This is a few days old, but this “Meet The Press” exchange was one for the ages:
GREGORY: So, Ruth Marcus, what wins here: bold leadership on Medicare and the argument that the Democrats won’t do something courageous, or the Democrats who say, “Hey, those guys want to take away my Medicare”?
MARCUS: I regret to inform you that I think it’s the latter. And I think when you were asking Senator McConnell if Medicare was the new third rail of American politics, I think the question was wrong in a sense because it’s the old third rail of American politics.
[….]MARCUS: This play has been run time after time. If you go back and look at the quotes from President Clinton back when he needed to win re-election, they sound a lot like the quotes from Democrats today about don’t let those Republicans take away your Medicare. The difference is that the debt is bigger, the deficit is bigger, the gap is bigger, and the situation is more dire. But I think that, sadly, the lesson of New York 26 is “mediscare” works.
(bold mine)
I’ve said this a thousand times: what’s dire here is rising medical costs, not Medicare specifically. Moving from a more efficient public model for senior health-care to a less efficient private market only exacerbates this problem.
What gets me, though, is that we’re supposed to think it’s sad that American citizens are scared by the idea that they will be deprived of access to health care. We hear all this shit along the lines of “you like it when the bully punches you in the face don’t you dirty fucking hippie” whenever anyone opposes a new war, but when Americans refuse to bend over and take it from the Beltway-corporate complex, it’s sad. Don’t they know that big Bobo will always look out for their best interests?
If you’re not scared by the idea of letting the people who brought you the Iraq War redesign your health care system, you’re not paying attention.
eemom
I hate that insipid twat.
She is SO. fucking. stupid.
arguingwithsignposts
@eemom: Which one, Gregory or Marcus?
BGinCHI
The mystery is why anyone takes Ruth Marcus seriously. Though I suppose that for the Sunday shows she’s a genius.
Gregory’s framing is such a perfect, classic example of Village Idiocy: swallowing the ideological narrative without even a hint of critical thinking.
Letter perfect.
kc
Is it just me, or is David Gregory dumber than a bag of hair?
gogol's wife
I’m happy to say I have no idea who Ruth Marcus is. She used to be a philosophy professor at Yale, but I doubt this is the same one. This is really, really disgusting. It confirms my resolution to watch no television that doesn’t involve Robert Osborne.
arguingwithsignposts
Also, too, props for the split enz
BGinCHI
The definition of MTP: who fucking cares about Medicare, what’s the over/under in Dems vs. GOP?
beltane
We really need to liberate ourselves from the Beltway media’s stranglehold on the national discourse. They are the enemies of the American people and should be treated as such. Is there a website that publicizes the salaries of these parasites? We have the right to know how much they paid to shill for their cannibal overlords.
Makewi
It’s sweet how you think that government will always look out for your interests in health care. Magical thinking.
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: It’s not her, for fuck’s sake.
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
I believe I acknowledged that.
13th Generation
DougJ, I know journlism is kind of your beat around here but I gave up caring about what any of these villagers thinks or says a long time ago. Except maybe kthug.
beltane
@gogol’s wife: Ruth Marcus is like a female Lanny Davis. I remember her most for her pro-Hillary shilling during the ’08 campaign. These people should be forced to appear on TV with price tags hanging around their necks because they are most certainly FOR SALE.
Brachiator
This is stupid on so many levels. As always, the Village loves to frame complex arguments as an idiotic contest of Beltway winners and losers. And they mindlessly echo the nonsensical notion that someone needs to offer a bold solution to what is an incorrect framing of the problem.
And the biggest scam of all is that the Republicans, and perhaps the Democrats as well, utterly incapable of coming up with a credible plan to restart the economy and increase jobs and wages, instead have settled for a pointless mud fight over deficit reduction and Quien es Mas Macho? about Medicare.
Fools.
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: My anger was directed at the stupid Ruth Marcus in the defense of the smart one. Sorry….
aimai
@Makewi:
Well, its true that when the government is run by Republicans they aren’t looking out for our interests. But that’s why most of us here are all about electing Democrats–so that the government won’t be planning to turn us over to private industry to be chopped into soylent green. Its astonishing to me that you, Makewi, don’t grasp that its your future (and perhaps even current) benefits, that you paid into for your entire working lifetime, that the Republicans want to steal. How stupid are you? I really mean that. You’ve paid into the system your entire working life and now the Republican party is pretending that the IOUs they wrote to you are worthless?
aimai
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
It’s okay. It’s just that people are always bringing up “Ruth Marcus” on here in a negative context, and I get a mental picture of a quite nice and very brilliant philosophy professor, and I get confused.
General Stuck
When it comes to medicare and SS, and at some point, the ACA, Ruth Marcus, Gregory and all the rest of the GOP fluffers and promoters of the MSM, what they think doesn’t amount to more than a hill of beans, because the folks most affected by any changes to those foundational programs, being seniors, will respond with their votes against those seeking to destroy these literal lifesavers to many.
The wingers actually did do mediscare with the ACA, and death panel lies, and got some votes for it in 2010, because it was new and unimplemented, and wingers were totally out of power and dems ran everything.
Democrats and especially Obama’s election fortunes and personal and party approval are climbing every day these shit bags puke funnel “saving medicare” by destroying it, and is doubly duplicitous because they are putting us all through the waves of bullshit in hopes of getting an opportunity to destroy the ACA. At some point, they will say, “let’s compromise on medicare” and just kill HCR instead, as a middle ground.
I wouldn’t worry too much there DougJ, on what the Village clowns are clowning about concerning medicare and SS. It is simply wasted effort in service to pol theater via the dem repub death cage match the media needs to keep going for their own monied interests. Grandma will get this.
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: Let’s all agree from now on to call the WaPo columnist Stupid Ruth Marcus, or SRM.
schrodinger's cat
DougJ@top
If you haven’t checked it out yet, check out Sullivan’s latest post on the Ryan Plan, where he calls Krugman names. Isn’t it funny that Sullivan and other village idiots trust McMegan on matters economic more than a Nobel Prize winner in the same subject.
Makewi
@aimai:
You have a political naivete that is almost childlike in it’s innocence. I hope you are still in your 20’s.
TaMara (BHF)
Those may be the best 26 words I’ve read in a long time.
13th Generation
@makewi
I can’t wait for aimai’s smackdown of your stupidity.
BGinCHI
@Makewi: Why don’t you cite some poll numbers that show how much people hate Medicare?
Can’t wait to see what you come up with.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Makewi: It’s working pretty well for us in the rest of the industrialised world. I don’t know what is so
exceptionalincompetent about US elites that you guys can’t swing it either.Makewi
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Sure, sure. Since they changed all of the benchmarks to measure based almost entirely on accessibility in ability to pay for, then the rest of the industrialized world is totally kicking ass. Pay no attention to the need to prescribe drinking water in the NHS, as that is almost certainly not a sign of how much the government cares.
Makewi
@BGinCHI:
This response shows how much you know about medicare or for the subject at hand. Thanks for playing.
Reminder: this is all about how many grandma’s Paul Ryan wants to push off a cliff.
Georgia Pig
This is evidence of the Village’s self-image as elevated above politics. Their discourse is almost always cast as a search for abstract virtue in an arena where there really are only interests (it goes without saying that the Villager’s is but just another interest, namely, the interest in people buying their bullshit so they can keep their interesting, perk-filled jobs and feel good about themselves). It plays into the hands of Republicans, who have learned to play this media game by casting everything as a matter of abstract principle (e.g., “family values”, “fiscal discipline”), which is, of course, utter bullshit. They’re just shills for rich people, not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. But the media is blind to recognizing them for what they are because it would deprive them of the quest for a nonexistent type of virtue that defines the media’s self-image.
Ash Can
Translated.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Makewi: Well, it doesn’t matter how much money the rich blow on gee-whiz machinery if you can’t access it. And yeah, we are totally kicking ass… we spend a lot less money and get far better results and service than you guys do. Sucks to be a sick middle-class American, eh?
You’re just reaching, dude. One thing I can tell you… the only institution that cares less about you than your government are your corporations. Who you gonna call?
Failure, Inc.
@Makewi: You make one hell of a word salad. Remind me to invite you to our 4th of July party.
We can always use a court jester. Livens things up a bit.
jl
The US national affairs news media continues to plumb new depths of incompetence and malfeasance that I thought were impossible just a few years ago. And my expectations were quite low even back then: that there was some bottom someplace down there.
The Obama and Democratic health care reform debate attempted to deal with the issues of health care expenditure growth, and the problems it caused for Medicare, and the news media followed the lead of the GOP and dismissed it.
Now the GOP is trying another scam to steal peoples’ social insurance contributions, and the media follows the GOP lead and pretends that the health care debate did not even exist.
Not sure how to describe these miserable callous nincompoops. I will probably have to consult a lawyer to make sure whatever I say about these vastly overpaid and pampered people (who have become really actors who are paid to pretend to do policy analysts on TV, just like a cowboy movie star is paid to pretend to throw a punch or shoot a gun) is not actionable in a court of law, at least when directed at a specific individual.
jwb
What scares me is that these bozos are the people the media bosses have selected to comment on our world.
Lysana
@Makewi:
Gee, that includes my older sister, a grandmother twice over before turning 55. You’re right. It is about how many Americans Ryan wants to kill off. Good show, Makewi.
BGinCHI
@Makewi: See, I knew you’d wuss out by directing the question back at me.
Facts? None.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Catsy
@Makewi:
This coming from someone who’s turned fact-free concern trolling into performance art. Hilarious.
Isn’t there some kind of paperwork required for a transaction involving this much fertilizer?
jl
Mankewi is totally wrong. The superior performance of the 20 to 25 high income developed countries that have health care outcomes that are as good or better than the US at lower cost DOES NOT depend on redefining quality of care on access to service.
It is based on real measures of real outcomes. Such as:
pregnancy related maternal mortality
infant and early childhood mortality
life expectancies at birth, 40, 60 and 65
loss of years of life to preventable health care conditions
satisfaction with their healthcare
You can look it up if you want to, for free or if you want the whole dismal collection of stats (which makes the US look WORSE), for 119 dollars (cheap)
http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3343,en_2649_34631_12968734_1_1_1_37407,00.html
Or, here for population based survey results on peoples’ experiences and level of satisfaction from several countries:
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Surveys/View-All.aspx
jl
My original comment is in moderation for the usual mysterious nonreasons. I will try again. Check back when comments is moderated to get links to data sources.
The first part of my original comment was
Mankewi is totally wrong. The superior performance of the 20 to 25 high income developed countries that have health care outcomes that are as good or better than the US at lower cost does not depend on redefining quality of care as easy access to service.
It is based on real measures of real outcomes. Such as:
pregnancy related maternal mortality
infant and early childhood mortality
life expectancies at birth, 40, 60 and 65
loss of years of life to preventable health care conditions
satisfaction with their health care
Joe Bauers
@Makewi: In my own personal experience, a large private health insurer arbitrarily stopped paying my wife’s medical bills in a transparent attempt to force us to declare bankruptcy and go away. The government never did that. So yeah, the level of trust I have for government is several orders of magnitude beyond my level of trust for the private health insurance industry.
JenJen
Split Enz!! And we were just talking about Crowded House at a barbecue yesterday.
Citizen_X
@Makewi:
This here’s America. Speak English or GTFO.
Does anybody have any idea what the fuck this refers to, or should I just shrug and file it under “Unhinged Winger Ranting?”
Warren Terra
@schrodinger’s cat:
I went and looked, and what I found was this:
There are a couple of points here:
1) I despise Sullivan, but I think you may be misreading him here. He is saying that Krugman flies into a rage when the Democrats prioritize “fiscal responsibility”. This is in fact an accurate characterization.
2) On the other hand, you may not be misreading him. You will note that I inserted scare quotes around “fiscal responsibility” – and he did not. The Republican-manufactured, Village-endorsed definition of “fiscal responsibility” means cutting spending on the poor, the sick, the halt, and the lame, and if not mandates at least encompasses tax cuts for rich folks. Krugman is a strong proponent of actual fiscal responsibility, just not the farcically exploitative version that the Washington consensus embraces. In the past, Sullivan has utterly failed to grasp that distinction, and I’m far from certain he’s doing any better here.
Yurpean
Co-incidentally Krugman wrote a blog-post on Medicare, and Ryan vs actual efforts to control costs, today:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/medicare-doublethink/
OzoneR
Can’t possibly understand why Democrats can’t win message wars.
schrodinger's cat
@Warren Terra: Adding to your (2)
Fiscal responsibility i.e. cutting spending when there is almost 9% unemployment is sheer lunacy. Cutting deficits makes sense during a boom not a bust (or a weak recovery) this is not my opinion it is what Keynes said. Also where were all these deficit hawks when Bush enacted his tax cuts and started a war with Iraq?
Cermet
@Makewi: Why not? Please, provide one valid point here on why the government shouldn’t help people in health care. What, children, poor males/females below 67, and old people who worked hard all their lives, paid taxes, and kept the world safe should just get sick and die so health care providers can make profits? What beliefs do you have? – not Christian,that for sure.
jl
@Warren Terra:
One assumption The Sullivan Gang makes is that the only way health care costs in the US can be reduced is to curtail service and ration care.
The very idea that the health insurance and medical care provider market in the US is totally messed up and inefficient seems to be completely beyond their imagination.
Yet, there are over 20 high income developed countries that do was well or better on health care outcomes, at lower burden on their economies and on their citizens than the US.
Completely bizarre ignorance and delusion on their part. Yet they are so arrogant that this whole community of worthless, innumerate, and ignorant pundits presume to lecture the US voters on how much worse their lives must become.
handy
Well Villagers I guess you can the Dems are one step ahead of you. Suck. On. This.
Groucho48
@Citizen_X:
I think part of what he is saying is that those measurements of health care in different countries tend to measure, as part of the ratings, how much of that health care is available to large percentages of the population. Right wingers couldn’t care less if half the population can’t afford the good health care, as long as they get theirs, so, they see this concept as nothing more than some socialist trick to make the American health care system look bad.
Makewi
@Cermet:
Ha. Words have different meanings for you it seems.
Mandramas
Quick thought experiment: Obama sanctions a program of government funded pharma labs that produce drugs for no profit for Medicare. This singlehandedly could reduce medical cost countrywide. Discuss.
dlnelson
@beltane: Has anyone asked how much Bill Clinton is being paid to be an “advisor” to Pete Peterson and his fiscal cat food commission. Curious minds want to know. Any serious person would ask that question. He is on the TV, C Span, etc. He is a serious blue dog democrat, right.
burnspbesq
@arguingwithsignposts:
“Also, too, props for the split enz”
New Liam Finn (Neil’s son) record due out soon.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
It’s quite a struggle, isn’t it? The parties actually causing the problem — insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, and doctors — vs. the gazillions of old farts who vote. Caught in the middle are the
professional cowardspoliticians and beltway pundits, who wish the problem would just go away. This could go one of two ways; either the problem-causers win and folks my age and younger take it in the ass, or the old farts win by finding the seemingly non-existent politicians with spines.In terms of a permanent fix there is no third, Broderian way, such as the one chosen by the current President. All that will do is delay the inevitable for a few years. If you want America to go down the toilet, choose the problem-causers. If you want to buy a little extra time go with PPACA. If you want to solve the problem find the elusive spined politician.
Turgidson
@jl:
As Krugman might say, I think their ignorance is “learned.”
The rich people, elites and VERY SERIOUS people they consider themselves and their closest associates to be have perfectly good access to health care, and in fact probably have access to extraordinarily high-tech and expensive procedures should the need arise. They have this access either through a gold-plated insurance plan or just because they’re exceedingly wealthy. They have NO incentive to restructure health care delivery to benefit more people and bend the cost curve to a more broadly shared and sustainable cost/benefit. They’re perfectly happy to cut costs as long as they are in no way personally inconvenienced. So their seemingly incredible ignorance on the topic may just be a defense of their own self-interest.
Or, considering how utterly, stupidly wrong they are on so many topics, it may be actual ignorance that happens to align with their self-interest. It’s always hard to tell with Sullivan and his bretheren.
Mandramas
@Shoemaker-Levy 9: Part of the problems is that medical doctor’s wages are higher on America that in the whole rest of the world. C’mon, it is a recurrent joke in a lot of sitcoms.
rikyrah
SEE, the problem here, that they don’t get…
is the people they’ve been whining to about ‘dirty fucking hippies’…
ARE THE ONES OUT THERE PROTESTING NOW.
folks understand the basics of being told to fend for themselves, while defending tax breaks for the rich.
shyt like that…IS REAL SIMPLE.
burnspbesq
@Mandramas:
He’s a friend’a them long-haired, hippy-type commie fags. Why, I betcha he’s even got a commie flag tacked up on th’ wall inside’a his garage.
jaleh
@Citizen_X: This Makewi person doesn’t make sense at all. Maybe a paid troll?
FlipYrWhig
You’re not supposed to think that’s sad… you’re supposed to think it’s sad that Democrats are using demagoguery instead of bold, grown-up solutions that involve shared sacrifice (by which Big Media mean someone else’s sacrifice). But it’s never worth being sad that Republicans are using demagoguery, because that’s just Manny being Manny. Media figures expect Republicans to be flame-throwing asswipes, and therefore never penalize Republicans for being such, and indeed reward any Republican who isn’t one.
Do you think these major media people, like David Gregory and Wolf Blitzer, comprehend how much everyone hates them? Even a little? Would anyone miss seeing John King’s face, or even realize he was gone?
brendancalling
I’d love to see Ruth Marcus lose her job and her health insurance, then get incredibly sick with a chronic condition, and watch her family go bankrupt because there’s no medicare.
what a stupid, entitled piece of shit she is.
El Cid
It’s interesting how so many times when I’ve heard people rant about the horrible overuse Americans make of medical care and the waste, it comes out that the connect this with visions of lazy, fat, sweaty and especially Southern types shuffling into the hospital for another wasted this or that.
In fact, that goes for all kinds of things which prompt people I know to go for ‘fuck the majority they need discipline the lazy gluttonous bastards’ policies — it’s intimately connected with visions (or maybe memories, or maybe anecdotes) of people they find disgusting and inferior getting disproportionate and undeserved benefits.
The super-rich may get such benefits too, but a lot of them are suave and own nice things and sponsor cool stuff and so forth, so it’s different.
OzoneR
@FlipYrWhig:
do they care? They have cushy jobs and people watch them. Who cares what people think of them as long as they’re watched and get paid.
Maude
@brendancalling:
People like her think nothing can ever happen to them.
slag
Awww…The Village is missing its Idiot Decider. How sweet they are when they get all nostalgic for their incoherently incompetent daddies of yore. It makes you almost want to put them down for a nap. Indefinitely.
Caz
Yeah, I’d much rather put my trust in the party that continued the Iraq war, continue the Afghanistan war, and started the Libyan war.
Medicare needs revision – but any attempt to broach the issue is met with scare tactics by the D’s. The D’s have no intention of revising anything. They are content to spend us into oblivion. Their only arguments are scare tactics, lies, more spending, less transparency, and cute little names for bills, like “job creation bill.”
The GOP isn’t much better when it comes to spending, but at least there are some in that party that are ready to make tough decisions (albeit a minority).
Both parties are corrupt and unqualified to run the country, but the D’s, having been in control of the ship for the last 2+ years are more to blame.
I know it gives you nightmares, but a tea party candidate is our best hope of righting this ship. A tea party candidate would end all three wars, cut all sorts of spending, respect and adhere to the Consitution, and help our economy rebound.
Or you can continue the balloon juice scare tactics so we get another 4 years of the decline of the nation. The politicans are laughing at you, useful idiot!
brendancalling
@Caz:
oh, go suck a bag of dicks.
Mnemosyne
@Makewi:
Fix’d. I have no idea why you think Blue Cross has your best interests at heart when they cancel your policy on flimsy grounds, but I’m sure you’ll come up with a reason why you deserved to have the overlords take your health insurance away.
ETA: And I’m sure that Health Net loves all of its customers, too, which is why they cancel their customers’ insurance in the middle of chemotherapy. They do it because they care.
I mean, really, can’t we all die happy knowing that while we may have died an excruciatingly painful death from cancer, the head of WellPoint was able to upgrade his yacht?
Mnemosyne
@Caz:
So because you hate that Obama continued the Bush policies you want to … put the people who originated those policies in charge instead because this time they’ll totally get it right?
I’m really starting to think that conservatism is a form of brain damage.
OzoneR
@Caz:
LMFAO, wow, what an delusional idiot
bob h
Wage and price controls in healthcare?
Flugelhorn
Clearly you know shit about Medicare.