Tag Archives: mean

Quote of the Day: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obamacare?

by LesterMcGrowdie Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

From a Republican congressional health aide who was “granted anonymity to speak candidly,” on the difficulties of creating a Republican plan to replace Obamacare:

The problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act. … To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market.

That’s a problem, all right. If you actually want to cover people, you have to pay for it. End of story. Republicans are steadfastly not willing to pay for it, so they aren’t going to cover anyone with whatever plan they dream up. No matter what kind of smoke and mirrors they throw up to disguise this, that’s the bottom line. No money, no coverage.

Really, though, all this GOP aide is saying is that Obamacare is fundamentally a pretty conservative plan. Liberals nearly all prefer a simpler, cheaper, more comprehensive riff on single-payer of some kind. But that couldn’t pass in 2009—even moderate Democrats wouldn’t have supported it—so instead we had to cobble together a bunch of conservative ideas into a kind of Rube Goldberg edifice that was at least better than nothing. It only works moderately well, but that’s because the conservative take on healthcare is fundamentally incoherent. The more conservative your health care plan, the worse it works.

So Republicans have a choice. They can:

  1. Introduce a more liberal plan that’s cheaper and works better.
  2. Introduce an even more conservative plan that’s more expensive and works even worse than Obamacare
  3. Toss out a few of the usual pet rocks and just pretend it’s a plan.

My money is on Option 3.

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Quote of the Day: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obamacare?

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Global Investors See Bubbles As Far As the Eye Can See

by HalinaFreitas Posted on January 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Generally speaking, global investors are pretty optimistic. According to a new Bloomberg poll, they think China is a trouble spot, but they’re bullish on prospects in Europe and the US, and a large majority are more confident than they were at this time last year. But take a look at this:

After the great crash of 2008, investors sure are sensitive about bubbles. They think equity markets are close to being a bubble; fixed-income markets are close to being a bubble; and even US treasuries are inching toward bubblicious territory. That accounts for just about everything except real property, which investors are still sanguine about—in the US, anyway.

This is just raw data, and it might not mean anything. On the other hand, no matter what investors say about the economy, if they’re bearish on real-world ventures (factory expansions, etc.) and they’re getting cold feet about financial ventures, does this mean that more and more money is going to be sitting on the sidelines? Or does it mean that all this money is going to suddenly start pouring into the safe haven of US housing until everyone gets scared of that too? Or something else?

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Global Investors See Bubbles As Far As the Eye Can See

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We Spend a Ton on Health Care, And We Get Lousy Service in Return

by Robert0689 Posted on November 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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The 2013 version of the OECD’s “Health at a Glance” is out today, which means that if I’d waited a day I could have posted the very latest data on the number of doctors per capita in the United States compared to other countries. Not to worry, though: nothing much has changed since yesterday. We still don’t have very many doctors, even though we pay them far more than in most other countries.

In any case, “at a glance” means 209 pages to the OECD, so there’s plenty of other stuff to chew on today. I’ll pick out two tidbits for you. First, the chart below shows the number of doctor visits per year. We’re very low. Despite spending far, far more on health care than any other country—$8,500 per person compared to about $4,000 for other rich countries—we don’t get to see our doctors very often—about four times a year compared to six for the rest of the world. So does this mean that American doctors are lightly worked compared to other countries? As the next chart down shows, yes it does! The average American doc sees about 1,800 patients per year. The average for other rich countries is about 2,500. Again, this is despite the fact that American doctors are very highly paid.

Next up is a chart brought to my attention by Paul Waldman, and it could be one of the greatest and most instructive health care charts ever made. It shows what people think about their health. And despite the fact that by any objective measure, American health is mediocre at best and our health system is both expensive and lousy, Americans think they’re in great health. They think they’re in the best health of any country in the world!

This is Stockholm Syndrome at its finest. Apparently one of the reasons we don’t mind the lousy service and high cost of our health care system is because our health care system has convinced us that it’s great and, therefore, our health must be great too. We’re Number 1, and we won’t put up with anyone who tells us otherwise.

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We Spend a Ton on Health Care, And We Get Lousy Service in Return

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