posted on January 31, 2008 07:55:13 AM new
I'm sick of hearing about Hillary Clinton's 35 years of experience. Very few of those years have been as an elected official, 8 of them were as first lady and some of it even goes back to her law school years.
How about anybody else, are there any lines that you keep hearing a candidate repeat that you're already tired of hearing? Or that just don't ring quite true to you?
posted on January 31, 2008 04:19:24 PM new
I juat heard Hilary said that-35 years!
Do you guys notice she looks more and more like Bill?
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Lets all stop whining !
posted on January 31, 2008 09:14:07 PM new
Anything and everything Romney has to say bothers me. If that hypocrite took off his coat, got himself a louder tie, gold ID bracelet and a pack of smokes he could pass for a car salesman on any lot in this country. McGain trying to portray himself as an actual conservative bothers me. Giuliani just plain bothers me, doesn't even have to open his New York mouth. Hillary is starting to bother me. Edwards didn't bother me, but he's a footnote now sadly. Obama hasn't bothered me yet, but he better be careful.
Since the president is simply a representative or a puppet of a party who in turn gets it's strength from K street, I doubt that it really makes a lot of difference whether we as Democrats elect Clinton or Obama.
posted on February 1, 2008 06:47:24 AM newMy 22-year old daughter pointed out that there has been a Clinton or Bush in the White House ever since she was two!!
Which is why we need to elect someone else.
God forbid if Hillary is elected, Chelsea might be running for president in the 2016 election.
"In my experience, those who do not like you fall into two categories: the stupid, and the envious. - John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester
posted on February 1, 2008 10:20:19 AM new
LOL I agree with both of you. I think we are in for a rough ride no matter who gets in. I'm still waiting to see if I'm even going to get any June Bug money or if they just forget the whole rebate thing. I fear we will be in a depression by then. Bush needs to do something with the gas prices today,and he ain't going to do nothing.
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posted on February 1, 2008 02:50:21 PM new
It is the early campaigning -Hilary's idea of kicking off the campaign early ,thats why we are so sick of these debates .
Early campaigning is good for the new comers like Obama .
Maybe we should get a benevolent despot like Catherine the Great,Peter the Great.
Even Napoleon would be nice.
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Lets all stop whining !
posted on February 3, 2008 07:44:14 PM new
"at the end of the day", one of mine. I know it's not so much a campaign line as it is a worn out saying in general. As near as I can figure out it actually started with those financial pundits on CNBC and Bloomberg, like that one fellow with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loose who screams about everything, but the politicos have adopted it and I'm real tired of it.
"I'm for change" is another one more political, especially when it comes out of mouths like Romney's....sure you are, THIS WEEK.
posted on February 4, 2008 04:34:33 AM new
Based on campaign speech rhetoric alone it's not easy to understand the difference between the health plans suggested by Obama and Clinton. Krugman defines their intentions in this article.
Both plans require that private insurers offer policies to everyone, regardless of medical history. Both also allow people to buy into government-offered insurance instead.
And both plans seek to make insurance affordable to lower-income Americans. The Clinton plan is, however, more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.
But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.
Mr. Obama claims that people will buy insurance if it becomes affordable. Unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise.
After all, we already have programs that make health insurance free or very cheap to many low-income Americans, without requiring that they sign up. And many of those eligible fail, for whatever reason, to enroll.
An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else. Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.
So the Obama plan would leave more people uninsured than the Clinton plan. How big is the difference?
To answer this question you need to make a detailed analysis of health care decisions. That’s what Jonathan Gruber of M.I.T., one of America’s leading health care economists, does in a new paper.
Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.
That doesn’t look like a trivial difference to me. One plan achieves more or less universal coverage; the other, although it costs more than 80 percent as much, covers only about half of those currently uninsured.
As with any economic analysis, Mr. Gruber’s results are only as good as his model. But they’re consistent with the results of other analyses, such as a 2003 study, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that compared health reform plans and found that mandates made a big difference both to success in covering the uninsured and to cost-effectiveness.
And that’s why many health care experts like Mr. Gruber strongly support mandates.
Now, some might argue that none of this matters, because the legislation presidents actually manage to get enacted often bears little resemblance to their campaign proposals. And there is, indeed, no guarantee that Mrs. Clinton would, if elected, be able to pass anything like her current health care plan.
But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects.
You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.
If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.
If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.
