The Ashford Zone Blog

Digby takes on the Republican talking points on health care and nails it:

Just in case you are like me and would like to be able to hit the mute button whenever a Republican is on TV talking about health care, the Huffington Post has conveniently provided the official Republican talking points:

In regard to specific talking points, the RNC Memo has nine of them:

#1 — President Obama and Democrats are conducting a grand experiment with our economy, our country, and now our health care.

#2 — President Obama's massive spending experiments have created more debt than at any other time in our nation's history.

#3 — The President experimented with a $780 billion dollar budget-busting stimulus plan and unemployment is still rising. The President experimented with banks and auto companies, and now we're on the hook for tens of billions of dollars with no exit plan.

#4 — Now the President is proposing more debt and more risk through a trillion dollar experiment with our health care.

#5 — Democrats are proposing a government controlled health insurance system, which will control care, treatments, medicines and even what doctors a patient may see.

#6 — This health care experiment will have consequences for generations, but President Obama and Democrats want to ram this legislation through Congress in two months.

#7 — President Obama's health care experiment is too much, too fast, too soon. Our country cannot afford to fix health care through a rushed experiment.

#8 — Americans want health care reform that addresses, not increases, cost or debt.

#9 — Government takeover is the wrong way to go — health care decisions should remain between the doctor and the patient.

Digby addresses each one:

#1 — Yes it is a grand experiment. It's possible that it will fail. But we already know that the current system is failing badly and is going to get worse. If Americans wanted to put their faith in the same private sector that just blew up the global financial system to fix this problem voluntarily, they would have voted for John McCain. It's not like Obama and the Democrats didn't run on reforming health care. The people knew what they were getting into and they want the Democrats to run their experiment.

#2 — Yes there is a deficit. It's there because the Bush administration left a global financial crisis, the worst economy since the Great Depression, an imploding health care system and a planet that's heating up so fast that the polar bears are running out of ice. Oh, and there are two ongoing expensive wars.

I'm sorry those things cost money to fix, but they do and it's the price Americans are going to have to pay for voting for an ignorant lout and his evil puppetmaster for president. The mess has to be cleaned up and it isn't going to come cheap.

#3 — the stimulus was never going to have fully kicked in this soon and complaining about it this early is pure political opportunism. But there's no doubt that it could have been better if a handful of moderate busy bodies hadn't arbitrarily decided on a certain number for no good reason and then gutted much needed money for the states that would have been spent quickly. That's what you get for bipartisanship.

#4 — this is meaningless, repetitive babble

#5 — nobody is proposing government run health care. We only wish they were. Instead what we have is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will, nonetheless, at the very least ensure that people will be able to see their own doctor and get the treatments they need. This is just the same stale old lie they've been telling for decades.

#6 — Health care reform is not a rushed experiment. People have been thinking about this for 60 years and have been blocked by these same lame excuses every time they try to do something about it. More to the point, the Republicans are already on record saying they want to delay the bill so they can kill health reform. Why would the Democrats want to help them do that?

#7 — Lather, rinse, repeat

#8 — Americans do want a system that contains costs. That's why the status quo is unacceptable. Even if they are lucky enough to have health insurance, they are getting eaten alive with costs if they are unlucky enough to actually get sick. The Republicans have no solution to any of these problems. If anything they want to make it worse by forcing people to buy their own health insurance on the open market where insurance companies can cherry pick only the healthy patients and kick anyone who might actually need their coverage off the rolls. They are in no position to be critical of anyone else's plan when that's the best they can come up with.

#9 — health care decisions should be between a doctor and a patient (unless it's reproductive health in which case it should be between a doctor a patient and the Christian Right.) Unfortunately, at the moment, health care decisions are now between a doctor, a patient and a faceless insurance company bureaucrat who answers to nobody but his immediate boss and who is being paid a bonus to find reasons not to cover you. I would welcome a government bureaucrat over that system. At least they aren't allowed to personally profit from my misfortune.

RELATED:  The GOP fearmongering about healthcare is in full tilt mode.  A memo must have gone out, because the latest talking point is that Obamacare is going to lead to the mass execution of the elderly.  No, I'm not kidding.  Read with amazement as some wonk at the National Review Online tries to make a section of the healthcare bill discussing 5-year medical consultations for the elderly into "eugenics".  This echoes the fearmongering from the floor of the House, too.

I don't blog about this very much, because I don't understand it very well.

I know there are several bills and versions out there; I just don't know what they do or how they differ.

I know there's such a thing as a "single payer system" which is essentially "socialized health care".  In essence, it's a single universal health care system where everybody is under the same "plan", kind of like Medicare, but involving everyone.  I also know this is not what Obama proposes.

I know there's such a thing as the "public plan option" which is what Obama is proposing.  Essentially, this is a government-run insurance plan (again, like Medicare or what congressmen have) that anyone can opt into.  It will cover people who are presently uninsured and essentially compete with private insurance plans.  But of course, because it is the government, it can provide better services at lower costs (the government has more bargaining power).  And I believe most of the proposals on the table are some varience of the "public plan" option.

Some say that the public plan approach is a stepping stone to a "single payer system".  That's fine with me.

But the main reason I have a problem getting my arms around health care reform is that I just don't know the lingo, as this helpful post from Exra Klein made salient:

There are two things that people might be talking about when they bring up the cost of health-care reform. One is "national health expenditures." That's the amount of money we spend as a country, in both the private and public sectors, on health care. The other is "public health expenditures," which is the amount of money the government — and thus taxpayers — spend on health-care programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

These two measures do not always point in the same direction. A single-payer system could cut national health expenditures by 10 percent while increasing public expenditures by trillions of dollars. In that scenario, national health expenditures would fall, but public health expenditures would rise, because we would be paying through taxes rather than premiums. Conversely, a scenario in which we ditch or weaken the public plan might mean that public health expenditures are lower because less money is being routed through government, but national health expenditures are higher, because you're missing out on a potential source of cost savings.

Another piece that confuses people is the difference between "paying" for health-care reform and "saving money" through health-care reform. Imagine that the final health-care bill costs $1 trillion but spends all that money on subsidies and doesn't change the system at all. That bill could be "paid for" through a tax that raises $1 trillion, or by cutting defense spending by the same. But it wouldn't save money. Conversely, imagine a health-care bill that cost $1 trillion but unravels the employer-based market and substantially reforms Medicare: That bill might save trillions in the long term by cutting national health expenditures, but unless someone found $1 trillion up front, it wouldn't be "paid for."

The goal of health-care reform — at least on the cost side — should be to save money on national health expenditures. Saving money in the long run is a lot more important than deficit neutrality in the short run. And the total level of health-care spending is a lot more important than what percentage of it is public.

I think I follow. 

One thing I do know is that there really is no excuse in the 21st century for not having digitized and easily transportable electronic medical records.  I understand there is a huge upfront cost to having hospitals and doctors' offices convert to digital, but it is something that needs to be done.  So much of health care costs is due to administrative expenses, and the way to save money on national health expenditures is to lessen those expenses.