This 50 Year Old Thinks Paul Ryan's Plan Stinks

Okay, I'm not 50 yet but I will be, sooner than I'd like to admit: this year in fact. And it just so happens people like me are the ones who will feel the brunt of Paul Ryan's sucky plan. Thanks for the generational warfare, asshole.

I thought Jon Stewart had the perfect takedown of Paul Ryan:

The Daily Show - Ryan's Private Savings - Path to Prosperity
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Healthcare Myth 237 Exposed

Physicians are not, it seems, fleeing Medicare, according to the GAO:

GAO found that Medicare beneficiaries experienced few problems accessing physician services during its period of study. Very small percentages of Medicare beneficiaries–less than 3 percent–reported major difficulties accessing physician services in 2007 and 2008. The proportion of beneficiaries who received physician services and the number of services per beneficiary served increased nationwide from April 2000 to April 2008. Indicators of physician willingness to serve Medicare beneficiaries and to accept Medicare fees as payments in full also rose from 2000 to 2008.

Here’s the entire report for your reading pleasure.

So, that’s how many right-wing healthcare myths debunked? Is anyone counting?

• There are no death panels (at least, not the government kind.)

• Canadians are not lining up at the U.S. border to obtain healthcare. In fact, it’s the other way around: tens of thousands of Americans flee the U.S. each year for affordable surgical procedures in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and India.

• British citizens do not, in fact, disparage their National Health Service, but if you lie about who you are and selectively edit some interview tapes it might look like they do.

• The USA does not, in fact, have the best healthcare in the world; indeed, we suck.

• America’s health insurance companies do, actually, need the government telling them what to do, since they’ve been unable to stop practices like pre-existing conditions on their own.

I’m sure there are more.

Menace To Freedom

Bob Herbert’s column today is a must-read.

Especially this part:

In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”

What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”

Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?

Herbert rightly points out that in this age of “truthiness,” what should be a huge gaffe is completely unnoticed by the media at large.

No one will call Sarah Palin on this because people are too focused on things like her glasses and haircut and the size of her flag pin (gi-NORMOUS!) and her winks. No one is really examining the content of her words. The AARP should be up in arms about this but I wonder how many folks have even bothered to notice? It's all style over substance.

And that, to me, is a huge menace to freedom.