Aaron, the critical point that I think you are missing in the Ron Paul quote is that the failures of our for profit health care system already necessitated action 35 years ago.
If anything, it's American hubris that leads to the assumption that we totally had it right the first time. Nixon may have made new problems with HMO's but that doesn't negate the fact that there were issues in the first place.
As a pragmatist I think we should look to all of the successful systems in the world right now (and as it turns out they are all state controlled) and try to culminate a plan that applies their strengths and avoids their flaws. If you have an example of a strong non-social system in existence now I'd be curious to hear about it.
Regarding economics, I do agree that government regulations "bog down" industry. However I think that history has shown this to be a necessary evil.
You said that "Obama and his crew know(ing) very little about ecomonics and sound money" and frankly I'm not even sure how to respond to this. It is one thing to disagree with them but I think questioning their
knowledge of the subject unless you yourself are an Econ PhD is probably going too far. If nothing else I think it's worth giving some weight to Warren Buffet's opinion of our president.
-egan
I admit, I don't know a whole lot about the details of our health care system pre-HMO style, and am very interested. Tell me what you know! What problems necessitated the HMO action?
I guess my largest argument against socialized health care is just the simple fact that our government is $11 trillion in debt, and is in absolutely NO shape to be spending new large quantities of money on
anything. The government owes approximately an additional $1.5 billion to our creditors each DAY,
in interest. If that doesn't deeply concern every single United States citizen, something is terribly wrong. That said, if drastic enough change can be made in US government spending (change Obama has certainly NOT offered), then I would be much more open to your suggestion of culminating a health care plan that may include partial socialization/government spending...but until then, our country is a sinking ship. Perhaps you don't like Ron Paul's idea of going back to our pre-HMO style of health care, but he is a man who understands the gravity of the monetary situation our country is in, and his ideas and policies are all formulated with that in mind. This, to me, needs to be tackled first before our government should even think about spending new money on health care. When Obama rolled out his budget and passed the ridiculously huge stimulus, and increased our debt by close to $2 trillion, he also announced that within two years he would reduce the deficit by half, while also promising to roll out a universal coverage health care plan
Is this guy serious!?
Back to the economics issue, I agree with you that me saying "Obama and his crew know very little about ecomonics and sound money" is obviously the wrong way to put it. They are economically educated people, but I have yet to see them making any decisions that help the larger issues of national debt and a sound money supply. A printing press does not = wealth. A huge part of it is also the Keynesian/Austrian economics debate. Keynesian economics is certainly the common idea these days in Washington DC, but just because it is common and popular does not mean that it's right. I don't have an Econ PhD, but Keynesian economics seems very flawed when contrasted against Austrian economics...
One more thing I want to address, since a few people have brought it up already, is this idea that we need to cut Obama some slack or something since we're still reeling from these terrible, terrible Bush years where he supposedly just drove our entire country nose-first into the ground. If you're talking from a strictly foreign policy standpoint, then it is certainly undeniable that a lot of damage was done in foreign relations and in the United States overall appeal during the Bush administration. However, it is not Bush alone that soured Muslims against us, it was just as much other presidents and administrations who have meddled in other countries' affairs, on their land, and supported locally unpopular regimes. Had the United States been following a policy of non-intervention as our brilliant framers of the constitution had envisioned, then we would be in a vastly different situation today. I am not defending the mistakes made by the Bush administration, but I AM saying that he is only partially to blame, and too often I hear people erroneously pinning everything on him. Al-Qaeda hated our country long before Bush sent troops anywhere... The rest of the world generally dislikes us only because of what our country has done with the war on terror, but our pre-war on terror foreign policies were obviously not good enough to prevent widespread animosity towards us in the Muslim world.
Economically speaking, Bush certainly didn't do anything to help our country's problems, but it's laughable to suggest that something specific his administration did was the sole cause of the worldwide economic turmoil. Our debt has been growing for decades, and our economic approach changes little to none when the government gets traded between Democrats and Republicans. The fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans in practice are nearly identical.
