Lou Dobbs is frightfully shaken by talk like this.
The vampire will see you now.
(HuffPo)
"I thought we had gotten rid of this left-wing pest for a while," Dobbs said. "But I guess he is just resurgent. He is a blood-sucking leftist. You have got to put a stake through his heart to stop this guy."
— Lou Dobbs,
The Lou Dobbs Show
The Lou Dobbs Show
Read more about Lou's vampire theories.
Pointing to GOP Senator Grassley and Sarah Palin's ominously evocative talk of DNC death panels and also to RNC chairman Michael Steele and Republican Senator DeMint's challenge to mold healthcare reform's failure into Obama's eventual Waterloo, Dean emphasizes the GOP's total disinterest in any plan at all... much less any thoughtful or honest debate
The only actual debate is going on between the administration and the so-called centrist Democrats, many of them newly elected to Congress.
"As he has done before, Dean criticized talk of substituting a government run program with co-operative insurance plans, calling the latter a fig leaf."
While the ghosts of protest past have come back more amendable to healthcare reform, some have gotten a LOT more scary.
More scary than Lou is that his kind of craziness is predictable, now that it has become all too common among once serious contibutors... now that even our most absurd jokes turn out to be political prophesy.
It's like their Rapture-ready writers read our minds, but let's make it clear anyway. There ARE vampires at the NHS!
"The progressive watchdog group Media Matters jumped all over the comment, and like-minded bloggers followed suit. In private, Dean allies are fuming at Dobbs for a comment that not only equates the former Vermont Governor to a vampire, but raises the specter of violence during an emotionally charged health care debate."
But commie vampires are not all that's biting. From MoveOn.org, there's "Shark Week"
Meanwhile, at the healthcare town hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Obama tried to deal with the persistent and arguable claim that his ultimate objective is a single-payer health care system by telling the audience, "For us to transition to a system like that I think would be too disruptive."
"He also disputed the notion that adding a government-run insurance plan into a menu of options from which people could pick would drive private insurers out of business, in effect making the system single-payer by default.
"As long as they have a good product and the government plan has to sustain itself through premiums and other non-tax revenue, private insurers should be able to compete with the government plan, Obama said."
IF people are smart, a government-run insurance plan would eventually, in effect, create a so-called single-payer system.
But... the word, single-payer, has been a disastrous misnomer for reform-minded public relations, one that mischaracterizes what's being done in countries where it's in place.
The word no longer benefits from being associated with those Xerox flyers taped to telephone poles throughout the '90s, creating the impression of a system that is actually run from the monthly gathering of indigenous cooperative granola rollers who meet to decide who will live and who must report to this panel the following month to die.
Some single-payer systems are simply a large non-profit corporation, funded by a combination of taxes and premiums, much like Medicare is funded here, a fund that pays private service providers like doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, hospice, drug and equipment companies. And most so-called single-payer systems aren't even the only payer in town, because plenty of private insurance options exist in these so-called single-payer countries.
Progressive reform enthusiasts variously don't know this or have stupidly gotten lost in the lingo of pseudo-socialism that serves them no good in persuasive debate. It's remarkably embarrassing on top of being confoundingly self-defeating.
A better term to use would be federal-payer, and the insurance plan's optional use should be emphasized, because the progressive's teachable moment, the ideological hard-sell via hard-core indoctrination determined to persuade everyone about the socialist efficiencies and equality of the single-payer system is exactly what scares people. The first thing that natural proponents of single-payer need to face is the fact that the system isn't even what they think it is, and then devise one that's appealing to American sensibilities, instead of thinking it's only a matter of mass, systematic re-education before people see the light.
"In 1996, when he was running for the state Senate in Illinois, Obama was asked on a questionnaire whether he supported a single-payer health plan. The response was, 'Yes in principle.'"
Branding is everything, and the customized and modern single-payer systems working so well in other countries haven't been properly evaluated or explained to American healthcare reformers, much less the American people. SiCKO has been the only effective teaching tool, but its purpose served only to show that people are happy with their system, not the interesting differences between systems around the world.
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