Health care is a commodity; it is is not in the Bill of Rights. Will deficit spending doom the govt. healthcare bill?

1 Yi the country will never recover from this multi-trillion debt. I saw on the news that we pay China 1.2 billion a month in interest alone.(will check those figures...). Seems govt healthcare is a moot point.

2 I might take your question seriously if not for two things.1. If health care is only a commodity, then companies are entitled to withhold it if they choose to do so. As, of course, they often do now.

Since some have died as a result, that means health care is more than a commodity - it's a necessity. Does "...unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" sound familiar?2. Wait until your child is seriously ill and you can't afford health care, because your former insurer has decided that it would be more profitable for them to practice recission and eliminate your coverage - even though you paid your (sky-high) premiums for years, and they have an effective monopoly in your area (as many do).

Then tell me that health care is only a "commodity". As for the deficit, I don't recall hearing right-wingers complain about the deficit when your guy, George W. Bush, was exploding it with the help of a Republican Congress."Reagan proved deficits don't matter", remember?

And Republicans screamed the same thing about Medicare...and Medicaid...and Social Security, for that matter. Yet despite everything your party could do, those programs remain fundamentally sound and immensely popular. Go peddle your fear somewhere else.

PamPerdue replied to post #1: 3 > Seems govt healthcare is a moot point. Not necessarily. (I happen to suspect it will, but it need not be the case.)First: NOBODY is talking about government health care.

Such programs are long since off the table. The closest you get to government health care is single-payer, and that's not really an option, either. That's not the meat of my argument.

I'm trying to explain the intended effects, and that's more difficult when working with strawmen. The reason health care was brought up first on the agenda is that it was intended to be a stimulus to the economy. Currently, we devote a very large portion of the economy to health care, with mediocre results by many measures.

And it's getting larger, faster. IF (this is a big if) the government can reduce overall spending (not just theirs, but the whole nation's) on health care, more money would be left to promote foster things we can sell to our creditors. That reduces our trade deficit and our national debt.

Another key point: the government already spends about half the nation's health care costs, through very popular and effective programs like Medicare and the Veteran's Administration. In the VA, it does a good job of keeping costs down through negotiations. Medicare is less effective at it, being hamstrung.

Part of the goal is to reduce costs in these programs, in part by forcing insurance providers to be more competitive with each other. (The goal of the "public option" for health insurance was to create competition on price that doesn't exist at the moment, for a variety of reasons.)These sorts of advantages don't show up in CBO scoring; that's not what the CBO does. But it was intended as a key deficit-reducing tool: give the government more control over what it spends, and force health care providers to spend less money (lower overhead) while delivering better care.

The "public option" is probably a loss at this point. Which is too bad, because it's one of the best tools they had for controlling costs. But people see only the expenditures, and with the government in debt, they don't have the tools to spend money to save money.

Instead, we're likely to see a new set of insurance industry regulations, which won't do very much to control costs but will end some of the abusive practices by the insurance industry and will cover a few people who currently go uninsured without it. They're going to have to tackle the deficit some other way. There are three key portions of the budget: social security, medicare, and defense.

This was their attempt to fix help via the middle. Defense is being slowly worked at, though everybody hates having cuts in their district. Social Security is one they haven't talked about yet, and it would probably wait for a second (lame-duck) term, if there is one.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.