[email protected] (Tom Kunich) wrote in message
news:<
[email protected]>...
>
[email protected] (tokugawa) wrote in message
> news:<
[email protected]>...
> > "Tom Kunich" <
[email protected]> wrote : ...
> > > Indeed Social Security WILL be eliminated in the future or changed to something that will
> > > work. Or maybe you've missed that debate in Washington.
> >
> > The debate in Washington is led by the Securities industry in its attempt to privatize Social
> > Security. This would require an increase in YOUR taxes of over a trillion dollars, which, of
> > course, they never talk about.
>
> The talk is supported by the latest report from the GAO which shows that Social Security will fail
> as I stated. Of course we can always increase taxes some more or the more heinous route of cutting
> government services such as taking money from the largest consumer of government largess - HEW.
You do not dispute that privatization would require tax increases of over one trillion dollars.
> > We live in the most prosperous country of all time.
>
> Amd despite that the Liberals have managed to spend us into a national debt of monumental
> proportions and one that they have no intentions of dealing with.
Our President, George W. Bush, a Liberal? He's the one who turned a $200 billion surplus to a $200
billion deficit in a mere two years. His plan of a massive supply-side tax cut will provide less
than 10% of its total cost in immediate stimulus for the economy, and will cause further increases
in the budget deficit. Recall President Reagan's supply-side program resulted in a tripling of the
federal deficit.
> > Argentina would be running a budget surplus now had it not been for their decision to privatize
> > their Social Security system. Look at Argentina now. They are an economic basket case.
>
> Can you explain to us WHEN Argentina ever ran a budget surplus which would lend you fuel to make
> such a bizarre statement?
Do you think there is no cost to privatization? Let me spell it out for you:
1) people who choose to invest their money in securities rather than into Social Security will no
longer pay the full Social Security tax,
2) the number of beneficiaries and their benefits will not change, therefore
3) the government must raise taxes to make up the shortfall.
Argentina did this. They needed to raise taxes to make up the shortfall caused by privatization, but
still ran a budget deficit, because their economy was on a downward spiral. If Argentineans had
still been paying Social Security taxes instead of using the money to invest in securities,
Argentina's budget would now be in surplus. Instead, the decision to privatize has been a disaster.
You didn't think privatization was free, did you?
> > The bottom line is: health care for everybody with a Single-Payer system costs less than the
> > crazy-quilt system we currently have which leaves over 40 million Americans without any kind of
> > health insurance.
>
> The bottom line is this: the government has shown that it cannot found and fund a social
> security system.
I think you missed the Social Security Act, which passed in the United States in the 1930's, during
the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Not a single payment has been missed to an eligible
citizen. They have a 100% perfect record of paying out benefits.
> > What part of "COSTS LESS" don't you understand?
>
> The part that is an utter and complete fabrication.
Canada spend less per capita than the United States. Therefore, it COSTS LESS. Your assertion
concerning a fabrication is completely unsupported. Can you cite a peer-reviewed medical journal?
Can you cite a government study?
> > By the way, you still offer no solution to the problem of how to provide insurance to low income
> > (white) people. You really don't care about them, do you?
>
> Sure I care about them.
But you have no idea how to solve their problem that you feel is so important. You really don't care
about them, do you? If so, prove it.
> But your suggestion that I should pay their way in the world is about as preposterous a suggestion
> and I think anyone could make.
Again, you are already paying for them in the form of Medicaid (free health care for the desperately
poor), Medicare (for the elderly), and those Aliens and Blacks who you assert are getting free care.
Just because you repeat the same argument over and over again does not make it true.
> Please answer the question: where is the money going to come from? Oh, yeah, you THINK that there
> is more money in the present insurance system now than is needed.
The money comes from lower administrative costs, lower marketing costs and lower costs caused by
free-market pirates like Enron's Ken Lay. A case in point:
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/08/news-ireland.php
JANUARY 10 - 16, 2003
The Bad Doctor Bill Frist's long record of corporate vices by Doug Ireland
While TV gushed last week over the Republicans' new Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, intervening
in a traffic accident, portraying the former heart surgeon as a "Good Samaritan," in truth the GOP
has simply replaced a racist with a corporate crook.
Frist was born rich, and got richer — thanks to massive criminal fraud by the family business. The
basis of the Frist family fortune is HCA Inc. (Hospital Corporation of America), the largest
for-profit hospital chain in the country, which was founded by Frist's father and brother. And, just
as Karl Rove was engineering the scuttling of Trent Lott and the elevation of Frist, the Bush
Justice Department suddenly ended a near-decadelong federal investigation into how HCA for years had
defrauded Medicaid, Medicare and Tricare (the federal program that covers the military and their
families), giving the greedy health-care behemoth's executives a sweetheart settlement that kept
them out of the can.
The government's case was that HCA kept two sets of books and fraudulently overbilled the
government. The deal meant that HCA agreed to pay the government $631 million for its lucrative
scams — which, on top of previous fines, brought the total government penalties against the
health-care conglomerate to a whopping $1.7 billion, the largest fraud settlement in history,
breaking the old record set by Drexel Burnham.
The deal also meant that HCA can continue to participate in Medicare. And, as part of the Bushies'
deal shutting down what Deputy Assistant FBI Director Thomas Kubic called "one of the FBI's
highest-priority white-collar crime investigations," no criminal charges were brought against the
top HCA execs who presided over the illegal bilking of federal programs designed to aid the poor —
and that includes Senator Frist's brother, Thomas, HCA's former CEO (and current director), who's
been described by Forbes magazine as "one of the richest men in America," with a personal fortune
estimated at close to $2 billion.
What did HCA do? It inflated its expenses and billed the government for the overrun; it billed the
government for services ineligible for reimbursement (like advertising and marketing costs). HCA
violated both law and medical ethics when, as Forbes put it, "the company increased Medicare
billings by exaggerating the seriousness of the illnesses they were treating. It also granted
doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors' referring patients to HCA.
In addition, it gave doctors ‘loans' that were never expected to be paid back, free rent, free
office furniture — and free drugs from hospital pharmacies."
This is the ethical climate that reigned in the Frist family's money machine. In an unguarded
moment, Senator Frist told the Boston Globe that conversations with his doctor father about the
family calling were like "benign versions of the Godfather and Michael Corleone." Apparently the
senator considers defrauding the government "benign." So too does the Bush White House, which
dictated the Justice Department deal with HCA that let the crooks escape jail just as Frist was
being anointed the Senate's majority leader. A pure coincidence in timing, of course.
The senator has always claimed no current connection to HCA because the $26 million he and his wife
hold in the company's stock is in a so-called "blind trust." But it was the family's dirty money
that bought Frist a place in the Senate. In 1994, Frist — who'd never bothered to vote before first
running for the Senate that year — spent some $3.4 million of his personal fortune to buy the seat
from Tennessee (HCA's headquarters) that he now occupies. Moreover, "In the Senate, Frist has used
his influence to further HCA's cause by stopping a strong patients' bill of rights, gridlocking a
mandatory Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and promoting caps on damages for victims who sue
negligent hospitals like HCA's," points out Jamie Court, executive director of the Santa
Monica–based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, who adds, "The Senate should not replace a
racist with a principal backer of one of the largest corporate swindles ever perpetrated against the
American public. If Frist was a patriot first, he would have sold his HCA stock long ago."
But Frist's pandering to the lobbyists of the voracious health-care industry knows no bounds. "Frist
isn't the senator from Tennessee — he's the senator from the state of Health Care Industry Influence
— he's gotten more than $2 million from the health-care sector, giving him the dubious distinction
of raising more cash from health-care interests than 98 percent of his colleagues," says Nick
Nyhart, executive director of Public Campaign.
Consider the special servicing he gave to pharmaceutical giant Eli
Lilly. In another example of his "patriotism," Frist engineered the insertion into the Homeland
Security bill of a provision that would protect Eli Lilly from lawsuits over Thimerosal, a
mercury-based preservative used in its vaccines. Thousands of lawsuits have been filed
against Lilly by parents who believe Thimerosal caused autism and other neurological maladies
in their kids. The Frist-authored rider shields Lilly by forcing those lawsuits into a
special "vaccine court," where they can be easily scuttled, potentially saving Lilly hundreds
of millions. The pharmaceutical industry was the largest single contributor to the National
Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that Frist chaired, ladling out some $4 million —
and Lilly was the single biggest contributor to the GOP from that industry, having given $1.6
million in the last election cycle, 79 percent of it to Republicans.
The good Dr. Frist voted against patients' rights to sue their HMOs for failure to provide
adequate treatment, and voted to give tax subsidies to HMOs and insurance companies to offer
prescription drugs to seniors, rather than providing them through Medicare. Frist has, of course,
personally raked it in from the interested industries, gobbling up $123,750 in campaign cash from
the HMOs and $265,023 from the pharmaceutical industry. Frist also took $130,204 from the
food-processing industry — and then helped kill a bill putting teeth into the USDA's authority to
crack down on processing plants that violate federal standards for bacterial and viral infection
of meat and poultry.
There's a lot more, like this — so much that it leads to an inescapable conclusion: In the Senate,
"Good Samaritan" Frist has almost daily violated the injunction of the physicians' Hippocratic oath:
"First, do no harm."
