How Socialist is US Health Care?

>> Friday, September 18, 2009

Andy Engelson finds it to be more socialist than Communist Vietnam, thus supporting what we already know: the tea-baggers are idiots.


The money paragraph(s):
The much needed health reforms proposed in the U.S. won’t be perfect, but will go a long way to making sure everyone is insured and that getting really sick doesn’t bankrupt you (which also happens here in Vietnam). Will this be costly? Sure. But remember that the Medicare drug insurance plan passed by a Republicans Congress during the Bush administration in 2003 is expected to cost 1.5 trillion dollars, higher than the approximately $1 trillion cost cited for the current health care proposals.

Where were the tea-baggers when that bill was making its way through Congress?

But what do I know? I live in a communist country.
Meanwhile, Tim Egan argues that these same tea-baggers have unleashed their inimitable rage on the wrong target, of course:
Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

[ . . . ]

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

But now, at a time when a new president wants to reform health care to fix the largest single cause of middle-class economic collapse, he’s called a Nazi by these self-described friends of the working stiff.
I recently returned to England from spending a two month stay in my homeland on a mixed research / professional / quality time with my partner trip, mainly in Oregon. (So recent was the return that I'm still jet lagged). While I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, and am actively considering returning to the United States, one distinction that I anecdotally noted was the quality of political discourse. I found this to be thoroughly asinine and banal to the point of profound discouragement. Not only the obvious, to quote Egan again, "the brat’s cry of Joe Wilson", but simple personal dialogue between private citizens. Six years here in the UK, indeed I start my seventh academic year in a week or so, political discourse here seems more reasoned, toned down, and respectful than the US (save for the English Defence League or our non-racist friends in the BNP). Hell, when the best I often encountered was utterly unoriginal (as well as amusingly inaccurate) tea bagger talking points, I miss the BNP's amusing attempts to demonstrate their lack of racism.

Please show that I am wrong, with examples.

Feel free to lie if you must.

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