Charlie Rose

owldog  09/11/2009 03:02 AM Report

Podesta is the first person I heard mention the public option as a program working through on a State level. People should listen to this guy.

REMant  09/09/2009 01:03 PM Report

I doubt the president will offer anything new tonight or even support only one plan. Decisiveness does not seem to be in his character, anymore than it was in Clinton's. In any case, I wrote the following two weeks ago Friday for Moyers' blog in response to a film that placed the blame on doctors and insurance cos. It should not be unfamiliar to readers here:

"Kenneth Arrow, the Nobel prize-winning economist, wrote about this subject in 1963 and it has been taught ever since as a normal part of the welfare economics course every undergraduate economics student takes, called the principal-agent problem. This is that, unless you know as much about medicine as your doctor, you can't evaluate the quality of advice he gives you. And while it is true that this can prevent competition from having desirable consequences in the health care industry, and is likely the cause of some fraud and simple overuse - tho in many cases to protect against malpractice lawsuits - it is not really the cause of either the high cost or the unavailability of health care. It will not do to blame hospital cupidity, when they are being forced to close every day, or blame physician greed, when they are forced to leave the profession because of high insurance prices. It will not do to blame insurance cos, when they make far lower profits than most other industries. These things are caused by an attempt to make efficiencies in a system in desperate need of something to stay afloat, but regrettably they often are ineffective and only cause more problems.

So WHY is it so expensive?! Well, first of all, it is clearly only expensive for an unfortunately increasing number of Americans, and not for all. We see the same thing happen, when, for instance, oil or gold is found in some 3rd world country. Prices rise as ppl charge what the mkt will bear, which means fewer ppl can afford what they could before when their work had relatively more value and suddenly they can no longer feed themselves. We saw this in this country, when fewer and fewer ppl could afford to buy American cars and increasingly all that were made luxury gas-guzzlers, their assemblers could no longer afford to buy, or in the rise in house and land prices. This is caused not by selfish corporations and their shareholders, but by a financial system that MAKES prices rise and, at the same time, shifts the distribution of wealth, and that can ONLY be a function of increasing debt: printing money, creating bank credit, running Federal deficits, or by being subsidized by the labor of others elsewhere. More debt means more money, which means higher prices, especially for commodities, real estate and other assets, and the ppl who own these become increasingly wealthier than others in a vicious cycle, because as they become relatively wealthier, the rest become destitute both relatively and absolutely. That kind of economy is contracting. High prices mean POVERTY, not wealth. People, then, cannot afford health care, because they have simply been priced out of the market.

Let me tell you further that therefore the more welfare the government provides the more it will have to provide, and the more it has to provide, the less it will be able to afford to provide, and not because of dependency, but because of the simple economics of money.

There are only three ways to "motivate" ppl as Montesquieu among others pointed out: fear, bribery, or honesty. We have fought and still fight against fear, and this report is one of this kind. It is relatively easy to point fingers at others, but we have a society built not on fear but on bribing ppl, and we ought by now to have recognized its shortcomings. It is past time we began the fight against that as well."