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Town Hallers: Not Crazy to Be Angry

October 26th, 2009 at 10:56 am David Frum | 34 Comments |

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I begin a new weekly column on CNN.com today. The first deals with the interconnection of the Medicare and immigration issues, and you can read it here.

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34 Comments so far ↓

  • Oldskool // Oct 26, 2009 at 9:43 pm

    “History has many lessons for us.

    You cherry-picked one, while ignoring the others.”

    Whatever your point was, it’s gone adrift.

  • agentprovocateur // Oct 26, 2009 at 10:37 pm

    I wonder how many of these protestors who are supposedly so angry because they find the concept of income transfer to be odious are already recieving some form or another of income transfer themselves.

  • sdspringy // Oct 26, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    Bacon loves the public option, wants a Medicare style healthcare option. Yet never mentions that right now Medicare is operating with 38 TRILLIONS in unfunded liabilities. UNFUNDED. Medicare has never managed the care of a majority of Americans and yet is so terribly UNDERFUNDED that it needs it’s own TARP.

    Now the wisdom is to cover everyone. Where is the money coming from? This is absolutely a fairy tale. Currently Medicare reimbursements are so low that medical providers will no longer see them. Those that do pass the cost not covered onto other paying customers. Thats you and me. Wonder why your healthcare premiums go up? Your government has been passing healthcare cost onto your budget for years.

    Average Medicare taxes collected are around $40-50K per person per life time. Average payout to a Medicare patient is $150K lifetime. This is your government managing healthcare, collect $50K and payout $150K. This is the reason for 38 TRILLION in UNFUNDED liabilities.

    This is why Canada and France and anyother nationized healthcare system is breaking under the stress of payment. This is why Massachussets is cutting coverage and raising premiums.

    This is why America is in serious trouble, everyone wants someone else to pay for THEIR benefits.

  • balconesfault // Oct 27, 2009 at 5:50 am

    Bacon loves the public option, wants a Medicare style healthcare option.

    Actually, Medicare style in terms of how healthcare is provided. Funding would be via premiums paid directly to the government, rather than to private insurers.

    Yet never mentions that right now Medicare is operating with 38 TRILLIONS in unfunded liabilities. UNFUNDED.

    How’s that math work? Is it based on the assumption that everyone under 65 becomes immediately and permanently unemployed, and the system is left to care for those currently on Medicare, as well as future Medicare beneficiaries as they age into the system, with no future revenues to support it?

    I guess that is possible … in some kind of sci-fi movie where a plague mutates to only kill the under 65 or something.

    Wonder why your healthcare premiums go up? Your government has been passing healthcare cost onto your budget for years.

    Really? That’s the only reason healthcare premiums go up … because Medicare negotiates better rates with providers?

    Average Medicare taxes collected are around $40-50K per person per life time. Average payout to a Medicare patient is $150K lifetime.

    And RNC Chairman Michael Steele wrote the following in a Washington Post OpEd recently:

    Republicans want reform that should, first, do no harm, especially to our seniors. That is why Republicans support a Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights, which we are introducing today, to ensure that our greatest generation will receive access to quality health care. We also believe that any health-care reform should be fully paid for, but not funded on the backs of our nation’s senior citizens.

    It is the policy of the Republican Party that nothing be done to cost-control for Medicare and reduce that imbalance you cite.

    This is why Canada and France and anyother nationized healthcare system is breaking under the stress of payment.

    You realize, I hope, that on a societal basis Americans are paying far more per capita in taxes for health insurance.

    Canada spends about $3,600 per capita on health insurance, France about $4,600.

    Right now when you total all the ways tax dollars in America are collected to pay for health insurance (excluding the military system, for argument) – Medicare, Medicaid, CHIPs, VA benefits, healthcare benefits to federal, state, and local employees (including firemen and policemen, etc), healthcare benefits to teachers, healthcare benefits to federal pensioners, and tax credits to businesses to pay for employee healthcare – we’re spending around $6,000 per person in publicly financed healthcare.

    In other words … societally we’re already spending more in tax dollars than those countries.

    This is why America is in serious trouble, everyone wants someone else to pay for THEIR benefits.

    I thought we were in serious trouble because a lot of financial players played a high stakes gambling game over the last decade with derivatives and credit swaps and other financial products that were all pegged to the concept that housing prices in America would never flatten or decline – building up debt to capital levels of 70-1 in our major financial institutions.

  • Reason60 // Oct 27, 2009 at 2:34 pm

    “This is why America is in serious trouble, everyone wants someone else to pay for THEIR benefits.

    I thought we were in serious trouble because a lot of financial players played a high stakes gambling game over the last decade with derivatives and credit swaps …”

    So you two agree- America is in trouble because the Wall Street players screwed up and now want someone else to pay for their benefits.

    Kumbaya at last.

  • SFTor1 // Oct 28, 2009 at 1:11 am

    According to a recent report on NPR Mexican illegal immigrants arrive in the United States in very good health, and return to Mexico with health problems. It appears that it is in fact we who place burdens on whatever medical services available in Mexico, not the other way around.

  • BoolaBoola // Oct 28, 2009 at 3:56 am

    David, it is very dishonest of you to present the tea-partiers as serious in any way. They are a mix of agents-for-hire, and, morons who could no more understand the relationship between Medicare and immigration than they could understand the decline of the Roman Empire or the price of gold.

  • sinz54 // Oct 29, 2009 at 10:11 am

    BoolaBoola: David, it is very dishonest of you to present the tea-partiers as serious in any way. They are a mix of agents-for-hire, and, morons
    Gee, whatever happened to “Dissent is Patriotic”?

    Now that you lefties have taken power, you feel the need to disparage grass-roots protesters.

    Tell me the difference between “agents-for-hire” and “community organizing”. You don’t think the pols in Chicago pay their organizers to do organizing? They sure do. They don’t turn out in droves just out of idealism. They get paid.

  • LFC // Oct 29, 2009 at 1:56 pm

    Gee, whatever happened to “Dissent is Patriotic”?

    “Coherent dissent is patriotic.” Fixed.

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