President Obama’s Speech on Health Care: Notable Quotes

These quotes do a pretty good job of summing up the interesting points of the speech. Obama also says the things that he’s been saying about how his plan won’t help illegals, no one will have to change their insurance if they like it, and that there will be no death panels. Another thing to note is that I’m decently sure I heard a Republican shout that Obama was lying during the speech, around the time when he was talking about benefits to illegals. I’m sure more about this will some up in the news tomorrow, but if you have a guess as to who said it, please comment.

If you’d rather take the time to read the transcript of the speech, it’s here, done by the Anchorage Daily News.  I will post analysis of these quotes later tomorrow.

“it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition”

“And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care”

“Now, even if we provide these affordable options, there may be those – particularly the young and healthy – who still want to take the risk and go without coverage…such irresponsible behavior costs all the rest of us money.”

“Insurance executives don’t do this because they are bad people. They do it because it’s profitable”

“the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects…But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits…it could provide a good deal for consumers”

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits – either now or in the future. Period.”

“Part of the reason I faced a trillion dollar deficit when I walked in the door of the White House is because too many initiatives over the last decade were not paid for – from the Iraq War to tax breaks for the wealthy.”

“we’ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system – a system that is currently full of waste and abuse…Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan. Much of the rest would be paid for with revenues from the very same drug and insurance companies that stand to benefit from tens of millions of new customers”

“So don’t pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut – especially since some of the same folks who are spreading these tall tales have fought against Medicare in the past”

“Add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years”

“I don’t believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I have talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs”

9-9-09: A sense of loss

Today is the last day for a century/millenia (depending on how you look at it)  that we will have a day that reads like this. 9-9-09 And yet, that doesn’t really matter. Nothing is happening today that won’t happen this time next year, except for maybe the sales on weddings, and a fanatical speech on health care. All the same, many of us feel a sense of loss today. It’s the *last* day. There won’t be another chance.

These phrases ring true with us because advertising companies have convinced us not to waste these sorts of opportunities. But today, there was nothing we could buy to take advantage of keeping the day forever, before the chance was lost. The “chance” to do nothing in particular. So today becomes tomorrow, and in spite of all of this….

I feel like I’ve lost something.

Doing What The World Won’t

Today, yet another esteemed publisher (Yale) has refused to publish Muhammad cartoons on the grounds that they are too controversial.  This time, the cartoons were to appear in a book called “The Cartoons That Shook the World.” Those Danish cartoons caused mass riots. They were definitely world shaking. Anyway, with vague hopes of being assassinated before my AP Spanish Lit quiz tomorrow, I’ve decided to make my own cartoon.

Health Care, Healthcare, Health-Care!

With this debate roaring across the country, I feel the need to make just *one* crucial point.

Health care is a noun.

Healthcare and health-care are adjectives.

That is all. You may continue yelling at your neighbors.

Grammar.

The Online Community

We’re always hearing about the evils of online predators, chat-rooms, and generalized strangers on the internet. I’d have to agree with the general message: it can be bad to give out too much information online. However, just to play devil’s advocate (and give you all a break from the healthcare debate) I’d like to share a heartwarming Facebook story.

On Facebook, there are different games that you can play, and one of them is called Sorority Life. The essential premise of the game is to be the backstabbing evil popular girl that you couldn’t have been/aren’t in school. You collect “friends” to become rich and popular. The way you collect these friends is to friend them, and then  invite them to your Sorority.

The problem is that they must be your friend to join your sorority house, and because most people don’t have loads of real life friends who want to play Sorority Life, they invite random people who they know play the game. This is not unusual, this is the norm. People post their email addresses in the game so that other people can add them as friends. I became rather concerned with this, being as the incentive was to allow random strangers to have access to your Facebook, and wrote the makers a letter. The conversation went like this…

Hello,

I was wondering if you had considered the danger of giving children the incentive to add as many strangers as possible to their friends lists, giving them complete access to their information, simply in order to add them to their sororities. You should consider rethinking the way people gain house members.

Hey there,

Thanks for the feedback. The application is still relatively new, so I am still in the process of adding new content and features. I appreciate your concern for the game and for contacting me with your thoughts.

So….yeah. Not too much progress.

But recently, I’ve had reason to wonder whether the system is really all that bad. Last Friday, the body of a missing 4 year old was found in a septic tank.

His mother plays sorority life. In a matter of hours, many of the characters were wearing black, and the mother had been been voted as best dressed. Her sorority life wall was filled with prayers. This was possible due to the nature of the game. Now of course, there are also people on the game who try to give you viruses when you add them, and people who would probably like to hurt you….but it would seem that most people are good.

My usual and “mourning” avatars on the game.

The War of the Fish

In a misguided attempt to save the struggling catfish industry, the Department of Agriculture is considering inspecting all pangasius fish imports from Vietnam. This seems fairly harmless,  but the “inspection” would turn into a literal ban for at least three years. The dead cattle  industry would also have beef with this, because Vietnam could very well decide to ‘inspect’ US beef for retaliati-’safety reasons.’ Comparative loss? US beef exports to Vietnam are worth $131 million; the catfish industry just got a $50 million bailout. Worldwide, the cattle industry is obviously worth more, with its $175 billion towering over the $1.4 billion of the catfish.

Aside from the sheer ridiculousness of giving up money for protectionism, there are two other good reasons to keep importing fish and exporting beef.

1. It pisses PETA off.

2. Pangasius fish are adorable!

Sue for a Sneaker!

There are two ways to look at the texting teen incident.  (A teen was texting and managed to fall into a sewer through an open manhole.)

1. The teen should have been paying attention and noticed the giant hole in the middle of her path.

2. The feds should have made sure it was impossible to fall into the hole, and the teen was obviously a victim of governmental dysfunction. She should therefore sue.

The general populous is *not* opting for option 1. Imagine that. Anyway, the mother of the oh so blighted girl is planning on taking option 2 and suing the pants off of everyone even remotely responsible for this. The problem? She doesn’t have any grounds. Her current idea is to sue on the ‘grossness’ factor. I have a better idea. Sue for a sneaker!

But of course, there is no point in having only one sneaker. So sue for a brand new pair. And you can never replace the emotional attachment between a girl and her sneaker, so sue for a couple new pairs every year until she finds one with which she can bond…But this will take time! So sue for all the time that Alexa will lose trying on shoes. This should all add up to about 65 million dollars, right Roy Pearson*?

*Roy Pearson was the guy who sued for $65 million over a pair of lost pants. And there wasn’t even a grossness factor!

Well…I guess we have to do *something* with it

On January 28, 2009, the Republicans fulfilled their promises to their constituents. Not a single one of them voted for the $819 billion stimulus plan. It passed anyway.

But their doom was not yet sealed. They could have filibustered. There was still hope.

A few days later, 3 Republicans sold their souls for 19 billion dollars, and a $838 bailout passed the house.  F***ing Commis!!! (For their protection, I will not list their names here. I will call it classified info. Hey, if the CIA can classify common knowledge, so can I. So shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh)

Anyway, the point is that the bailout passed, bought votes aside (and don’t tell me those votes weren’t bought: 19 billion dollars EXTRA to something the Republicans thought was a waste of money and it passes? Don’t even joke) so now we have a whole lot of money to spend. And by the looks of it, not much to spend it on. In total, including all of the bailouts passed and the maximum potential for what programs can cost, there are 11.3 trillion dollars we have to work with, and about a quarter of that has been spent or allocated (this article tells you where it all went). So we have some extra money floating around, and because of the magnitude of the money and the pressure to spend it quickly, it’s pretty much bound to be misspent.

Warren Buffet must be banking on this American incompetence, because even though the money ISN’T EVEN SPENT YET, he called for a SECOND economic stimulus this morning on “Good Morning America.” No really. He wants another one. When the first one has shown NO positive results and is STILL sitting on money. A second one. Please, please explain to me how this makes sense.

Oh, well. I won’t have to pay for it, as the Obama Administration clearly doesn’t care at all about repaying the deficit…ever. As long as I stay nice and poor, this isn’t my problem.

The bailout money, for all intents and purposes, is already gone. I just hope somebody does something with it.

Mandatory Minimum Sentences: Oops.

Background

A mandatory minimum sentence is the number of years that the fed requires you to spend in prison for a given crime, regardless of circumstance. For example, having 5 grams+ of crack = 5 years behind bars, no questions asked.

The main arguments against this system are that the sentences remove the discretion of the judge, tend to be subtly racist, fail to prevent people from doing drugs again, and aren’t cost effective.

The discretion of the judge argument goes like this. A  judge has the right to give a prisoner any punishment that he or she sees fit, taking into account any and all mitigating circumstances at his/her discretion. The judge was selected to do just this. An executive telling the judge that he must give a certain punishment violates this discretion.

To explain the racist argument, let’s examine a specific case. It would take 500 grams + of cocaine to get that same 5 year sentence (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/24/attorney-general-wants-review-crack-cocaine-sentences/), a one to one hundred ratio, and the poor tend to use more crack because it is cheaper. The poor are more likely to be minorities. In short, minorities are punished more for drug crimes due to mandatory minimums.

The thing about recidivism rates (how likely people are to go back to jail) is that once people go to jail, they get angry. Whether or not you deserved your punishment, the average citizen doesn’t want to go to jail. In the case of small drug possession rules, most people don’t feel that the punishment is deserved. Citizens can end up feeling that the rules are dumb, or that they could avoid enforcement better next time. Both of these breed anger, and being angry predisposes you to commit another crime.

The cost effective argument is based solely on a lack of deterrence, (this deterrence based article from the Rand Drug Policy Research Center is a good example of an average one), and as I assumed that the death penalty was a good deterrent, I will assume that mandatory minimums are as well.

Note that I am doing this for the sake of consistency. There is no widely accepted scientific study that conclusively proves or disproves the deterrence factor, so any claim is essentially arbitrary. However, if you are interested in the existing studies (well, the pro deterrence studies anyway) you can check my very first blog post. It also includes some things on how you could logically prove that it’s a deterrent.

So, we are assuming that Mandatory Minimum Sentences are a deterent, basically because I feel like it, but also because it’s irrelevent. Why’s it irrelevent? Because today I’m going to do something new, and look at an issue for the human side of things, rather than the strict policy based side.

Controversy

People are irrational. No matter how well they know that the government can’t change an enforcement rule just for them, or how well they know that they broke the law, they don’t want to be punished, and they get angry.

Lengthy Personal Example

Take me for example. As some of you know, I am currently at debate camp, where we have a rule that you must sign a piece of paper by 11, and by signing that paper you are agreeing to go straight to bed.

Tonight, I got in the shower at 10:49. This was obviously a stupid idea. I was positioning myself to break the rule. At 10:59, I ran out of the shower and signed the paper, then went back to the bathroom to get my stuff. At 11, the counselor walked into the bathroom and asked me if I had signed the paper. I told her I had. She told me that I had violated the rule of going straight to bed after signing the paper. I had. Now, it would be easy for me to say,”I signed the paper, then went back to my dorm and arrived before 11. How is a brief stop to pick up a comb relevant?” Or even for me to word this story somewhat differently. I could say,”OMG! I have to run stairs because I went to clean up the bathroom and was like thirty seconds late!! I could have just left that comb there, and not been in trouble. Way to give me incentives to fuck up the bathroom.” Neither of those would be very well thought out responses, but they are expressions of what most of us would have as an immediate, emotional response: This isn’t fair.

Conclusion

But it is fair. The law applies to each of us equally, and though if I had gotten fifty years in prison instead of fifty flights of stairs I would be more angry, it would still be fair. Exceptions to a law can’t be made based on how late you were, or how over the limit you were, because this sets the precedent for the person who was a little later or a little more stoned than you were to ask for an exception because you got an exception. The law must have clearly defined rules. This is legal; this is not. This is the punishment that everyone else gets; this is the punishment that you get.

Furthermore, mandatory minimum sentences allow you to have a knowledge of what will happen if you break a given rule. In trials without these rules, you could go in with no idea of your sentence, or break a law without knowing the consequences. Mandatory minimums, on a purely rational level, let you know the consequences of your actions. Whether or not the Fed should be allowed to do this (can it ignore the judiciary branch’s rights?) or whether or not the specifics of these minimums should be changed (is crack really worse than cocaine?) or whether or not jails should be concerned about helping people make better choices (I’ll go there later)  or whether or not it is actually a cost effective deterrent (who the hell knows), the principle of letting people know what the consequences of their actions are and sticking to these consequences is not a bad one. In fact, it can be very helpful.

Moral of My Story

Oops.

Presenting The Other Side

To my fellow Libertarians: This is decently amusing.

To the people who read my blog who aren’t Libertarians (no idea why you read my blog, by the way. I probably routinely offend you. But thanks!!): I figure I should present the other side at times, for risk of being a hypocrite (I *may* be more biased than CNN).

Without further ado, a defense of Universal Health Care, by Fabian Marxist G.O.D:

If every human being is subjected to the fungal foot of an overbearing government-that is to say, any government, the social contract- the bond that exists between citizen and state, ensures that the puny human be looked after to some degree. The human is ruled and subjected to law and ordinance, sensible or not, and in turn is granted rights that the government must look to. These rights include the trivial right to assembly and freedom of worship to the more serious, like, the right to justice and defense in times of national crisis.

Unfortunately, many smug bourgeois (a la MarinaLee), don’t care to recognize the prerequisite to all of these rights: the right to health care. The human body is the medium by which most human beings live.  Living is a function that allows them to enjoy such things as life, liberty, and pursuing epinepheral pleasure. One of the most prestigious governments around by many standards, the United States guarantees the rights that the body may enjoy, but fails to explain how in hell a body may do that when it’s discovered that it’s pushing dandelions.

So here’s an idea: The only way that the rights that a government “ensures” may be enjoyed is if the body is able to receive those rights. The body must be in working, living condition to do so, so Universal Health Care is an implied right.

To some extent, the government of the United States and most governments in this wide world of ours already ensures many forms of preventive health care. Clean water, sewers, eugenics programs… oh wait we quit that, fire departments, and the police department all work to protect the human body. This is all commonplace and expected. A government without these services would be considered backwards, not providing for an essential human right. So why does the government provide these services? To ensure that the humans’ bodies are able to enjoy the other rights. A human can’t be expected to be pursuing anything other than water while on fire, so the government sends out men to extinguish fires, and allow the flamers to pursue their marriag… happiness. So since it is already easily demonstrable that the government should protect bodies from filthy water, feces, fire and fuckers with guns, why not finish protecting the bodies? By not taking care of the body through and through, the government is doing as much a half ass job as Michael Jackson’s heart. Perhaps it is that people aren’t romantic enough. If I cannot see a virus, then surely, it must not exist? I can feel a fire, I can see the dirty water, and those problems must be taken care of. But… a virus? And what is this I hear about Cancer? You say my cells are regenerating too quickly… and this is bad? Obviously no one thinks this way, but the point is that viruses and cancer and all these other health problems can pose just as much a problem as fire. The whole concept of a government looking after its people sans heath care is comparable to a mother smothering her kids in sunscreen at the beach only to let them be eaten by a shark.

Now, obviously any Universal Health Care system in the United States would be bitchy and expensive, and would probably suck nuts. Still, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. 500 years ago people didn’t have the greatest sewer systems, but they were working on it. They didn’t have the best technology to put out fires and stuff, but they put forth an effort, and now  it works out in a cost effective manner. When a system works, no one bitches about the gargantuan government invading on the private  industry. We may not see a good universal health care system in this generation or the next, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.