Willard was FOR universal health care - before he was against it.

The most important thing here is that republicans oppose the new health care simply because it has the president's name on it. If the economy hadn't tanked, it would have been enormously popular, but the republicans hijacked it and demonized it. Giving health care to 37 million was a good start. We still need the public option.

Where is Flipper now? It's a shame he will be known as the Iconic Flipper a once loved dolphin viewed by many of children from 1964-1967.

Republicans are SUCH hypocrites

This doesn't matter at all. Anyone out there still planning to vote for one of the current GOP candidates has no memory capacity past the last episode of the Bachelorette or Dancing With Stars. These huckster politicians can say anything and their gullible, "low-information" (i.e. stupid) believers will swallow it whole.

Your real funny let me tell you

If Rebublicans were just hypocrites half this bitchen' wouldn't be happening. Carpet baggers is more like it.

Newt would talk @!$%# about his mother just to get elected....he's pathetic.......oh and add hypocrite!!!!

One more example of how the republican candidates are tripping all over their pasts in an effort to attract the votes of the right wing tea baggers in their party. What a pathetic bunch of hypocrites!

TO: FatBobMob who wrote:

"Overpopulation is the real problem facing mankind. The few can't pay for the many because mathematically it doesn't work..."

Wrong. Like Ross Perot famously said: "People don't know how much a billion dollars is. One billion dollars is enough money to build everyone in America a new home" (and he said that BEFORE prices on houses were as low as they are today!).

Ross Perot is a Republican who ran for POTUS as an independent back in 1991 with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush (41).

I bet you haven't seen the newest list of billionaires and how many there are of them. All of the hills in Los Angeles are covered with billionaires and millionaires from all over the world.

The fact is, Republicans will tell any story and make up any lie to NOT take care of their own, and it makes me SICK that the average Working American can't even get a pay raise without some ignorant Republican coming along and calling THAT a "redistribution of wealth".

REPUBLICANS = TAX CUTS for the rich, and PAY CUTS for working Americans.

Obama / Biden 2012

Arguing with libtards is such a chore. They know so few facts, begin from false premeses and then have no clue as to rules of logic. You would think that they would appreciate Gingrich for this compliment that fosters their Obamacare as legitimate, but they are so filled with hate that they attack someone that is agreeing with them.

Beyond that, there is no one on the Right that does not recognize the right of the state to institute programs that aid the health and welfare if its citizens. This has been the right of the state since before 1776. The constitution confirms this right in the 10th amendment. It is why they can require car insurance for example. It is the federal government that is estopped from doing these things by the constitution, not the state.

Romney helped Massachusetts develop the health insurance program along with so much more. It is why he is the best candidate for the next president. He worked with a legislature that was 85% Democrat and accomplished so much! The last thing we need is four more years of a president doing nothing and whining that the other party is obstructing him.

Intelligent Republicans, there a lot of you out there. I'm sure you must be scratching your heads over what has become of your party. I know you hate Obama, but, please, stay home on voting day in 2012. Think ahead to 2016 and come up with a reasonably good candidate. This current crop is pathetic, and you don't honestly want any of them running the country, do you?

hypopcrites, damn, hypocrites, damn, my lobbiest got grits, you god damn.... come and meet my pretty blond wife, ignore the pain and nazi strife and..... will you be my bestest friend;;;; I'll love you till the bitter end.... the oceans not yet dead you see,,, my picture rules both you and mee......

Jealousy is the new norm for democrats.

To me, the most important advantage to universal healthcare is the fact that it eliminates the neccessity of people without insurance waiting til the doctors' offices to be closed, so they can go to the ER, which at that time treats them, because the law already mandates that they have to treat them. It's a lot more expensive to treat them there. It also ties up medical personnel who could best be used for real emergencies. I've known people who have made, and spent good money foolishly, who don't carry insurance. When they have major trauma, people take up collections, and they use the limited slots for indigent rehab. With universal healthcare this could be avoided. Something a lot of people don't understand about insurance companies, is they make deals with doctors, and hospitals, to limit the amount insurance has to pay them for various procedures. My insurance has a deal with the VA, where they pay miniscule amounts for procedures. Additionally, the VA has a deal with my insurance, where the insurance only pays the exact amount the VA has to pay for my meds. Then the VA requires me, and other vets rated under 50% disability to pay the balance of the $8 prescription fee. Effectively this makes the bill cheaper for my insurance company, while negating my benefit that my insurance is supposed to pay. This applies only to non-service-connected medications.

One thing is sure Romney's dirty tactics will not work with me, I know now he is the one who's throwing s--- to others, perhaps Obama is been collecting allots of money for his re-election but the question is who's the questionable contributions to the Democratic party for sample China, and others.

And the 850, 000 a year don't hurt either,,,, ha ha....

Well, let's keep it short and to the point. Does the word hypocrite suit as a synonym for liberal. I'm not being obstreperous, but too many liberals want to borrow, spend, and tax. You don't mind saying you're all for higher taxes to spread the wealth, as long as you're not the ones being taxed. I guarantee, if there was a flat tax, but the government said it would publish a list of all do-gooders who will voluntarily contribute more than they are required to pay, not one of you would make the list. It's great to say all people deserve everything someone else has, but don't make me pay for it. Make those who have worked hard and done it the right way keep digging deeper and deeper. That's a great concept for ending democracy. Keep taking from those who work and just give it to those who won't or don't. Obviously, this could go on for ever, but I think you get the point. If people were given assistance to become independent and self sufficient, rather than free this and that for generation after generation we might just turn the corner. Once you train people that they deserve to be given everything, entitled, it's over.

There is a Republican talking point offered in answer to why America is the only country among the top 25 industrial powers that doesn't have single payer/universal health care, paraphrased: "America is special, unique, and must find its own health care solutions." The only thing unique about health care in the United States is that there are far more health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists than anywhere else in the world. Although Teapublicans talk about the many Aunt Suzies in Toronto who complain about waiting for some medical procedure in Toronto, all Canadians are entitled to health care as a matter of right, none of the hospitals are passing the costs of emergency room care for the poor to those capable of paying insurance coverage, and the vast majority of Canadians are satisfied with the quality of care they receive. In fact, "[b]y over a ten to one margin, Canadians prefer their own health care system over ours (82%-8%). 70% of them are either fairly satisfied, or very satisfied with the system." http://www.harrisdecima.com/sites/default/files/releases/071009E.pdf. So are the citizens of the 23 other industrial powers who don't have universal health care.

The health care industry makes up 16% of our overall economy, and the Congress sold out Americans' welfare to keep that part of the economy strictly in the private sector, even adding a mandate that all Americans must pay for insurance coverage. Between 55% and 70% of Americans wanted a public option to offer competition for private health insurers, yet only 41 Senators ever favored a public option. That Teapublicans defeated the public will is palpable. They've misrepresented what the public wants and have successfully defeated the the will of the majority elsewhere. According to a recent poll, 63 percent say the budget super committee should have called for increased taxes on higher-income Americans and businesses, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/10/new-cnn-poll-majority-want-tax-increase-for-wealthy-and-deep-spending-cuts/, yet all Teapublicans completely ignore that; instead, they onhly talk about reduced taxes even though income taxes are as low as they've been in 50 years (and poverty is as high as its been in 60 years).

There is little difference between Romney, the prevaricator, and Gingrich, the prevaricator. The villains are those politicians who sold their souls to America's corporate oligarchs, most of whom also signed the Grover Norquist pledge. They have been compromising the interests of working people for decades, transferring wealth from the middle class to the upper class, fighting against fair taxation of the rich, all the while extolling the virtues of capitalism even though it's not working for as much as a quarter of our population.

Republicans have been waging war on the middle class for over 30 years, ever since Reagan started selling America on the radical economic ideas of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics. You know it as the "lower taxes-cut government spending--deregulate business--privatize governmental functions" serenade. It's been our economic orthodoxy since Reagan, and its implementation has led to predictable results--the impoverishment of the middle class and the enrichment of the upper class. Although workers' wages have remained relatively flat since 1978, the average annual income for the top 1% went up by 275% between 1990 and 2011. The upper 20% in the United States now "earn" 85% of all annual income. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html. Had anyone been paying close attention, we could have seen how Friedman's ideas impoverished the middle class populations in post-Allende, Pinochet's Chile, in Lech Walesa's Poland, and in post-Glasnost Russia. Subscription to this form of "austere capitalism" has been made a condition for developing countries' acquisition of loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Its tyrannical reach can been seen by how many economic advisors to the President or heads of the Fed are Friedman acolytes--both Greenspan and Bernanke, and Summers, Paulson and Geithner were Friedman acolytes who went through the Morgan-Stanley mill.

Perhaps corporate America's greatest triumph was Citizens United, wherein our First Corporatist Chief Justice, John Roberts, writing for a conservative majority, conferred First Amendment rights on corporations (corporations are not just persons for purposes of having standing to sue and be sued, but also as persons that enjoy First Amendment protections against limiting free speech by limiting campaign contributions) and insisted that their political contributions could be made anonymously to PACs. This paves the way for anonymous corruption of politicians, hardly the kind of transparency we've come to expect in order to know who supports whom or what.

Time for America to awaken from its ideological slumbers. America should strive to regain its status as a representative democracy by passing an amendment to overturn Citizens United. Anyone who signed Norquist's pledge should be voted out of office as traitors who abandoned the interests of America's citizenry for a rigid, irrational fealty to economic dogma.

The only problem with our health care cost is that capitalism was thoroughly removed!

Apply it and rates will plummet.

"5 MYTHS About Health Care Around the World"

By T.R. Reid

Sunday, August 23, 2009

AS AMERICANS search for the cure to what ails our health-care system,
we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest
of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced
problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and
still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed
democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as
"socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do
that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:

1. It's all socialized medicine out there.

Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do
provide health care in government hospitals, with the government
paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on
private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But
many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan
and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors,
private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the
United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance
(Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands,
seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest
examples of government-run health care.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private
health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a
German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another,
with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance
plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you
have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But
patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer.
There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors
or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get
treatment -- and insurance has to pay.

Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a
doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for
weekends at a health spa.

As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed
plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for
nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the
Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany,
Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as
waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.

In Japan, waiting times are so short that most patients don't bother
to make an appointment. One Thursday morning in Tokyo, I called the
prestigious orthopedic clinic at Keio University Hospital to schedule
a consultation about my aching shoulder. "Why don't you just drop by?"
the receptionist said. That same afternoon, I was in the surgeon's
office. Dr. Nakamichi recommended an operation. "When could we do it?"
I asked. The doctor checked his computer and said, "Tomorrow would be
pretty difficult. Perhaps some day next week?"

3. Foreign health-care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free
enterprise -- private-sector, for-profit health insurance -- is
naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in
fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs
in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for
nonmedical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing.
France's health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and
spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada's universal insurance
system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on
administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has
administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned
to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for
wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though
its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On
average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times
the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality
is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are
better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400
per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than
$7,000.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation.

False. The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research,
but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any
American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French
innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian
breakthrough. Many of the wonder drugs promoted endlessly on American
television, including Viagra, come from British, Swiss or Japanese labs.

Overseas, strict cost controls actually drive innovation. In the
United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In
Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost
controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same
diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And
Japanese labs still make a profit.)

5. Health insurance has to be cruel.

Not really. American health insurance companies routinely reject
applicants with a "preexisting condition" -- precisely the people most
likely to need the insurers' service. They employ armies of adjusters
to deny claims. If a customer is hit by a truck and faces big medical
bills, the insurer's "rescission department" digs through the records
looking for grounds to cancel the policy, often while the victim is
still in the hospital. The companies say they have to do this stuff to
survive in a tough business.

Foreign health insurance companies, in contrast, must accept all
applicants, and they can't cancel as long as you pay your premiums.
The plans are required to pay any claim submitted by a doctor or
hospital (or health spa), usually within tight time limits. The big
Swiss insurer Groupe Mutuel promises to pay all claims within five
days. "Our customers love it," the group's chief executive told me.
The corollary is that everyone is mandated to buy insurance, to give
the plans an adequate pool of rate-payers.

The key difference is that foreign health insurance plans exist only
to pay people's medical bills, not to make a profit. The United States
is the only developed country that lets insurance companies profit
from basic health coverage.

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to
America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of
all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The
government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and
patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their
jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers,
and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For
people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance
plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors
and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of
millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the
world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care;
those who can't pay stay sick or die.

This fragmentation is another reason that we spend more than anybody
else and still leave millions without coverage. All the other
developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery
and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing
bureaucratic mess.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that
America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms
of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health
statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force
700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills.
In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero.
Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets -- the best-educated doctors and
nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research -- the
United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get
there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about
health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

[T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post reporter, is the author of "The
Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer
Health Care," to be published Monday.]

Both Gingrich and Romney are a lot like Obama. If either of them gets the nomination, there will be no reason to vote for them and Obama will probably be re-elected.

I'm thinking Newt is not the genius that he would have us believe he is.

Oh, that's OK. He prayed about it and asked forgiveness. At least twice, I think. It's all good.

MEOW.

Just one more of Newt's prevarications (lies)! And the teabaggers love him so what does that make them?!