If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.
Yeah, that would be really bad. What’s next? The government taking over the Army? Or our schools? Or — gasp — Social Security? Say it ain’t so!
And yes, we are talking about that Arthur Laffer, the inventor of supply-side economics. I can’t imagine why that hasn’t worked out.
(Via publius.)
What if we DO like the Post Office and the DMV? Seriously, I have never had a bad experience w/the DMV…maybe we just run ours really well down south?
But… Medicare and Medicaid are *already* run by the government. Is this a trick of some sort?
(not meant for you, Jeff. For Mr. Curve. Am I just old and amnesiac or is there a lot more out-and-out mendacious lying going on in these fora in the last 10 years??
Ruth,
It’s part of the campaign to maintain/instill ignorance in the population. I now feel slightly ashamed of making fun of the senior citizens who want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare. Poor folks have been brainwashed by some very crafty players, and it’s not like they are sophisticated enough to fact-check the claims they get from chain emails, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. Their mindset is of the old “fairness doctrine” days when a broadcaster was required to give both sides, and someone spouting this crap would be rebutted by an opponent.
If he meant that Medicare and Medicaid were badly run programs, he probably should have worded things a bit differently, so as not to sound like an idiot.
If he meant to imply what we’re laughing at, then either he’s an idiot or a liar. Probably a liar.
These people are going to make my brain explode I swear. Okay let’s break this down shall we. The post office will make sure that your birthday card to Grandma will not only make it across the country but will be delivered to the smallest towns in the country for 44 cents! The DMV here works just fine thanks.
Now onto Medicaid and Medicare, quick question. I had breast cancer at age 38 and had 12 rounds of chemotherapy. That left me sitting with plenty of Medicare recipients for hours at a time and never did I hear of any of them having to spend time on the phone to get things authorized or paid for like the rest of us did.
So here’s the question. When we know it’s bullshit how does it keep getting repeated without someone standing on a chair and screaming BULLSHIT!
“If he meant that Medicare and Medicaid were badly run programs”
But if they’re already badly-run programs, what does he mean by “just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government”? “Just wait til you see” implies that you can’t see it right now. If you could see it right now, why wait?
I’m getting so sick of this bullshit. Yesterday I had to listen (captive audience, in a car) to my mother read a newspaper op-ed whose basic argument was that under the public option we’d be unable to get the high-level medical care and decision-making ability enjoyed by Senator Ted Kennedy when he was diagnosed with cancer.
The number of people who already don’t have access to such care, or might have it vetoed by their insurance companies, was never mentioned.
It’s insanely stupid.
Yes, yes, absolutely, give me health insurance that works like the DMV! I would LOVE to have a description of the contract, procedure, coverage explanation, et cetera that reads as easily as the motor vehicle handbook the DMV puts out every year. I would LOVE to show up at a clinic, wait maybe ten minutes, and then have my problem taken care of. I would LOVE to get a specialist appointment or surgery, like a license, in 6-10 business days.
Post office? Even better.
GIMME.
And who had to bail out private industry and financial institutions recently?
Never had a bad experience at the DMV. I think the worst time was when I went in and they wouldn’t accept my debit card (I’m young and naive) so I had to go out and get cash. Once I came back with the cash I was put to the head of the line because they knew I had already waited my turn.
Compare that to when you, say, miss an appointment with the cable company tech. You’ll have to wait another week for another 9 AM – 5 PM time slot, on a weekday of course.
*channels GOP fanatic, wipes away slaver*
Yah, besides, it’s not like any other country ever has let government run their health care.
Well, no Western countries.
Or, wait, well, no non-European Western Countries.
Oh. Um. Well, no non-European, Western democracies, which speak English and not any of those faggy European languages like French or Spanish.
Oh, come on! Who cares about Australia? They’re NOTHING like the US! The US was founded by hardy pioneers who wrested their land from a bunch of aboriginals and then more or less exterminated them through compulsory paternalism! Those Aussies are all…what? What’d I say? Why’s everyone laughing?
/channeling
Hm. Well, I don’t know what states all of you live in, but the Illinois Secretary of State office is legendary for corruption and waste. The last time I had to get my driver’s license renewed I sat there for a couple of hours (and the only test I had to take was all of 30 seconds to prove I wasn’t blind). When the man who ran it when I got my first DL died (Paul Powell) they found the closets of his house stuffed with tens of thousands (or was it more than 100,000?) of checks for DL renewals and other SoS fees that were supposed to go to the State – God alone knows how many of them he actually cashed and used for his personal accounts. More recently, the main reason that ex-Governor George Ryan now sits in jail is because he forced the people working for him when he was SoS to pay him to keep their jobs so he could use the money to run for Governor.
Meanwhile, the State government’s reluctance to pay Medicare (or is it Medicaid?) reimbursements to physicians, pharmacies and hospitals is causing huge problems and is driving some of them out of the business, especially those who are not part of large chains or corporations and thus don’t have a cash buffer and can’t afford lawyers.
What else does the government run? Social Security? You’re holding up the country’s biggest Ponzi scheme as an example of good government? Private citizens who run this kind of thing are put in jail!
How about the VA? There’s a government-run health care system for you. Try going down to your local VFW or American Legion hall and start asking what they think of it. My own personal experience with it is not health-care related. My father passed a year ago last Easter Monday. That’s, what, about 17 months? Mom filed for her pension that my Dad risked his life for fighting the Nazis within a week or so. She still hasn’t got it despite getting a Senator, her Representative and a lawyer involved.
So, no – the last thing I want is for these people to run anything that’s actually essential to my well-being.
RonF, it was $800,000 hidden in shoeboxes (and briefcases, bags, boxes, etc.) at the St. Nicholas Hotel in Springfield, where he lived. Cash.
With that said, Paul Powell hasn’t been running the show in a long time. If you had to wait a couple of hours in line at the DMV, it’s because of understaffing. The understaffing is directly related to the cut-to-the-bone budget handed out to SOS under our former governor as punishment for Jesse White not backing him. (it would be poetic justice for Blago and Ryan to be cellmates). The understaffing is indirectly related to the whole State being in the economic toilet, which of course is related to how many good-paying manufacturing jobs have permanently left our country (Illinois being disproportionatly impacted by that). We don’t have mountains or beaches, so it’s hard to attract postindustrial jobs that pay more than subsistence (read: no disposable income, nothing left over for say, health insurance or retirement savings) wages.
I actually work at just the kind of job you say is hard to attract. I do network support for large corporations and the Chicago area, being a transportation and commmunications hub and having outstanding research and educational institutions, is an excellent location for that.
As far as understaffing the SoS goes, I confess I’m not up to speed on what was done to the SoS’s budget under Blago’s administration. But I’ve been going to the SoS’s office every so often ever since Paul Powell was SoS and I haven’t seen much difference in service levels along the line no matter who supported who for election. I suspect that the work rules for the employees and the systems they use have more to do with it.
As far as lacking mountains and beaches to attract people, I rather think that a major reason why this state has problems attracting people and corporations is our tax structures, our crumbling infrastructure and our now well-known issues with corruption. We have a well-educated work force at the high end and major cultural atrractions. But I think many of our deficiencies in being able to maintain our infrastructure, educate our inner-city youth and fund other public needs lie in the amount of money that goes towards padding public payrolls with make-work jobs for the friends, relatives and supporters of politicians and party functionaries and the amount of money that is overpaid to contractors in reward for their political support. I suspect the “corruption tax” is very, very high in this state and that things could be greatly improved if that money was recovered and put to productive use.
Fixing that would take true political courage. I despair of ever seeing it among our elected officials.
How about the VA? There’s a government-run health care system for you.
Yeah how about those VAs? I’ll stop the linking now out of respect for the spam filter, but the bottom line is that there are a whole slew of papers out there comparing outcomes at VAs and in private hospitals. Some marginally favor VAs, some marginally favor private hospitals but most frequently they find no difference once patient characteristics are adjusted for (VA patients tend to be poorer and sicker.) From the point of view of a provider, VAs tend to be easier to work at than private hospitals (no friggin insurance forms-therefore less paperwork) and their computer system went from being the worst in the early 1990s to the best in the early 2000s. Make of all that what you will.
A reasonable op-ed about the public option from about as smart and conservative as the intellectual right gets: a business school professor of economics from the University of Chicago (although I am doubtful of his tort reform trade-off). Even if you think the government’s postal service runs just fine (on its annual billion dollar deficit), do you honestly think it does better than FedEx and UPS on the services where it competes with them like next-day delivery?