Obama: Change? What change?

This is a good point. I think it is important that the VA not be a model for some socialized medical plan with government hospitals and civil servant doctors. That's what we have right now with the Charity Hospital System which would disappear under universal health care.

Universal Health Insurance would not only use regular insurance companies, but it would use regular private hospitals and clinics and private physicians. It benefits the wealthy by shifting indigent care from government systems to the private sector where investments can be made.

It benefits the middle class by enabling them to make their group health insurance coverages portable as upwardly mobile people move from job to job, including self-employment, without loss of benefits and covering them over short gaps between jobs and into retirement.

It benefits the working poor and the indigent by eliminating the current inadequate socialist Charity Hospital and County Clinic system and replacing it with an insurance plan that allows them to go to regular private medical facilities. Sure, the poorest would be subsidized, but they would all at least pay something rather than receive charity. It would be cheaper than maintaining government hospitals and it would utilize the obviously capitalist medical and insurance industries.

I see no reason why the VA couldn't be a part of it. Obviously we need some military hospitals to handle wartime casualties. But ordinary health care of the much more numerous veterans don't have to be handled the same way. Wouldn't it be easier and offer better care if veterans could have a VA Universal Health Insurance card that would let them receive care from the clinic or doctor of their choice?

 

Can you give me an example, if health care is not the issue?

I'm on the drilling side of this issue, as I have stated before and for good reasons. That's a differnt issue from windfall profits. Talk about redistribution of wealth. They make unearned $billions on consumers while receiving $billions is government subsidies?

Quit being an ass, It's unbecoming.

Thats a poor analogy.

You buy apples at $1 a bushel and it costs you 1$ a gallon to make cider and 1$ to transport it. Then you sell that cider (which costs you $3) for $6 making a fair 100% profit on your work.

Then your apples rise in price to $10 a bushel. It is fair to pass on this cost to the customer. Cider now costs the consumer $15 ($10 product + $2 processing costs + $3 profit on services). This is how it works with the electric company. They charge you for the service based upon their costs and profit margin. Fuel is passed on to you without them marking up that as well, since it costs them no more to process $30 gas than $3 gas.

But the oil companies are permitted to make a markup on the raw product before it is passed on to us. Now the cider would cost $24! ($10 raw product, $2 processing costs = $12 x 100% = $24)

$15 cider versus $24 cider. The Big Cider Corporation of America just turned the same work that earned them $3 into $9! A 300% profit! $6 a gallon taken from the consumer over an above the coast of the product, its processing and a fair profit. The consumer is gouged and the corporation posts record profits at their expense.

You're making assumptions, of course, since you know nothing of me. I'm amused that you think the well-off upper middle class have interests in common with the super-rich. They ain't robbing the poor, they're robbing us. Obama is proposing tax cuts for the middle class instead of the super-rich.

I know. You just have to let it go, amigo.

I was convinced for many years that the Cuban Russian CIA Mafia Oil Men conspiracy killed Kennedy. But 40 years of evidence still all point to Oswald.