The president who cried wolf

dukeofbaja

New Member
So your point that 250,000 Hawaiians are enrolled in QUEST was for what reason again?


(EDIT - The formatting gets fuked up, all original info is here http://www.med-quest.us/eligibility/EligPrograms_QUEST.html)
QUEST Covered Services
The QUEST health plans pay contracted health care providers for medical services received by enrollees. Dental services for QUEST recipients are covered by on a fee-for-service basis. The QUEST covered services include, but are not limited to:

  • <LI class=bodytext>Inpatient and outpatient hospital and clinical services (including X-ray and laboratory examinations) <LI class=bodytext>Physicians' services <LI class=bodytext>Nursing facility and home health services <LI class=bodytext>Drugs <LI class=bodytext>Biological and medical supplies (medical equipment and appliances) <LI class=bodytext>Podiatry (foot care) <LI class=bodytext>Whole blood <LI class=bodytext>Eye examinations, refraction and eyeglasses <LI class=bodytext>Dental services (individuals age 21 and older have an annual payment

  • limit for non-emergency services.) <LI class=bodytext>Family planning services <LI class=bodytext>Psychiatric/psychological services <LI class=bodytext>Diagnostic, screening, preventive and rehabilitative services <LI class=bodytext>Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis and Treatment (EPSDT) services <LI class=bodytext>Prosthetic devices, (including hearing aids) <LI class=bodytext>Transportation to, from, and between medical facilities, (including inter-island or out-of-state air transportation, food, and lodging as necessary) <LI class=bodytext>Respiratory care services​
  • Hospice care services
Individuals under age 21 also receive Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) health services. These services include:

  • <LI class=bodytext>Complete medical and dental exams; <LI class=bodytext>Hearing and vision tests, laboratory tests; <LI class=bodytext>Immunizations and skin tests for tuberculosis (TB); <LI class=bodytext>Assistance with necessary scheduling and transportation upon request.
  • Unlimited mental health benefits.

http://www.med-quest.us/FAQ/mqdfaq.html

All reputable sources put Hawaiians' rate of coverage at about 90%. Please show me a reputrable source who claims otherwise. Your PDF kind of shot you in the foot there


 

ChChoda

Well-Known Member
FALSE!
Hawaii has a moderate form of universal health care, everyone there loves it and the facts show it works. To say that Hawaiian health care has been 'met with disaster' would be even more unjustifiable than cigarettes that fill out 1040's. It is some of the most ridiculous babble out there and just goes to show....

YOU HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!

So leave this debate to those that actually want to improve our system, not just lob insults and lies

Ridiculous. :-|
 

CrackerJax

New Member
It's insurance you moron. It's just insurance. It's not a right...it's not an indication of your strength or weakness ... it's just insurance. :roll:


I'll recap real quick since I have vowed to stop wasting my time on folks like you.

The stimulus was an utter failure. No jobs were created. jobs were lost.... millions of them. For the govt. to say they "created jobs" is PURE speculation. In effect they are saying instead of losing 4 million jobs.... we only lost 3 million..... preposterous. Also, most of the jobs created are TEMPORARY. Think census.

Let's just end this. If the ppl wanted health care.... Obama would be having NO problem getting his bill through Congress. He has a majority rule there in BOTH houses.

It is HIS OWN PARTY which is balking..... wake up and get a dose of reality.

How do you get through the day?

Amazingly naive.
 

ink the world

Well-Known Member
The stimulus was an utter failure. No jobs were created. jobs were lost.... millions of them. For the govt. to say they "created jobs" is PURE speculation. In effect they are saying instead of losing 4 million jobs.... we only lost 3 million..... preposterous. Also, most of the jobs created are TEMPORARY. Think census.

Let's just end this. If the ppl wanted health care.... Obama would be having NO problem getting his bill through Congress. He has a majority rule there in BOTH houses.

It is HIS OWN PARTY which is balking..... wake up and get a dose of reality.

How do you get through the day?

Amazingly naive.

Thats a good one. Typical reaction to the FACTS not serving your cause or beliefs. Your statement about the stimulus is dead wrong and sadly I think you know it.



"With its estimate Tuesday that the $787 billion Obama stimulus package created up to 2.1 million jobs in the last quarter of 2009, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) joined in the near-unanimous chorus of voices proclaiming the package's success. Of course, it wasn't just the overwhelming consensus of economists which concurred that the stimulus saved or created about two million jobs while adding over three percentage points to U.S. gross domestic product. As the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and ThinkProgress all documented, the hypocritical groveling of Republican Congressmen for stimulus dollars they opposed only served the validate that the recovery package was good public policy."

So the program the Republicans all hailed as an utter failure and also vowed they wouldnt take any $ from is a success. Period. Numbers dont lie.

Dont forget all those so opposed to the program also got in line for the $, posed w/ the giant check and then took credit for helping the constituents.

The Bill is being blocked by those bought by the insurance industry in both parties, plain and simple.
You talk about being naive, thats laughable.
 
I

Illegal Smile

Guest
On internet discussion boards, when any poster resorts to using the term FACTS, it is a show of weakness. Obviously the facts are in dispute, at least any being discussed are. Using the term is the equivalent of:

"I have the faaa-cts and you..uuuuu dooo..n't. Nyah nyah nyah!"
 

CrackerJax

New Member
Here's the latest poll out of CNN ... you know a real RIGHT WINGER news agency.

25% of ppl polled want the Obama health care bill.

25%.

That means 25% of the population is officially uneducated. Your in good company it seems... oh wait.... ur not.
 

ink the world

Well-Known Member
On internet discussion boards, when any poster resorts to using the term FACTS, it is a show of weakness. Obviously the facts are in dispute, at least any being discussed are. Using the term is the equivalent of:

"I have the faaa-cts and you..uuuuu dooo..n't. Nyah nyah nyah!"

Why doesnt it surprise me that you look at the use of fact over lies and rhetoric as being "weak."

The FACTS are not in dispute, you just dont like them. So the CBO (by the way a NON partisan group), WSJ, Bloomberg and most economists are all wrong?

And you, the guy w/ 4,000+ posts on a message board about growing dope is more informed and educated on financial matters than a majority of economists?

And using facts in a discussion is more like saying "you're full of shit and you know it, but just don't have the manhood required to admit it"
 

CrackerJax

New Member
The "fiscal stimulus" only refers to a deliberate $862 Billion increase in budget deficit spending (never good). Importantly, only 23% ($200Billion) was spent in 2009, with 47% in 2010 and 30% in later years, according to the CBO.

How could the 200 billion be responsible for the 5.7% jump in 4th quarter GDP? ( uhhh, it doesn't)

You follow Keynesnian economics and it will lead you down the road to failure every time.

Yet the GDP report clearly said the gain"reflected and increase in private inventory investment, a deceleration of imports (not good) ad an upturn in nonresidential, fixed investment that was partly offset by decelerations in federal spending (defense...again...not good) and in personal consumption expenditure (again...not good).

Since federal spending accounted for EXACTLY ZERO of the only significant increase in GDP, how could such spending possibly have "created or saved" 2 million jobs? (uhhh, it didn't)

What was labeled a "stimulus" package was actually a stimulus to government transfer payments... cash and benefits that are primarily rewards for NOT working, or at least not working too hard.

The stimulus act has increased unemployment by about 2%.
The evidence that extended benefits have that effect is OVERWHELMING, fully documented by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and development and by at LEAST TWO economists in the OBAMA administration!

It turns out that raising the unemployment rate is about the ONLY thing the stimulus package achieved...

Not good.

Source.... WSJ.

I don't know how you believe what you do.... but as usual you have it backwards.
 

redivider

Well-Known Member
you have it wrong CJ. you're citing a source, then not properly stating what the source says.

here's a REAL source:
Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked.
Let&#8217;s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of weeks and had rapidly helped the economy. Let&#8217;s also imagine it was large enough to have had a huge impact on jobs &#8212; employing something like two million people who would otherwise be unemployed right now.



If that had happened, what would the economy look like today?
Well, it would look almost exactly as it does now. Because those nice descriptions of the stimulus that I just gave aren&#8217;t hypothetical. They are descriptions of the actual bill.
Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody&#8217;s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.
Yet I&#8217;m guessing you don&#8217;t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You&#8217;ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you&#8217;ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.



And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it&#8217;s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.


The reasons for the stimulus&#8217;s middling popularity aren&#8217;t a mystery. The unemployment rate remains near 10 percent, and many families are struggling. Saying that things could have been even worse doesn&#8217;t exactly inspire. Liberals don&#8217;t like the stimulus because they wish it were bigger. Republicans don&#8217;t like it because it&#8217;s a Democratic program. The Obama administration hurt the bill&#8217;s popularity by making too rosy an economic forecast upon taking office.


Moreover, the introduction of the most visible parts of the program &#8212; spending on roads, buildings and the like &#8212; has been a bit sluggish. Aid to states, unemployment benefits and some tax provisions have been more successful and account for far more of the bill. But their successes are not obvious.


Even if the conventional wisdom is understandable, however, it has consequences. Because the economy is still a long way from being healthy, members of Congress are now debating another, smaller stimulus bill. (They&#8217;re calling it a &#8220;jobs bill,&#8221; seeing stimulus as a dirty word.) The logical thing to do would be to examine what worked and what didn&#8217;t in last year&#8217;s bill.


But that&#8217;s not what is happening. Instead, the debate is largely disconnected from the huge stimulus experiment we just ran. Why? As Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts, the newest member of Congress, said, in a nice summary of the misperceptions, the stimulus might have saved some jobs, but it &#8220;didn&#8217;t create one new job.&#8221;
&#8226;
The case against the stimulus revolves around the idea that the economy would be no worse off without it. As a Wall Street Journal opinion piece put it last year, &#8220;The resilience of the private sector following the fall 2008 panic &#8212; not the fiscal stimulus program &#8212; deserves the lion&#8217;s share of the credit for the impressive growth improvement.&#8221; In a touch of unintended irony, two of article&#8217;s three authors were listed as working at a research institution named for Herbert Hoover.


Of course, no one can be certain about what would have happened in an alternate universe without a $787 billion stimulus. But there are two main reasons to think the hard-core skeptics are misguided &#8212; above and beyond those complicated, independent economic analyses.



The first is the basic narrative that the data offer. Pick just about any area of the economy and you come across the stimulus bill&#8217;s footprints.



In the early months of last year, spending by state and local governments was falling rapidly, as was tax revenue. In the spring, tax revenue continued to drop, yet spending jumped &#8212; during the very time when state and local officials were finding out roughly how much stimulus money they would be receiving. This is the money that has kept teachers, police officers, health care workers and firefighters employed.
Then there is corporate spending. It surged in the final months of last year. Mark Zandi of Economy.com (who has advised the McCain campaign and Congressional Democrats) says that the Dec. 31 expiration of a tax credit for corporate investment, which was part of the stimulus, is a big reason.



The story isn&#8217;t quite as clear-cut with consumer spending, as skeptics note. Its sharp plunge stopped before President Obama signed the stimulus into law exactly one year ago. But the billions of dollars in tax cuts, food stamps and jobless benefits in the stimulus have still made a difference. Since February, aggregate wages and salaries have fallen, while consumer spending has risen. The difference between the two &#8212; some $100 billion &#8212; has essentially come from stimulus checks.


The second argument in the bill&#8217;s favor is the history of financial crises. They have wreaked terrible damage on economies. Indeed, the damage tended to be even worse than what we have suffered.



Around the world over the last century, the typical financial crisis caused the jobless rate to rise for almost five years, according to work by the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. On that timeline, our rate would still be rising in early 2012. Even that may be optimistic, given that the recent crisis was so bad. As Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson (Republicans both) and many others warned in 2008, this recession had the potential to become a depression.
Yet the jobless rate is now expected to begin falling consistently by the end of this year.


For that, the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. &#8220;It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,&#8221; Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight&#8217;s chief economist, says. &#8220;I think everyone would have to acknowledge that&#8217;s a good thing.&#8221;
So what now?


The last year has shown &#8212; just as economists have long said &#8212; that aid to states and cities may be the single most effective form of stimulus. Unlike road- or bridge-building, it can happen in a matter of weeks. And unlike tax cuts, state and local aid never languishes in a household&#8217;s savings account.



The ideal follow-up stimulus would start with that aid. It would then add on extended jobless benefits, which also tend to be spent, as well as tax credits carefully drafted to get businesses to hire and households to spend, like the cash-for-clunkers program.
By this yardstick, the $154 billion bill that the House passed in December is decent. It includes $27 billion in state and local aid, $79 billion for jobless benefits and other safety nets, and $48 billion in infrastructure spending.



The smaller bills being considered by the Senate are worse. They may end up with no state aid at all, and their tax credits sound better &#8212; with promises to help the long-term unemployed and small businesses &#8212; than they are. &#8220;The economic impact of the Senate bill, at this point, is starting to look very small,&#8221; Mr. Behravesh says.

Given what people have been saying about a successful stimulus bill, just imagine what they&#8217;ll say about one that doesn&#8217;t accomplish much.

Article by David Leonhardt. Economic correspondent for the NY Times.


The article is called:
Judging Stimulus by job data reveals success


time to stick your head in your ass, and make up some lies that sound true.... i'm waiting....
 

CrackerJax

New Member
The stimulus is a failure...op ed pieces aside.

Unemployment is UP... debt is UP....confidence is DOWN.... business is DOWN.

That's a fail.
 

figtree

Active Member
The stimulus is a failure...op ed pieces aside.

Unemployment is UP... debt is UP....confidence is DOWN.... business is DOWN.

That's a fail.
Even if everything was being fixed the way you want it fixed, you would still say failure, even if hes doing what you want you would say hes not. your one of the ones that want Obama to fail no matter what, and will do anything and say anything to help make that happen. Thats OK though, we are all free to our opinions right?
 

redivider

Well-Known Member
guess CJ doesn't understand how much worse things would've been without the stimulus bill.... ignorance is bliss.....
 

ChChoda

Well-Known Member
:idea:

Imagine if the sun didn't come up this morning...we'd be fookin toast. Well, not literally. More like otter pops...
 

Dragline

Well-Known Member
If you want Government health care ... then you want rationing.

Great Britain's health care has been in place more than 30 years, and it's in a shambles.

Oh, and rationing is EVERYWHERE. Even the doctors are rationed.

Lack of common sense.
Excuse me while I correct you again. For starters, the UK has had their system in place for over 60 years. Second, you seem to use it as an example of things to come here yet it is NOTHING like what has even been proposed here. The UK is a completely socialized system right down to hospitals being government owned and doctors being government employees. That is NOTHING even remotely close to what has been proposed here. It isn't even comparing apples to oranges. More like apples to cheeseburgers.
 

CrackerJax

New Member
Excuse me while I correct you again. For starters, the UK has had their system in place for over 60 years. Second, you seem to use it as an example of things to come here yet it is NOTHING like what has even been proposed here. The UK is a completely socialized system right down to hospitals being government owned and doctors being government employees. That is NOTHING even remotely close to what has been proposed here. It isn't even comparing apples to oranges. More like apples to cheeseburgers.

I said MORE than 30 years so GB fits...tyvm... not a correction at all....you just can't read well.

No one is modeling the USA system on GB because it is HORRIBLE.

What is being proposed is the same old song and dance....massive spending....massive rationing....less quality health care....less innovation in medicine.

Sound good to you? UR in the vast MINORITY.

And the cost? Oh lawdy...it will make every other govt program look solvent (psst...none of them are... that's a clue)
 

dukeofbaja

New Member
I fail to see how the cost of our system could do anything but go down. Our current system is what is costing us. Every rich capitalist democracy that lets their government run things or has some mix between government and private pays less.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a1/International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png/800px-International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png

In fact, we are already like a lot of these countries in some respects. For our senior citizens, Medicare is a lot like the NHS in England (which is highly popular with those that actually use it....fact). For our veterans, health care is a lot like what they do in Taiwan (which is again, hugely popular...fact). For the employed, our system is a lot like Germany's (again, hugely popular...fact).

But for those without insurance, you might as well be living in a third world country.

By the way, folks on 'socialized government run communist Medicare' generally report higher rates of satisfaction than those with private insurance through employers. http://seniorjournal.com/NEWS/Medicare/2009/20090512-SenCitLikeMedicare.htm

Whoever is arguing that we should stay with our current system, which is not only the most expensive in the world but also leaves 700,000 folks bankrupt annually (weakening our nation) needs to examine this issue further. Some suggested viewing: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/ (56 minutes)
 

beardo

Well-Known Member
from what i here the heathcare package is really unpopular with the american people but i think their trying to pass it to save face and not lose. like even if people dont like it it was our idea and its right so we have to do it then you will realise it was the right thing to do...thats not how a Republic or a democracy work. i would be happier to see massive work programs...like the CCC civilian conservation corps. put every uneployed person to work doing phisical labor...build railroads or dams or solar and wind power stations whatever build a border wall put people to work put these billions of dollars to real jobs starting now. i know its not a solution but its better than paying failing banks auto companies and healthcare programs....
 
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