Obamacare Good for the Economy - Scarcity of New Docs Means More Insured People Thrown off "Physical Cliff"

Since the bottom line is all that counts, let's look at Obamacare from that perspective.  Now that Obamcare mandates insurance, more than 30 million currently uninsured or underinsured patients will be demanding care.  However, the US is not graduating enough doctors to meet the demand. See today's Chronicle.

So more people will pay insurance premiums, a good thing, but alas, they won't be able to use them, bad for the patients, good for the economy.  Unless of course, we import docs from China and India, which is likely, or we can always export the patients.

Which would you prefer?

You say get more people into Med School? Let's see what the Republicans think about increased grants and loans, with reasonable fees, for students. Sorry, cheaper to do the import/export thing and then we create jobs for import/exporters. Kern County is doing it now. Cheaper than Med school by a long shot.

 

Diagnosing and prescribing by video: Cheaper yet!

Poor Little Desperate Debra Saunders

Really Reaching Saunders:

Poor Debra Saunders, she's getting a little desperate this week.  It must be tough being a Republican in a Democratic Town, but she gets a column in the San Francisco Chronicle at least twice a week, and more this week.  (One of these days they'll get around to firing her and hiring me, or at least inviting me to post my blogs as a counter point, but I'm not holding my breath.)  First there was her column taking the Democrats to task for saying that the Republican's (Mitt's) economic plan was to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans while taxing the middle class more to pay for it.  Well, says Debra there's no evidence for that. The Dems just use the analysis provided by the Tax Policy Center.  

Well, Debra, where's your evidence that it's not true?  She doesn't cite a single reference for her supposition. What the Tax Policy Center did was analyze what they know of Mitt's plan pointing out they have to take what he says and make assumptions based on that because "Governor Romney has not offered a fully-specified plan. He has been explicit about the tax cuts he has in mind, including a one-fifth reduction in marginal tax rates from today’s level, which would drop the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent and a cut in capital gains and dividend taxes for families with incomes below $200,000. He and his team have also said that reform should be revenue-neutral and not increase taxes on capital gains and dividends. But they have not provided any detail about what tax preferences they would cut to make up lost revenue."

Such a revenue neutral plan would logically "reduce taxes for high-income households, requiring higher taxes on middle- or low-income households. I doubt that’s his intent, but it is an implication of what we can tell about his plan so far." Understanding TPC’s Analysis of Governor Romney’s Tax Plan by Donald Marron.

Even Debra was forced to admit that Romney was vague about his policies, and that the Tax Policy Center's assumptions were logical given the information provided.  But, she continues, Romney would never raise taxes on the middle class.  Don't hold your breath.

Pro-life Saunders:

In today's column, she asks "where are the pro life Democrats."  Newsflash for Debra, we are all pro-life. We are also mostly pro-choice.  As in women should be able to make their own choices about their own bodies. It's not one or the other.  The anti-choice crowd calls themselves pro-life, but they are for the most part, anti-life, after that life is a born human being anyway.

Easy to love the fetus. No muss, no fuss.  No cost except for pre-natal care, which the I'm not sure how the Republicans feel about paying for for poor women, but I can guess.  Obamacare, as we are all now calling it, is a truly pro-life program.  Just ask that mom of the little girl with the heart condition who won't be kicked off her insurance plan by the time she's five - unless Romney is elected.  

Two Faced Republicans

I guess flip flopping and contradictions are natural to Republicans. Romney was for Obamacare, when it was called Romneycare, and he instituted it in Massachusetts, before he was against it, and Paul Ryan, who is ready to disembowel Obamacare if he and Romney are elected, in 2010 requested a grant that would be funded from that program for his own State.  What's that old song from the cold war era - the era the Republicans want to take us back to?  Oh yeah, "Two Faces Have I" 

Invisible Antics at the Democratic National Convention

Watching the Republican Convention last week, when Clint Eastwood chatted with an empty chair supposedly occupied by an invisible Obama (by the way, little did he know that Obama really was in that chair, wearing his Superhero cloak of invisibility and taking it all very well!), I got to thinking how the Democrats can use the same trick in Charlotte. It was a show stopper you have to admit.

Here are a few ideas for how using a chair as a prop can boost ratings and poll numbers for Obama:

• 1.       Stephen Colbert interviews invisible Romney, asking him to explain his varying positions on women’s right to choose, health care, social security and other social issues from when he was Governor. Of course, you’d need two chairs for that, one on each side of the stage, and you’d probably need an invisible traffic cop to keep the two invisible Romneys from attacking each other.

• 2.       Obama interviews a copy of the Romney health care plan propped up in a chair, while an invisible page turner points to the pertinent topics where the two plans are identical.

• 3.       A whole line up of Massachusetts women, senior citizens, moms with babies and workers stand up very visibly on stage and thank Romney for his health care plan and give brief anecdotes on how it helped them in their times of need. Not nearly so witty as the empty chair routine maybe, but I hear Convention crowds go wild for real people.

• 4.       Invisible Paul Ryan dodges and weaves an invisible Todd Akin as he tells people his own plan for limiting abortion and protecting Medicare.  Real senior citizens can pelt him with mock vouchers from the wings.

Romney was so proud of his own Romney Care in Massachusetts, he featured it in his official portrait.

Not exactly as they say on Wait,Wait Don’t Tell Me, if any of these things happen at the Democratic Convention, we’ll be in for a rip roaring good show.