I fear Virginia Foxx.

>> ^alizarin:
When they say a health care bill will cost x billion dollars how do they come up with that figure? I'm pretty sure I'm right in my assumption that that figure leaves out the amount not spent privately on health care and insurance and that it leaves out the programs that would automatically be reduced or removed once we had a decent system. So the X billion dollars should be a very big negative number if you're being intellectually honest.


You're essentially dead on. There's no attempt in the CBO reports to gauge the non-government cost impacts of any of the health care bills.

He does mention that it would reduce the deficit, though people like Foxx say that just means it's a "stealth" tax increase.

I also think the costs listed for our wars are lowball ones, and don't include things like veterans benefits, or our basic defense spending that wasn't specifically earmarked for the war. It also doesn't mention that there were no tax increases to pay for the war -- it was pure deficit spending, with no long-run value to the American people that I can discern.

Health care, on the other hand, will be a huge long-run benefit to us, and will reduce our deficit. Seems like win/win/win, even if you insist on looking at it in purely fiscal terms.

All this talk about free enterprise, capitalism etc is just great but misses the point. Your politicians (in this case read republicans) are lying to you. As a Canadian I don't really care what type of health system you have but it's really irritating to turn on CNN and see people like Virginia Foxx standing in Congress and telling gross blatant f**king lies about other countries health care systems in an attempt to scare (the favourite tactic of the right wing everywhere) and nobody other than John Stewart calls them on it. Our system is far from perfect, and we criticize it with an aim to get improvements not to trash it.

And by the way for those Americans who aren't aware of it the US is a socialist country, maybe less socialist than most others, but socialist nonetheless.

200 A.D. ?


Edit: Also, anyone catch the mis-cued quote displayed after Olbermann starts quoting Virginia Foxx?

It says: "Breast implants in pageants is not a rarity ... It's very common ... I don't personally have them, but you know -- they are."
-Shanna Moakler

Uhm...... woops?