Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Hater Depot]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/19/AR2009091900112_pf.html

[quote]the bulk of these bills amount to hundreds of small tweaks and fixes that make this corner of the health-care system a smidge more user-friendly, or that transaction a tad faster. Rather than saving hundreds of billions of dollars with a single dramatic intervention that transforms the system, they provide for the accretion of modest savings and small efficiencies.

For instance, despite all the fire over the co-op plan, it gets two pages in the Finance Committee's bill. Pages 75 to 110 are all devoted to delivery system changes that are meant to make the system a bit more efficient but that no one has ever heard of. "Value-based purchasing" alone gets six pages in the bill. The "National Pilot Program on Payment Bundling" gets another five.

Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, a researcher at the Rand Corporation, and David Cutler, a health economist at Harvard, recently estimated the savings that could be attained by "modernizing" the system over the next 10 years. The changes they examined weren't dramatic. Replacing paper records with computerized files, making it easier for people to comparison-shop across insurers, "bundling" payments for the treatment of a single illness rather than shelling out separately for each doctor visit -- that sort of thing. Added up, they equaled a startling $2 trillion over 10 years. That's a lot of money for policies that have received virtually no attention in the debate.

[bacasper]

Like many of these bills, They are so long to ensure that lawmakers do not read them, and citizens do no understand them.

Like the PATRIOT Act. How could there have been a 700-page bill ready six weeks after 9/11? Lawmakers did not read it, and were impugned for lacking patriotism for even questioning it!

Obviously, it had been prepared beforehand, and they just needed the pretext to implement it.

I am guessing with the health care bill (I haven't read any versions of it) that it is so complex in an attempt to maintain the status quo as much as possible.

[mithridates]

[bacasper]

[mithridates]

I like this link:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3200/text

You can see the comments related to certain sections of the bill so you can get an idea of some of the debate surrounding them instead of just wading through reams of text.

I haven't read the bill yet either, but then again I don't have a personal interest in the matter besides wanting to see the US prosper.

[ontheway]

There are numerous competing and constantly changing bills. Members of Congress do not have time to read the bills submitted each year. Members of Congress do not write the bills either.

There are thousands of unknown staff members who write pieces of bills that are then crammed together by members who introduce them without reading them. Staff members are also unable to read everything and are responsible for portions of the bills. In addition they lack expertise and rely on unknown outside experts and interested parties to write the portions that they are responsible for writing.

It is in this process of crafting legislation that all the corruption and chaos takes over and destroys any chance that good intentions will prevail. If it were not already proven theoretically and practically that socialism always fails due to its violation of the laws of physics, economics and basic human nature, we could still count on the fact that socialism will always fail due to the mathematical principles of chaos theory and the impossible complexity of socialistic legislative processes.

[bacasper]

As a baby step towards improving upon these "socialistic legislative processes," I propose there be a requirement that legislators actually READ any bill put up for a vote.

[Fox]

[bacasper]

[Fox]