[ETWolverine]

Hello again, El:

I don't know what's so hard here. You've got an industry that makes $25 Billion a year doing stuff. If you can get another entity (the government) to do the same stuff at the same rate, with the same cost structure, but doesn't have owners that it needs to split the profits with, there's $25 Billion left over to spend on whatever - like the uninsured. It's just simple arithmetic and not too difficult to understand.

excon

You are assuming that a body that doesn't care whether it loses money or not is going to be as efficient as a company that lives or dies by it's efficiencies. Remember the $500 hammer and the $1200 toilet seat paid for by the government? The government is, by it's very nature, the most inefficient spender of money in the entire world.

Additionally, the government is already (on a state by state basis) spending 21% of it's budget on Medicare and Medicaid and failing miserably at it.

You are also assuming that the government can do the job as well as the private sector. Go compare the care given at the VA Hospitals to that given at hospitals in the private sphere, and tell me whether the government can do the job as well as can be done in the private sector. The answer is no, and you know it.

Finally, keep in mind that government employees are all unionized. The benefits for union employees cost much more than the benefits offered in the private sector. Especially when it comes to pensions and the like. (NY City is currently paying for 3 police forces... one that is currently working and two that are retired but have full salary pensions.) The costs of administering a government-run health system are going to be twice or three times as high as the costs of administering a private system, just because of the cost of retirement benefits for former government-insurance employees.

Do you think that there will be $25 billion left over after doubling or tripling the costs of those government retirees?

That's what I meant when I said that just knowing the net income figure isn't enough information. You have to understand the entire P&L and the balance sheet as well in order to put that $25 billion in context. You don't know what the costs of running a medical insurance company are, what the similar costs of running them would be for a government with union employees, and whether $25 billion is enough to sustain that increase in expenses, much less enough to cover more people.

Elliot

[speechlesstx]

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

Well now gee, it's a long bill so let's not quibble about whether we actually know what it contains. Poor things, wouldn't be able to pass a darn thing if they actually had to read the crap they're pushing on the American public. Here's an idea, stop submitting this massive, complex nonsense that no one reads in the first place.

[tomder55]

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Tuesday that the health-care reform bill now pending in Congress would garner very few votes if lawmakers actually had to read the entire bill before voting on it.

Maybe because the bill being crafted is loaded with unrelated or periferally related pork.

Tucked within is a provision that could provide billions of dollars for walking paths, streetlights, jungle gyms, and even farmers' markets.
The add-ons - characterized as part of a broad effort to improve the nation's health “infrastructure'' - appear in House and Senate versions of the bill.

In health bill, billions for parks, paths - The Boston Globe

[galveston]

This is a pretty long thread, and maybe this point has already been made. If so I apologize.

VA hospitals are government run health care.

Would you want them to be your only source of health care?

I have had some relatives who didn't think much of their quality.