Originally Posted by the_13th_redneck

You seem to have a lot of faith in some of these companies.
Remember the financial melt down? The government didn't cause it.

Don't worry! It'll fix itself! Half the country will be in poverty in the mean time, but those of us who are handy with guns will rise from the ashes to restore America! Or remove the country that exploits us due to our shambled economy.

Originally Posted by George

Stating the obvious, loses money, threatens to reduce service & raise prices. Sounds a lot like what ObamaCare will be like.

Sounds a bit like the military.
It loses money like just about nothing else.
It doesn't produce anything.
Gets more and more expensive every year.
Would you like to privatize the entire military as well?

Government organizations like the post office, national health insurance etc., are not designed to earn money. They are designed to have the basic needs accessable to everyone. What money they do have left over going in towards the end of the fiscal year they have to use up or else they have trouble getting funding for the next fiscal year.
Do I have to explain this like 50 billion times?

Originally Posted by the_13th_redneck

You seem to have a lot of faith in some of these companies.
Remember the financial melt down? The government didn't cause it.

A big portion was the housing meltdown. The Cartyer Admin passed a Law that the poor folks should be able to buy houses. The Clinton Admin put pressure on the financial industry to lower Stadards well below the established minimum that they knew people would be able to pay off the morgage. With the booming economy they got away with it for a while. In '05 McCain tried to warn that there was big problems. Barney Frank just denounced him as a racist because the Head of (Freddy or Fanny) was a black guy. When it fell apart Frank, other Democrats, & thier coconspirators in the Media blamed Republicans, including McCain, for the Dem. caused disaster.

Originally Posted by George

A big portion was the housing meltdown. The Cartyer Admin passed a Law that the poor folks should be able to buy houses. The Clinton Admin put pressure on the financial industry to lower Stadards well below the established minimum that they knew people would be able to pay off the morgage. With the booming economy they got away with it for a while. In '05 McCain tried to warn that there was big problems. Barney Frank just denounced him as a racist because the Head of (Freddy or Fanny) was a black guy. When it fell apart Frank, other Democrats, & thier coconspirators in the Media blamed Republicans, including McCain, for the Dem. caused disaster.

But who de-regulated the market? It wasn't Carter, Clinton, Barney Frank, Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi.

Thank you George. The people who wanted to give Americans greater access to home ownership causing the sub-prime mortgage melt-down ... leading to a national financial crisis which has had global repercussions now want to give Americans greater access to cheap health care.

Sounds good on paper but the government will screw it up just as they have Medicaid (care for the poor), Medicare (care for the elderly) and the V.A. system ... which is a national nightmare of long waits for indifferent quality care.

The US Gov't recently bought ham with stimulus dollars:

" A number of federal contracts from the government's stimulus package were published on the Drudge Report Web site and cited as examples of wasteful spending. One contract was for "two-pound frozen ham, sliced" from a Los Angeles company.

Agriculture Secretary Vilsack released a statement saying, 'the references to 'two-pound frozen ham sliced' are to the sizes of the packaging... the contract in question purchased 760,000 pounds of ham for $1.191 million, at a cost of approximately a $1.50 per pound.'


But that's not a great deal. The grocery store chain Food Lion is offering sliced ham this week for as little as $0.79 a pound in some states. And that's not wholesale."


Usually when you buy in bulk, you get an extra bargain. When the government buys something, it pays double.


Give Obamacare a chance ... and in a decade or two we'll be paying twice as much and waiting ten times as long.


The current American system works. It's expensive but most Americans get the best health care in the world ... paid for by private insurance. The poor get Medicaid, the elderly get Medicare and anyone who doesn't have any insurance of any kind can still show up to emergency rooms and get treated (It's the law).

"But who de-regulated the market?"

It wasn't deregulation that cause the sub-prime disaster. It was the Feds leaning on banks to give unqualified people home loans ... a form of over-regulation that went the other way. The banks went along with this plan because these mortgages were subsequently sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ... quasi governmental institutions which absorbed the risk.

These mortgages were then bundled and sold again as very safe investments ... because in the past, Americans would do ANYTHING to keep their homes. But when you have a loan you aren't qualified for and you have very little paid in terms of principla, you can just walk away any time you like. Too many people did this in the past couple of years and the investments built on those mortgages folded like a house of cards and took the economy with it.

Now, I have a great idea, let's put these same people in charge of healthcare!

Originally Posted by Bror Jace

Thank you George. The people who wanted to give Americans greater access to home ownership causing the sub-prime mortgage melt-down ... leading to a national financial crisis which has had global repercussions now want to give Americans greater access to cheap health care.

You are truly kidding or on drugs.
The subprime mortage melt-down had to do with banks, bad loans and the camouflaging of bad loans (with no potential for payback) under fancy names. The big banks used their names and their reputation to sell these worthless bonds worldwide (the biggest buyers were in the UK I think) and eventually when the actual value of these bonds were known, it caused the financial crisis that we are experiencing right now.
If the government had any role in it it was:
1) Deregulation that allowed this to happen.
2) Using tax money to bail a lot of the failed/failing companies out to attempt to save the US economy.

Originally Posted by Bror Jace

Give Obamacare a chance ... and in a decade or two we'll be paying twice as much and waiting ten times as long.


The current American system works. It's expensive but most Americans get the best health care in the world ... paid for by private insurance. The poor get Medicaid, the elderly get Medicare and anyone who doesn't have any insurance of any kind can still show up to emergency rooms and get treated (It's the law).

Sorry... No... The current American system does NOT work. It is the MOST expensive, and it is NOT most Americans. There are figures that say over 75 million Americans are without healthcare insurance.

Who gets the "best" healthcare in the world are those who normally don't need it. There are these things, called "pre-existing conditions" that screw a large portion of the population out of REAL quality healthcare. Insurance companies can streamline their policies to those who are at absolute zero when it comes to health risk, and just collect their monthly dues without ever having to pay anything BACK. All these different sources can't be wrong about the American system being ass-backwards.

You say we'll be waiting twice as long and paying twice as much... We're already paying more than we need to be, and we already wait in line (because of the folks who go to the emergency room for a cold). If we had a government alternative of some type, we could eliminate a LOT of that wait and unnecessary spending.

redneck, you are at least partially correct when you say the banks had a lot to do with this. But the very seed of the problem were the bad loans which the Carter Administration pushed for ... a policy increased under Clinton. The risky derivatives were built on very unsound loan practices ... making them even riskier.

A series of editorials in Investor's Business Daily about the meltdown:

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/series11.aspx

Do you honestly believe the guys who read hte Investor's Business Daily would really like to blame themselves for what happened? Think about the audience.
Actually for me, the most impartial and reliable press source for economic news is the Economist. Most people I've met tend to agree that this is probably the best source of economic news that the regular layperson can read.