Charlie Rose

GQtaste  09/11/2009 11:02 PM Report

Why have that right wing nutjob on there to denounce everything Obama is attempting to get across? I'm not talking about the politician. I'm talking about the replacement of the Natural Review.

hamiltonwallace  09/11/2009 06:33 PM Report

I actually thought it was refreshing to hear reasonable arguments from both sides. Perhaps the first time I've seen both sides venture off their talking points and attempt dialog. Maybe they were just tired.

CarbonFoil  09/11/2009 05:19 PM Report

It was both amusing and annoying to see the pale pate of Rep. McCotter among the sour-puss faction of the audience at the President's address. He and his GOP cohorts scowled like petulant children even while Obama was reaching out to them.

Enough of that. The Republicans are too wedded to their notions of statist free-market ideology to do the people's work. Pandering to that bunch of goons is not only futile, but damaging.

Perhaps now the 'mainstream' has picked up on this. David Letterman made a quip about the "YOU LIE!" outburst: how was Rep. Wilson able to sit still for eight years during Bush's speeches?

Slim  09/11/2009 05:09 PM Report

Watching the to and fro of political theater and tumult correographed by Republicans the past six months has been depressing. Not to mention the fawning media's willingness to proffer this conservative drivel to the public as reasonable and constructive criticism of some new Socialist conspiracy. The sheer number and shrillness of mindless, pointless attacks are apparently calculated to drown out any real examination of solutions to problems they themselves created. They have decided to write a new chapter in Nixon's tome on dirty tricks and created a new definition of irony by calling this President a liar. This coming mid-term election season should finally usher out of congress this most self serving malignant cabal.

fredschumacher  09/11/2009 03:03 PM Report

"Simplicity is everything"

This is ironic. After posting my comment on complexity in health insurance, I watched Charlie Rose interview Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint Nextel. In talkin of cell phone technology, Hesse said, "Simplicity is everything.... People will pay a premium for simplicity."

The great advantage of single payer systems, like Medicare, is their comparative simplicity: one set of rules instead of thousands. That is why single payer systems have an administrative cost in the range of 3% and complex systems have one in the 15 to 30% range.

N.B.: Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia's provincially managed single payer auto insurance systems also operate in the 3% administrative cost range, much lower than private insurance.

fredschumacher  09/11/2009 02:06 PM Report

"non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem"

William of Ockham had it right seven centuries ago. The elephant in the room that never gets mentioned is complexity. We have the most non-parsimonious health care payment system in the world. The massive number of insurance plans and variations require an army of clerks to maintain. It is about as inefficient as capitalism gets and certainly more inefficient than government.

The U.S. system most closely resembles France's. Most of the variance that explains the difference between France's 11% of GNP cost of health care and the U.S.'s 16% is due to America's inordinately complex health care payment system.

Health insurance in the U.S. is an accident of history, an artifact of the WW II labor shortage and legislation exempting health insurance benefits from taxation. There is no Plan. It has been improvised on an as you go basis, like the meandering roads of New England and unlike the mile roads of the Midwest. There is no systematics to the system.

On top of that, we have a GOP that is rapidly mutating from a political party into a cult. Its priority is not in improving life for Americans but in sinking the Obama administration. It apparently believes in minority rule, where 40 Senators now want to dictate terms to the elected government.

In 1966, my Austrian grandmother came to visit us and firmly announced that America is an uncivilized country because it doesn't have national health insurance. Four decades later, we're still uncivilized, in more ways than one.

doodahdaze  09/11/2009 12:23 PM Report

Will the President's plan disrupt the research & development of my new head that I'm having built to supplement my existing head? Will the quality suffer? Will the health care bureaucrats allow Timothy Leary's head to melt that is current being kept frozen for later use by well paid and very happy cutting-edge free-market professionals.

If the President can guarantee no tampering with my quest for immortality?; then sure, why not. Let the poor have some medicine.

EyesOnYou  09/11/2009 12:57 AM Report

Because he sounded like a nutcase, I decided to google him. Read on:

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/07/us_rep_thaddeus_mccotter_healt.html

Charlie, why would you bring this guy to your respectable table?

EyesOnYou  09/10/2009 11:03 PM Report

Bravo to Antony Weiner. I'm not in your district, but damn proud to have a representative from NY speak coherently. Obama would be well advised to hire you as his healthcare spokesperson!

GPOST  09/10/2009 07:02 PM Report

That was a fantastic show yesterday evening on the President's speech and the healthcare debate.

It was truly a pleasure to watch a civil and even fun discussion by people of several political backgrounds on a topic that has turned into a lightning rod.

Charlie Rose is a great moderator and the assemblage of guests provided a sufficient variety of viewpoints.

Joe Califano ought to be on one of the committees forming the bill.

owldog  09/10/2009 05:30 PM Report

I don't know why none of the guests mentioned the State public option, to which Podesta alluded the night before. We have many state health programs, funded in part by medicaid waivers. what will we do with these infractructures?

Wouldn't making the public option a program carried out by States (with federal funding and standards criteria) make a lot more sense? It would be more economical and more digestible by those on the right, and by those against "government takeovers"

mother  09/10/2009 05:18 PM Report

JEZ Charlie,

Everywhere a republican and I was hoping for balance. Calling the public plan DEAD pres Obama has NEVER taken that off the table and coming from a greedy businessman as much as I hate to say it "is the only way to provide completion". I understand why insurance companies are so afraid however it just allows them to be creative and move there businesses forward into the future.

Instead of wars here's a new concept something for the working stiff.

charliesheep  09/10/2009 04:29 PM Report

ALL THE KINGS HORSES AND ALL THE KINGS MEN COULDNT--BY CHARLIE ROSE STANDARDS--FLOAT HEATHCARE AGAIN --THE DEATH OF IT AND PRESIDENCY STRODE LIKE WARRIORS ON THE BACKS OF [PINHEADS] DESK SCRIPTED FOOLS,- THEY ARE BETTERS, ON THE COME LINE--OH--THAT MONEY--WERE TRUTH, THEN WE COULD ALL BATHE AND BE CLEAN--AS PER PINHEADS; THE PRESIDENT SHOULD SERVE TEA, COAST FOR 3 YEARS, SURRENDER 60 SEATS,I.E. PANDER TO CORPORATE NEEDS--CALIFANO--SAYS "BALLS' ARE NEEDED--WAS HE TALKING ABOUT GOLF-? MAYBE IN THIS CASE-BASKET BALLS--ARE WHATS NEEDED

nle  09/10/2009 04:27 PM Report

This show was a travesty. Thaddeus McCotter? Are you kidding me? The only one that made any sense was Anthony Weiner and of course you wouldn't want to keep him on to rain on your conventional wisdom parade that the public option is dead. Oh yes, and as usual a few minutes of a token woman. Thanks but no thanks.

REMant  09/10/2009 02:13 PM Report

As usual the Congress made a spectacle of itself, while the president pandered to public opinion with a veracity scarcely higher than a TV commercial. I thought it was ruder than the representative from South Carolina. Presidential leadership does not equate to hectoring Congress. South Carolina, btw, was a leader second only to Massachusetts in the Revolution. I thought also that the mention of Kennedy, which clearly flopped as a peroration, was really too much. The man seems to have written to everyone trading on his imminent passing. Good riddance to him, his stupid ideas and pretentious family. My father died of a brain tumor and I don't recall him writing the president or the pope, and he was smarter, too.

The plain fact is that this country is headed down the same ruinous path as the Soviet Union. If the president is looking for someone who has disputed the assertion that health care is the cause of our deficit, I have, and given not only a reasonable, but true account of the reason for it. The admin can lower health care prices thru insurance reform, but it will be probably at the expense of the quality of care overall, and still likely do nothing to correct the maldistribution of it. It would be as tho the building of McMansions was to be stopped by reducing home financing to a uniform amount. Now, there is nothing wrong with suggesting that ppl stop building McMansions if the country cannot afford them, but it comes at the problem from the wrong end. Besides being averse to equality of opportunity, it is likely to mean that the wealthy seek care in private clinics or overseas, and that those in govt supported plans will see the greatest decline in care. As I've said from the beginning, the health care problem is a symptom of our malaise, not the cause of it. The correct tack is not to insure the poor, but see to it that some do not enjoy unmerited wealth - gain without working for it - which our supposedly democratic financial policies perversely promote, and which drives up prices. Reducing the amount we pay for medical care can, of course, mean a reduction in research and development, but that is only being supported by a shrinking base, so that in the end greater income equality will be better able to sustain the system, which is at present on the same trajectory as the country, itself. We need to be concerned about the welfare of those who actually do the work in society, but Harringtonian quotas are not the means.

And universal coverage of this sort, without a real incentive to save money and live healthier, has all the flaws of no-fault auto insurance, which is bound to further drive up costs as that idiocy did. Too, you can regulate the life out of the industry, but you cannot prevent health care professionals from leaving it either, which they will surely do, tho perhaps we can import more Indians or Chinese to take their places, for a time. That has always been the Democratic way, hasn't it?

The president compared his plan to the founding of public higher education, a fair analogy, but we clearly see a multi-tiered system there, and similarly rising prices. Small private colleges are an endangered species, while the Ivy League and a few others dominate every aspect of the system, from recruitment to placement, siphoning off the best students and faculty, without providing any better education. The state-supported institutions, while growing in size and proportion, have had to hike tuition steadily as the states have become increasingly unable to support them, all of which will certainly happen in the same way if public health care institutions are inserted into this failing economy.

As in Moyer's recent programs there was much finger-pointing at insurance cos and health care professionals in this discussion also. Insurance is in fact a public good if there ever was one. You either accept that, or you don't accept the idea of public goods. The issue is black and white. There is no point in talking about markets for insurance. Insurance is the antithesis of competition. In any case, while I'm sure they are engaged in all sorts of things we'd rather they weren't, like financial manipulations, cherry-picking, and bureaucratic red-tape, the real rise in price has very little to do with the insurance cos, and the fact that they aren't very profitable is proof of it.

Some would therefore argue that the hospitals and doctors must be the real culprits and point to the fact that patients either have no clout or alternative to force down prices, or don't understand what is going on so must accept what they are being sold. But due to professional regulation doctors rarely sell snake oil nowadays and ultimately must accept what patients can pay anyway or leave the profession, and, if allowed to operate, that dynamic will set the necessary price for their services. In addition, the idea of rewarding only successful treatment and not the attempt neglects the fact that someone must pay for the learning curve, just as in a military contract someone has to pay for the cost of development, and so we usually find cost-plus contracts, like them or not. You would not expect your mechanic to quote you a flat price to fix the noise in your engine when he doesn't know what is causing it. Further, eliminating competition, as is often the situation in defense purchases, surely increases the probability of abuse rather than lowering it, and would likely stifle innovation at the same time, if it did not also result in shoddy work. In other words, if lack of knowledge leads to lack of competition, bureaucracy must be a much more direct route. Wal-Mart is only cost-effective, because competition in low-end retailing and groceries is voracious, and the margins, of necessity, wafer-thin. Without question care provided in an environment of many individual providers will result in the greatest efficiency, in an area as uncertain as health care.

The insurance cos and the physicians point their fingers at the lawyers, but don't expect anyone in this administration to talk about that. Nevertheless, suits are not exactly productive, and most medical mistakes and rationing decisions are clearly not the result of indifference or the desire to bilk ppl, but because draconian efficiency measures have been forced on the system by its increasing poverty.

That leaves the drug cos, where clearly, if we can get patents and the FDA under control, there ought to be competition. But, like everyone else, the drug cos charge what the mkt will bear, hence what costs x in the US will certainly be less in Bangladesh, and if prices are higher here someone must be paying them, and that is ultimately the Fed, because through monetary policy the central bank has the unquestioned ability to make certain that debt is not run up so that prices must come down to what ppl can afford.

CarbonFoil  09/10/2009 01:55 PM Report

Well, then. Al Hunt, David Brooks, and Rep. McCotter all unceremoniously declare the public option dead. So why all the rancor about Big Government? Without a public option, there is no comprehensive health care reform, only a few modest statutory changes that will do precisely nothing to contain costs.

CarbonFoil  09/10/2009 01:55 PM Report

Well, then. Al Hunt, David Brooks, and Rep. McCotter all unceremoniously declare the public option dead. So why all the rancor about Big Government? Without a public option, there is no comprehensive health care reform, only a few modest statutory changes that will do precisely nothing to contain costs.

CarbonFoil  09/10/2009 01:55 PM Report

Well, then. Al Hunt, David Brooks, and Rep. McCotter all unceremoniously declare the public option dead. So why all the rancor about Big Government? Without a public option, there is no comprehensive health care reform, only a few modest statutory changes that will do precisely nothing to contain costs.