Yeah, I see some merit in that idea. The old system isn't satisfactory, but nothing was being done to change it. Getting the ship moving even in the wrong direction has some value because anyone who wants to right it has to suggest the correct direction. They can't very well just say "Let's go back to port and sit there".

Both parties are bad at this. Obama is always accusing the Republicans of blocking legislation that he never got around to proposing in the first place. But the Republicans are a little worse than the Democrats in this area. They'll talk about ideas that sound promising, and then do nothing about them. They had House, Senate and White House for 6 years, and did absolutely nothing to fix the Health Care System. If they had, Obamacare would never have been passed in the first place, so they're laregely to blame themselves.

One of the ideas they always talk about is allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines, with the idea that they'll compete with each other and so no longer be monopolies. Sounds great. When's the vote on that?

I hope the moving ship is the right analogy. I would be grateful to see some positive reforms getting made.

I don't think selling payment plans across state lines is really going to change much though. Even my sparsely populated state has a handful of payment providers. As long as they all pay roughly the same cost for medical products and services there will be only trivial differences for the people consuming health care.

The fundamental flaw in the current system is that there is no price negotiation between the health care provider and the health care consumer. All pricing is negotiated between the payment provider and the health care provider. Neither of these parties has any serious interest in keeping your costs down.

New technologies are introduced with a bit of a price premium because they are new--that is true in many industries. What is also true in most industries is that as the tech becomes increasingly mainstream the costs drop, the capabilities improve, or both. But in medicine that is not true--at least not as far as the consumer is concerned.

Prices between payment providers and care providers are negotiated like a federal gov't budget. The care providers ask for a 15% increase, the payment providers offer 9%, they settle on 12% and the payment provider tells the consumer they've cut costs by 3%.

The prices of medical services and products are largely based on what they cost when they were first introduced. A procedure may be very expensive because initially it was performed by only a handful of people and may have taken 2x as long as an older procedure. As more folks are able to deliver the procedure, as repetition and improvements reduce the time by 50%+ the cost to the consumer continues to increase!?

I don't see how any of this changes if payment providers are able to sell their services across state lines.

Maybe, maybe not. But the point is the Republicans are always claiming it will help, and then not lifting a finger to enact it. They might put something in writing just to say "we have something", and then put it on the shelf to gather dust.

I do sort of admire the Democrats for their initiative in getting Obamacare passed. Ultimately I have to condemn them because they were more intersted in passing something than passing something good, and because they not only fought the Republicans, they fought the general public too. That's the Bad Side. But the Good Side is that they really made a supreme effort to get something done and managed to accomplish it. If only they had used their Initiative for niceness... instead of evil.

On another subject, I saw Debbie Wasserman Schultz on TV the other night, and got an interesting insight into her way of thinking.

I've nicknamed her "The Human Talking Point", because all she ever does on her appearances is spew out pre-packaged talking points, usually the same ones. (She's almost the Democrat Sean Hannity in that regard.) In fact, she reminds me a lot of Sherlock Holmes description of Inspector Lestrade; kind of a dimwitted bulldog type who can latch their teeth onto anything and hang on for dear life, if you just point them in the right direction.

Anyway, the interviewer actually commented that all she was doing was spouting talking points. I think that every time I see her, but I've never heard an interviewer say it before. Schulz replied something like "These aren't talking points, they're true!"

As a matter of fact, some of her talking points were true statements. Others were decidedly false. Others were indeterminate. But that's not important right now. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that all of them were true. In her mind, that meant that they couldn't possibly be talking points. I think that tells you everything you need to know about her, and why she's so dim. She doesn't even seem to grasp the concept of intelligent discussion.

What makes them talking points isn't that they're false, so much as that they're irrelevant. Something can be 100% true and still be a talking point if it has nothing to do with the question that was asked, or the subject you're talking about, or if it distracts from a question rather than answering it. If you come into a studio with a laundry list, and say "I'm going to give these 10 answers no matter what the questions are", then of course, you're just spouting talking points. They can train monkeys to do that.


I mentioned Hannity. He's the same way, which is the reason his show can be so tedious. He's too busy ticking off his talking points (and pretty much the same ones every night) to listen to what his guests are saying, or to try to respond to them intelligently. It's absolutely true that Obama once said Republicans want dirty air and water, but is that really worth mentioning four times a night? Especially if you're never going to actually respond to it, just note that it was said, and then move on to the next point?

How much influence do people like Hannity and Schultz have on politics in general? Are they influential at all or do most people generally dismiss or ignore what they say, and instead, find sources that are able to examine issues more carefully?

It seems to be most of our talking point people are relegated to the fringes. So much so, I'm not even sure who the talking points are (Ezra Levant, perhaps who I only know because our political satirist Rick Mercer mentioned him in on of his rants--was defending him actually over freedom of speech issues).

@petro on healthcare: I think we are in agreement about the roles of republicans and democrats in the mess. Republicans talked and did nothing. The democrats did something without apparent concern for whether or not it was a useful something.

A small glimmer of hope in today's paper--an editorial that discussed the republican talking point of "repeal and replace." IF the republicans are actually going to replace Obamacare with something less bad, then getting the ship going in the wrong direction will have worked.

@talking points. So glad to hear an interviewer call someone on that. I get so frustrated by interviewers who have a list of questions and interviewees with a list of talking point answers that share only a little. I cannot count the number of times that I have screamed at some TV news interviewer that their guest never answer the question asked.

What is the point in asking a specific question if you are simply going to accept talking point #7 as the answer. I would love to see a journalist keep asking the same question repeatedly until it was actually answered.

Logged in for the first time in years due to the serendipity of having seen spock's last comment. A friend just sent me the following link which actually does see a journalist asking the same question repeatedly until it is...well not exactly answered. But close enough. Leave it to the vastly superior BBC news not to buy into the frequently insulting relationship between political figures and the media.

Not a huge fan of Paxman, in general, and I can't quite get rid of the feeling that Smith was a lamb sent by the wolves to the lion for slaughter. But whatever. The interview is delightfully uncomfortable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bddWaHuxTzc&feature=related

Hope everyone here is happy and hale.

Hey, Crumhorn, good to see 'ya!!

It's been a long time!!

Stay a while, this time!!


Chess Fan

There is a big similarity with the Wasserman Schultz interview here, but it's not quite the same thing. This one is more like a Presidential press secretary. There's been a big flipflop that she isn't prepared to explain, so she's doing her best to talk around it. She has enormous difficulty answering simple questions, but there are a couple of times here where she actually does come flat out and admit that she isn't going to answer that.

It's a little different with Wasserman Schultz (or Hannity). They don't talk this way to try to cover something up necessarily, they simply don't know any other way to hold a discussion except to read off a pre-packaged script.

Speaking of talking points, we saw an I Love Lucy episode along those lines recently. Lucy gets Ricky on Frank Nelson's radio quiz show, but finds Ricky doesn't really know much. To try to avoid being embarrassed on the air, she steals a copy of the answers, and memorizes them without knowing the questions. The questions and answers were something like this:

Q: To whom do you make your Federal tax check out on March 15th?
A: The collector of internal revenue.

Q: How do sub-freezing temperatures in the Arctic affect the growth of trees?
A: The sap runs every two years.

Q: Why was the steamship Ile de France put into drydock recently?
A: To scrape the barnacles off her hull.

At the last minute though, they changed the questions. Lucy, having nothing better to say, just responded with the answers she'd memorized. You can work out the effects of that yourself. Here are the new questions:

1. What is the name of the animal that fastens itself to you and drains you of your blood?
2. What is a congressman's term of office?
3. Why did the French put Marie Antoinette under the sharp blade of the guillotine?

Evidently you are not thinking about our education system, our tax code, our immigration policy....