority chair, that they are DYING. Donations are down. And, in their communities, IF they faced town halls, people yelled at them.
For comparison, what happens when doctors discover a cancer? Do they tell you to go home and die? Or do they tell you to submit to the operation? Here, Pelosi is ‘doing an operation.’
I asked myself, WHY is she doing this? And, it dawned on me that democrapic voters are dropping out. She sees the polling numbers. She can read this stuff. And, if she didn’t pull this stunt? She hemorrhages out more of her own voters.
But, you say, the opposition is energized. Yes, and they’ve been counted. So far nothing is turning away folks who will go vote. To give you one example, they said they’d vote for Doug Hoffman in New York State’s District #10, even after pollsters said “he was in 3rd place.”
True, today, people don’t believe the legacy media and their tricks. But this is a different trick. This is Pelosi pulling a stunt. To convince the democrapic voters to keep volunteering. NOT to lose their faith. And, to keep sending money. 2000 sheets of paper. What did she have to lose? No. She doesn’t have your good will. She must make this bet. If she didn’t then the only strong woman remains Sarah Palin.
Different bets. But Pelosi wasn’t going to fold. Not now. And, on November 4th the news will trickle out to the background sounds of chirping crickets.
“Health Care Holocaust”
I shall remind my CongressRat that this must be trashed: even steely Gen Patton vomited on seeing the Nazi’z finest work on Jews.
Let the state experiments in reform pass a few years. Then take it up. one the lamp of experience renders its light.
Screw O-man’s dangerous hysterics.
Everyone’s missing the point. A government health care plan isn’t intended to improve the health of the nation’s citizens. It’s to control that health care, so that future Democrats can run for office on the “I’ll give you free health care, my opponent would cut it” platform. Also, everyone who works in the bureaucracy that this will create will be a civil service union member, involuntarily contributing to the Democratic party regardless of what state he works in (right to work laws, like other state statutes, don’t apply to the Federal government). This will (the Democrats hope) create a vast pool of money for them to use to get reelected; if this goes right, there will never be another Republican president or Congress. Everything else that’s said (the number of uninsured that will be covered, whether illegal aliens will be part of the plan, what exactly it’ll provide for, etc.) is all window dressing to distract everyone from what’s really going on.
You can’t fool me! Pelosi s bluffing. She’s not willing to fold. Because folding now is more costly than hanging in there.
2000 pages, is what should be called “all in.”
If Pelosi didn’t do this Sarah Palin stands as the only woman willing to go against the usual … of sucking up.
Besides. It’s all about losing more of her own. You didn’t know democrats joined tea parties? Pelosi is doing a trick to fool her own voters not to lose hope. Doesn’t mean it works. It just means she’s got enough Botox in her face that she can bluff.
Folding wasn’t an option. And, becoming reasonable, where something else would have been found? She loses her hard core voters right there! I’ll bet Pelosi is hoping that November 3rd doesn’t produce a total rout for her side. While every single, plus every other move, produces the same bad outcomes.
We’re voting on November 3rd. Pelosi doesn’t have enough time, even, to strap this thing to a vote. Just as General Patton never called any of his battle moves “retreats,” his tank tactics always probed the flanks. And, Pelosi has no intention of ever saying ‘she lost.’ Besides, she has no other cards to play. Her hand’s weak. Her party’s losses are looking to be astronomical. And, she’s pushing forward a 2000 page bluff. Then, if you act scared, she thinks you’re weak. And, hey, you may not even go out and vote. She’ll even provide ya with a stick that has a pair of her white underpants on top.
“Should I read the new healthcare bill or finish Remembrance of Things Past?”
Neither. The bill is not designed to be read. Like the undecipherable tax codes, it’s meant to intimidate you. Because you don’t know what’s in the 2000 pages, and you don’t want to pay for a lawyer to extract you from difficulties, you are most likely to err on the side of safety, i.e. follow orders, real or imaginary to avoid punishments, i.e. lawsuits.
Nor should you read “Remembrance of Things Past because everything begins anew from the day of His Oneness’ coronation. The Past is irrelevant.
3. ts:
“How much worse would it have to get for you to consider it a catastrophe?”
When it’s time to pay for it, circa 2013, after the 2012 election campaign.
Dear Roger,
As a nurse, I disagree with the premise that health care needs improvement by the FEDERAL government. I don’t think it is a constitutionally granted task. I think the federal government should get out of health care even for its congress and federal employees and provide only for veterans. It is a state province. We need competition and tort reform.
Nancy Pelosi, Queen of OHI
When Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address with the stirring words, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he could never have envisioned Nancy Pelosi.
We still have a nation even if God has been banished from the public forum and we still have some freedoms left despite efforts by Congress and the president to deny them.
However, Abe’s dream that our government would always be of, by, and for the people took another shot to the solar plexus in Washington today.
Nancy Pelosi’s health care bill, is a monstrosity in every sense of the word. . .
(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1295)
Go with the Proust, no question.
Roger, I’d read the healthcare bill if I were you. It’s got all the signs of being great literature. It’s part of an exciting and dangerous plot. It’s filled with suspenseful twists and turns. It’s got vile antagonists (doctors, researchers and patients), but also great protagonists (Obama/Pelosi/Reid, their donors, Keith Oldbermann, ACORN). You even have Joe Biden for comic relief.
Obama is kind of like a Luke Skywalker character. He was just popping over to Tashi Station to pick up some power converters, when some crazy shenanigans ensued, and suddenly he’s President! He’s got Emperor Palpatine as Speaker of the House, the Mouth of Sauron as his Chief of Staff, and the Coach from Cheers as his VP. Oh, and Andrew Sullivan.
The stakes are high, Pelosi holds our lives in her claw-like talons. And, as the NEA chairman has pointed out, it was written by the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar! What can possibly go wrong?
“They are only interested in power,” has always seemed so much psychobabble to me. I much prefer “They are only interested in money.”
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Now I have a 1990 page healthcare bill to keep me awake.
It may be as long as Remembrance of Things Past, but it reads more like a Steven King novel.
Maybe before you finish Proust, you should take a look at “The Healing of America.” That seems to be an excellent analysis of health plans around the world, and I find the “Bismarck” plans especially interesting, since both the payers and the providers remain private. France and Germany use this system, among many other countries. Basically, health insurance companies are required to provide a non-profit operation which sells insurance to everyone. Everyone participates, just like income taxes (or maybe FICA taxes!) If you lose your job, the government picks up the employer portion of the tab but you DON’T CHANGE PLANS unless you want to.
It really doesn’t give much more power to the government, which is probably why nobody in Washington mentions it.
All the pansy GOP objections are pathetic.
A good constitutional trial lawyer could expose the corrupt process of cross referencing pending legislation or non-legislated agency regulations which make all laws by Congress uninterpretable for a vote.
The equally corrupt fat cat Republican country clubbers don’t see it because they use it themselves.
THROW THE BUMS OUT! ALL OF THEM!
Proust wins.
pelaut:
Why is that the GOP’s fault? The country is full of lawyers, you can not shake a stick without hitting one of them, if it is as simple as you say, why doesn’t someone Independent lawyer put a stop to this?
Actually I think a lot of the people who go after the GOP are really Democrats hoping to create problems for the opposition.
Read the bill, that is passe and for republics and democracies.
We have moved on to 3rd world tinpot countries were Democrats allow their representatives to pass “bills” and then after they are passed the politburo of Leftist will put in whatever measures fit their whims at a later date.
So a “bill” is what every Barry Soetoro, Nancy and any other Leftist twit decides it says and they will decide who has to follow the new “laws” and who gets a pass because of skin color or “correct” political thinking.
“…then decent is patriotic!”
Well, I think it is important to be “decent,” but “dissent” can be helpful, too.
I’m not sure what everyone is so worked up about over government healthcare. I mean, look at public housing, public education (look at the word facilities of Mr. “Decent” above), public transportation; I’m sure the government will do a fabulous job with our medical care.
roger,
it’s a bit like Patrick White books for an Australian, after all he won a Nobel, or Ulysses, I doubt anyone has ever finished any of them,
back to the shiraz,
jack
Why bother reading Proust when you can watch folks summarize him?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwAOc4g3K-g
Is this an indication of how government works now? People, including those who’s job it is to understand this stuff, would prefer to struggle through Proust than read congressional bills? Sort of like the choice between pneumonia and a real, bad cold.
Definitely Proust. Though you have to discipline yourself to read it… I read twenty pages a day, every day, (with short breaks between volumes) just because there are amazingly boring sections butressed by beautiful insightful passages that make it worth it. And while some of those passages make sense outside of the work (“Our most long-reaching decisions are arrived at in a short-term frame of mind” applies here) many of them don’t… in other words, you have to have the pages (and pages and pages and pages) of discourse to get it. But it’s worth it, it has a point, and you’ll actually feel good about yourself when you’re finished. Unlike the health care bill.
Oh, and definitely read the most recent Viking translation, though you’ll have to order the last three books (printed in two volumes) from amazon.uk.
We should read the bill aloud to the Gitmo detainees. Then, they’ll spill all they know. http://www.MDWhistleblower.blogspot.com
There are three D’s Dang,Dumb Democrats in Washington DC trying to tell Americans what is good for them, as if we are as dumb as they .
Ron Artest – Anti-Jihadi?
http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2009/10/afghan-women.html
Ron Artest – counter-Jihadi?
http://ibloga.blogspot.com/2009/10/afghan-women.html
Sorry about the duplicate comment. Sometimes my comments don’t show up here. This time it just showed up a little late. My apologies.
Easier and much more valuable to read Atlas Shrugged for the second time. Or all the issues of The New Individualist.
I can’t think of a single problem that Congress can’t (and won’t) make worse. Sure, there are problems with health insurance as opposed to actual health care. Anyone who thinks this hurriedly prepared 1990 page monstrosity will make things better is living in cloud-cuckoo-land.
bobblehead offers pap as critical thought, and washes it down with glorious doses of inane asides…..what a treat it is to share his blog wit with him….and yes I truly miss
the frequently villified president, W. he seems a giant of great insight and moral courage when compared to the new kid in town. a memo
will suffice when you are deservedly trusted and known to be truthful
and honorable…..the new kid hides behind closed doors while his happy band of prevaricaters do their best to rob the treasury and enrich such stalwarts as acorn and apollo…
where do u think the money 4 all of thish will come from taxes will be threw the roof i hope you people know that in it it says that if you are over 55 if you get to sick the pigs in dc will kill you with leathal injection