Clovis,

You're being quite disrespectful while everyone is being quite restrained about you. I can assure you that your opinions here are not universally considered objective and rational.

I would suggest Obama is retired from politics. I think he is free to give speeches. Like it or not banks are a huge part of our economy. Unless people think Obama just slobbed the knobs of investment bankers instead of perhaps hoping to broaden their worldview I don't get it.

Again Obama is not really a politician any more.

What do you mean by it?

I'm in Canada. We don't spend unlimited funds on end of life care. We operate within an economic system just like everyone.

Avwal is a scumbag to be sure but he is not talking about death panels. That's just hyperbole. He is taking about changing the way we accept death and making different economic choices within limited Heathcare funds.

How am I being disrespectful? Because I won't argue religion with Fly?

Is there any reasonable position that the entire financial sector is rent seeking? Of course not so if he wants to debate he should do so reasonably.

If we've learned anything from this election it's that smart enough to be president is not actually very smart at all. Thus smart enough to be president doesn't really mean that they could be successful in another arena. Guys like W and Trump did make money doing other things. But I don't think their intelligence had a lot to do with it.

To become president one needs a certain level of charisma and being able to connect with people. And those skills can also be monetized in other ways, but probably not quite as easily as intelligence (as conventionally defined).

Well said. The really crappy thing is there is less and less of a correlation between the skills needed to become president and those needed to be president.

Of course not. That is what makes it an interesting debate.

Yeah nothing is being gotten by turning down speaking engagements. In the case of a dynamic speaker like Obama he has the possibility to actually be a positive social influence on a group that mostly lives in a bubble. That is absolutely worth it.

Do people think Obama said Wall Street is great and does no wrong? Or perhaps he discussed several issues facing the country and the world and how everyone needs to work together because it is in all our interests.

The idea that progressives should turn down money because having money is bad is so far gone and absolutely not something that should be put out there unless you just want democrats/progressives/ and liberals to just go extinct.

There is also a mistaken concept that everyone who might be in an audience at a Wall Street speech are militant right wing conservatives.

Should obama just preach to the choir? What on earth would be the point of that. Did I mention he no longer is a politician?

Should conservatives be crying that W. turned into a wishy washy liberal artist?

Huge inefficiencies leave plenty of room for bringing costs down. We have more than enough resources to pay for all of this care. It's not debatable. You use the word finite. How much is that in your mind?

Plus extremely expensive treatments, procedures and surgeries ultimately advance modern medicine. How much do you think the first heart transplant cost in current dollars? Tens of millions of dollars? So I guess we should have just cut that off and everyone it would help in the future.

This idea that there is a real issue of tough cost choices in a reformed system is simply wholly without merit. The United States has the resources in spades to deal with all this. People seem to think the cost of medical care is some intractable figure dropped down from the sky.

Keeping people alive in the hospital for an extra week will absolutely NOT bankrupt healthcare nor will it cause us to withhold treatments from Dan's cancer babies. It won't even create moments of doubts as to how it's paid for.

All of these things are already being paid for in our horribly inefficient system which has us paying more for most of this stuff.

I don't advocate throwing more money at it. I said with proper healthcare reform we could easily provide every American with platinum healthcare from cradle to the grave for only a very minor percentage increase in healthcare payouts relative to the totality of the system we have now.

People either ignore or don't understand how much room there is for substantial cost reductions in our healthcare system. However we can't even start attacking that issue until we move to single payer as the current system thrives on special interests and inefficiencies. We can literally give everyone much better healthcare and not have it cost more money. So anything else is just an jerk off circle of special interests.

We absolutely can afford to keep terminally ill people alive longer and it absolutely would not lead to trade offs. The only metric for stopping treatment should be pain/quality of life/suffering. There is zero reason we should ever have to be terminating people because their care is costly.

Agreed.

Break down that hundred million dollars needed to keep someone with no quality of life alive in a system where medical costs have been recalibrated to reality. Also make sure this circumstance provides zero benefit to improving medicine in the future for other people.

You are bringing up absolutely absurd numbers now, you said one billion dollars, because even the most costly care can absolutely be absorbed into a properly formed healthcare system. I would add other people posting examples of lots of money on end of life care are all examples of things that are currently paid for NOW.

A publically traded company giving the president a 60 million dollar advance is no big deal but a $400k speech is the end of the world.

Imagine bankers providing said book publisher with ultra low interest financing in order to facilitate such a book deal. It serves nobody to be hyper paranoid how banks or businesses might influence former presidents. It's unavoidable unless you demand they live in a monastery.

Clovis what relevance does that have to do with the debate between the status quo of the ACA and the proposed AHCA legislation?

The answer is "nothing".

So here's the next, super important step: why are Obamacare opponents like awval and Dan so eager to chat about this right now? Why the sudden interest in getting people to agree that end of life care needs to be rationed?

Think about why that's what they want to talk about.

Pretty significant diminishing of the Office of the President there. Do people not understand that for most people, politics aside, a speech by a former president is considered a pretty significant thing.

I agree with whomever said that acting like everyone is a cartoon villain is serving nobody.

It's because they are ****ing cowards and don't want to defend their actual specific views on actual specific legislation. It's misdirection from the current coverage related debate which has a binary choice between the ACA and the AHCA, and it's transparent.

Their goal is to get the hated libtards to articulate a Grand Principle of Health Care, and if they can't or won't, well, now who's the smart one? Libtards shouldn't virtue signal about Medicaid cuts being bad if they can't rigorously solve the ****ing problem of finite resources and the intractable moral calculus problem of valuing a day of human life in dollars.

P.S. Clovis "rent-seeking" is an economics term of art. Maybe you aren't familiar with it? That's ok, but don't patronize me because I am.

The key sentence:

"But Republicans rejected the notion that to help 2 million people with preexisting conditions get access to care, we needed a 2,000-page bill that transformed one-sixth of the economy."

They try to slide it in there, and a huge percentage of the country doesn't catch on... But they don't think people deserve health care as a human right, they think they deserve access to it. In their minds, whether or not you can afford it is a similar problem to whether or not you can afford a Ferrari.

By the way obama's 60 million dollar book deal comes from penguin random house which is a company that is the merger of a German and British publishing house. Undoubtedly big bankers played a role when they merged.

So obama is getting 60 million dollars from two foreign companies manipulated by big banks.

Do you honestly expect me to read further than that? Obviously I don't think the $400k speech is the end of the world or anything like that.

I'm using the extreme on purpose to illustrate that every system has limits on what is spent to save life. Therefore we are arguing about degree not kind. This is why hyperbole like death panels is silly.

I don't care why they want to talk about it. I think it's a fair debate and one we need to have.

I think its pretty clear itt that I have no respect at all for Avwal or dan. None. That doesnt mean that everything they say is automatically wrong.

I'm well aware of what rent-seeking is and if you think all financial transactions are it, it's not me who is confused.

As a society, we need to decide that healthcare is not something that should have a profit motive.

1) I think end of life spending is astronomical and we need to change the way we think about death in this country. For instance, I knew when my mother was having an issue retaining CO2 that if I called EMS she would be taken to a hospital and tubed. Instead, I called the hospice house and had her transferred to a hospice bed. She died later that week. But that's because I knew that calling EMS would mean heroic measures first and questions later. Not everyone knows this.

2) That said, it's incredibly disingenuous for any person who supports republicans to make these types of arguments - the ACA had specific provisions to pay for end of life counseling and that was used as the rallying call of "DEATH PANELS!".

3) I take specific issue with the statement that the US spends more money for healthcare than any other nation. Not because it's not true. It is true. But the reasons for this isn't just end of life care. That's far too simplistic a take. This article from Time on healthcare costs is a good read. The answer isn't risk pools, it's universal health care. Point blank. Bottom line. Then we can have discussions on resource allocations.

People keep throwing out the $400k number like this will be the one and only speech Obama is ever going to be paid for.

This is the key to solving the problem.