“We have the best health care in the world,” Tiahrt said with some in the audience agreeing with him.
Of course he is wrong and our own newspaper printed an article from MClatchy that said:
“If U.S. health care's so good, why do other people live longer?”
The article went on to say:
“People live longer in just about every industrialized nation, from Canada to our north, throughout much of Europe, and around the Pacific in Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
New mothers and their babies also face a rockier start here, with U.S. infant and maternal death rates double some of our industrialized peers.”
So as usual, Tiahrt was wrong. He made it clear he was opposed to any public system for those who can’t get insurance. He even said that Medicare wasn’t a good system because it doesn’t pay for everything and some doctors don’t like to take Medicare patients.
“Health care needs reform,” he said.
Then he went over all the usual blather of the Republican party, ….“less waste, less bureaucracy.” In other words nothing will really change.
It is ironic that The Wichita Eagle ran a opinion piece warning the Republicans to “Keep false claims out of debate.”
The article said:
“Still, the first half of August’s great health care debate has left The Eagle editorial board wishing that Tiahrt and the other Republicans in Kansas’ delegation would get real themselves.
If Tiahrt really believes that, as he told an overflow Topeka crowd last week, “if you look at health care, it’s not a crisis,” he isn’t really looking at health care.
According to census and other state-by-state data released last week by the Department of Health and Human Services, in Kansas: More than 340,000 people, or 13æpercent of residents, don’t have health insurance, although 71æpercent of them live in families with at least one full-time worker. Providers lose more than $801æmillion to bad debt in taking care of the uninsured, a cost passed to covered Kansans in premium increases of roughly $900 per year. The average cost of a family’s health insurance premium has risen 105æpercent since 2000. Only 40æpercent of small businesses .”
American health care….Eewww!!
I had told him I went to all the town halls up to this weekend and the forum (I didn't go to the last three; no money!), and, as a constituent, I wanted him to support public option because, well, I don't have insurance. He said he supports a voucher system that would give vouchers to people at poverty level or even up to 200% of poverty level. He said as a single woman with no kids, that would be $32,000. Also something about tax breaks (which is useless for the poor who are exempt from taxes because they don't make enough money; how can they afford health insurance and health care?).
ReplyDeleteTwo of the four panelists supported public option while two did not. Tiahrt was not the last to speak but, rather, a consumer's rights advocate who twisted the screws a bit on Tiahrt's message. But the best part was as Tiahrt was again talking about how underfunded Medicare was, the first panelist challenged him to actually fund Medicare.
I'd be much happier if he just opposed it ideologically instead of spreading lies and fears about it (and changing his message: what he tells the town halls is different than what he says on his senate campaign trail).
In Wellington, he also said something about how wrong he thinks it was for the tanker deal to go to France and how he was working to bring those jobs back to Wichita. Odd considering he voted for the bill that allowed that to happen!
Rabbi Moti Rieber was the moderator and has posted both his opening statement and a bit of a follow-up.
If our nation didn't have 20 million illegal aliens, the results would be very different. They often come in poor health and drive up costs for everyone by only using the ER and then not paying. Liberals refuse to acknowledge this FACT!
ReplyDeleteA lot of poor Americans who can’t afford health insurance go to the medical ER’s to get treatment when they are desperately sick, not JUST illegal aliens. With a national health plan that gave poor people PREVENTABLE health care, and some type of insurance, they wouldn’t use ERs.
ReplyDeleteThe ERs can’t refuse treatment, but they can keep a person in debt, which means if they get decent employment, they can’t buy homes or cars or make investments without the hospitals coming back for their money—thus leaving poor people trapped in poverty.
Why do they use ERs? It’s the only place they can get guaranteed treatment for their sicknesses which are often in late stages and beyond a cure.
THIS IS THE RESULTS OF OUR HEALTH SYSTEM!!!! Blaming illegals in nothing more than Scapegoating. When will conservatives pull their heads out and realize this system just plain doesn’t work?