Obama's FY 2012 Budget

j-mac said:

No it isn't opinion is it? Here try this one....


The Trouble with Canadian Healthcare —


j-mac

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Brett J. Skinner is director of bio-pharma, health, and insurance policy at the Fraser Institute. He is the principal author of “The Hidden Costs of Single-Payer Health Insurance: A Comparison of the United States and Canada” (available here).

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Less than two weeks after he denounced President Barack Obama’s “failure to lead” on cutting deficit spending, freshman Sen. Joe Manchin is taking his argument home to his West Virginia constituents. Warning that “we cannot ignore the fiscal Titanic of our national debt and deficit,” the Democrat stressed his unwillingness to simply rubber-stamp his party’s positions in a Monday morning speech at the University of Charleston. “There are some in Washington who believe we can simply ignore the fiscal peril we face as a nation,” he said. “They are wrong.”

Facing a tough battle for a full term in the Senate, Manchin is making clear efforts to distance himself from what he sees as dithering on the national debt, coming from Democrats and from Washington as a whole. The former West Virginia governor asked earlier this month: “Why are we doing all this when the most powerful person in these negotiations — our president — has failed to lead this debate or offer a serious proposal for spending and cuts that he would be willing to fight for?” Last week, 64 senators signed a letter to Obama asking him to play a larger role in solving the debt crisis.

Manchin has also “gone rogue” in his efforts to get reelected, meeting with Senate Republican leaders and hinting that he might not vote for Obama next year.

In his early March floor speech, Manchin blasted the president for largely staying out of budget negotiations and for proposing too few cuts, and on Monday he will repeat many of those tropes.

Manchin said that he plans to stand firm in his fiscal conservatism. “We must get our fiscal house in order. We must be honest about what we value and what we need to spend your taxpayer dollars on — not what just sounds good,” he said. “In the coming weeks, we will face many difficult budget decisions. I know it will not be easy. I know that it will take compromise. I know it will be partisan and difficult. I know that everyone will have to give up something and no one will want to relinquish anything. But we cannot ignore the fiscal Titanic of our national debt and deficit.”

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The 2009 WTA Report Card measured the total wait
facing patients across a range of services and procedures that
go beyond the narrow focus of the 5 priority areas and found
long waits in both the referral-to-specialist-consultation stage
and specialist-consultation-to-treatment stage. Furthermore,
5 million Canadians do not have a regular family
physician/GP and may have to wait longer at the beginning
of their health care journey.

Despite being hailed as signs of progress, recent wait-time
reports show how far we still have to go. When it comes to
wait times, Canadians are selling themselves short. Canadians
deserve timely access to health care and accurate information
on how long they can expect to wait for a consultation,
test or procedure. Unfortunately, Canada is one of the few
developed countries with universal health care systems where
patients face long waits for necessary care.

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Kulterkampf said:

Your fine to do that, within your state. The federal government does not have the constitutional authority to implement any healthcare reform without a major amendment to the constitution. You believe that gov't control is the best way to achieve these things I believe that a free market will provide a far fairer and more efficient systems. Differences in opinion of how to achieve the same goal. I don't want to have to pay for an obese individuals cardiac health care. Why should I have to pay for someone else's choices, make your own decisions and live with them.

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Boo Radley said:

Why hasn't the free market fix things already?

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iamitter said:

The health care industry is an oligopoly (in some places a monopoly), which means, if they choose to do so, they don't have to set the rate at the market rate.

Oligopolies aren't necessarily bad or good. They're everywhere, in the power industry, oil, movie production, etc.

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Sales dropped nearly 17 percent in February after a big drop in January. Put that on top of the nearly 10 percent February drop in existing home sales reported earlier this week and the incredibly low level of mortgage purchase applications, and you get a clear case for a double dip in housing.

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President Obama’s former top economic advisor sharply criticized the federal government for failing to take more aggressive action against unemployment.

“I frankly don’t understand why policy makers aren’t more worried about the suffering of real families,” former Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer, who left the Administration last fall, said during a discussion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tuesday. “I think there are tools we have tools we have that we can use, and I think it’s shameful that we’re not using them.”

Romer had been a voice inside the Obama Administration pressing for a larger ecnomic stimulus and more aggressive government action from the early days of the Administration, and she’s continued to make that case from the outside in a New York Times column.

But the sharpness of her criticism reflected deep concern among many Democratic economists about a political consensus that the federal government has to rein in expensive attempts to restart the economy even as rising oil prices again put a damper on growth.

“We need to realize that there is still a lot of devastation out there,” Romer said, calling the 8.9% unemployment rate "an absolute crisis."

Romer suggested that extending the payroll tax break to the empoyer side of the payroll tax could spur the economy; she suggested that Congress simultaneously pass a comprehensive, long-term plan for reducing the deficit.

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The US ranks near the bottom of developed global economies in terms of financial stability and will stay there unless it addresses its burgeoning debt problems, a new study has found.

In the Sovereign Fiscal Responsibility Index, the Comeback America Initiative ranked 34 countries according to their ability to meet their financial challenges, and the US finished 28th, said David Walker, head of the organization and former US comptroller general.

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The Senate Republicans are preparing to tell President Obama that they want a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) to the Constitution passed in Congress in exchange for raising the statuary debt ceiling above $14.2 trillion.

“My hope is that we would force a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment as a condition to voting on the debt ceiling,” Sen. John Cornyn (R.-Tex.) told HUMAN EVENTS. “By next week, or shortly thereafter, we will have all 47 Republicans unified behind the effort, and then begin to reach out to our Democratic colleagues.”

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The Prof said:

our very own DEBT CRISIS

US Finances Rank Near Worst in World: Study[/url]

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ricksfolly said:

Where were you political rabble-rousers when Regan tripled the national debt, caused 10.4 unemployment, and dropped the top tax rate down from 71 to 38 percent?

ricksfolly

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Former President Bill Clinton's budget chief, Alice Rivlin, said Sunday that if Congress does not act to reign in spending or raise revenues, she could easily foresee the possibility of a wider economic crisis.

"We could definitely have what's called a sovereign debt crisis," Rivlin told CNN's "State of the Union." ""We used to think that only happened to small countries on other continents, but it could happen to us as well"

"That means that we would not be perceived as able to get our act together and pay our debts and our creditors would lose confidence in us," she said.

According to Rivlin, a sovereign debt crisis would result in a large interest rate spike, a fall in the global value of the dollar and a period of economic decline much worse than the recession that began in 2008.

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Conservative said:

LOL, are you serious? What economic policy did Reagan implement that caused the rise in unemployment? I am sure it had nothing to do with the misery index from the Carter years. Tripling the debt? Anyone here that wouldn't take a 2.6 trillion debt over the 14.3 trillion debt we have today? Reagan added 1.7 trillion in 8 years, Obama will add 5 trillion in three? Where is your outrage?

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iamitter said:

That would be paul volcker's artificially raising the interest rate to curb inflation in exchange for artificially raising unemployment. That's Econ 101.

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Conservative said:

That doesn't answer the question I aksed ricksfolly regarding his claims about Reagan.

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What economic policy did Reagan implement that caused the rise in unemployment?

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iamitter said:

Well, you certainly asked the question and the answer to that is the contractionary monetary policy.

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j-mac said:

Medicare has an unfunded liability somewhere in the 10s of Trillions.....Yeah great plan.


j-mac

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washunut said:

Not sure you understood what I said. Medicare has to be fixed becuase of FUTURE problems. So the quicker we fix them the better. Some people want to throw out a roadblock to cutting anything and throw out your line about the trillions of dollars of shortfall Medicare will have in the future. Medicare is not a quick fix. As proven by Obamacare which original goal was to " bend the cost curve".

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iamitter said:

That would be paul volcker's artificially raising the interest rate to curb inflation in exchange for artificially raising unemployment. That's Econ 101.

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