Rockefeller Whacks Conrad For Criticizing Medicare Buy-In: 'I'm Tired Of Hearing About That From Him'

Actually if Kent Conrad doesn't want and extension of Medicare at affordable rates for his constituents then he really doesn't have their best interests in mind. He's still thinking about the interests of the Insurance corporations. No one needs to invoke Teddy Kennedy or Preston Brooks to see that.

I'm sorry, when did Hospital Suffrage pass?

You mean the best interests of the insurance company!!!

why doesnt Conrad support the opt out Public Option and he can get his North Dakota out and give everyone else the chance to have real healthcare reform?

Since you obviously slept through Congresscritter Decryption 101 and threw away your notes after the final, here's page 1 of the codebook.

"I support this bill because it benefits the people of my state" = "I'm bringing home some bacon."

"I oppose this provision because it adversely affects the people of my state" = "I oppose this because it adversely affects the interests of my largest campaign contributors."

Because our whole system - be it treatment or incomes of doctors - far excedes other countries.

It's rarely brought up, but for decades the AMA has essentially dictated the number of medical admissions. In order to keep the "doctor market" as non competitive as possible.

We need to change this and also consider allowing more foreign doctors, especially primary care physicians, into the country. It's been done in every European country at some point in time.

So why are you here?

It is pointless debating most of the people on this site

Pointless? Perhaps you should debate the merits of the "For Profit" Health Insurance industry that so blatantly & ruthlessly profiteers off the pain, suffering & misery of Americans?

What are your "good faith reasons" for advocating the existence of these bloodsucking parasites? A paycheck?

Buncha latte sippin', Volvo drivin', birkenstock wearin' dirty fucking hippies, right?

you start showing where your party has good faith options and alternative policies. You don't, they don't, so this is what happens.

There is a difference between simply opposing the bill and refusing to allow anyone to even vote on it. If Kent Conrad wants to vote against the bill, fine, let him vote against it. But why should he and his cohorts refuse to allow anybody else to vote for it?

MasonF is a filth. The guy's only arguments are that nobody here can have a real discussion. I guess that makes you a fulfiller of your own prophecy. I've seen you troll every single article making the same arguments and coming to the same conclusion. Go off to the Drudge report.

And for a substantive argument, I've heard many many doctors come out in support of this bill. Additionally many of them prefer to work with medicare over the insurance companies because they pay quicker and don't protest as much as the insurance companies..

"anyone can have good faith reasons to oppose this bill."

So when can we expect you to actually *present* some good faith reasons to oppose the bill, Cowboy?

So far, you've only presented alarmism, lies, innuendo and made-up bullspit.

Sorry, bud, but the people who represent you wiped their asses with our willingness to attribute good faith to anyone on the your side of this debate and flushed it down the crapper a long time ago. We're done with good faith.

Yeah, it's a crude statement deliberately intended to convey the crudity of their statements and tactics.

The leading figures in what I assume is your party have steadfastly refused to debate this thing on the merits since about fifteen minutes after Obama was inauguarated. Instead, they've compared us to Hitler and Mengele and Stalin. They've fanned the flames of the patent falsehood that we're trying to insure illegal immigrants with the tax dollars of hard working white people. They've flatly called us socialists and communists and nazis. They've ceaselessly peddled the vilest falsehoods no matter how many times they're authoratatively debunked, like the yammering about "death panels" and how giving billions of taxpayer dollars to private health insurance companies is "socialism" and a "government takeover" of health care. They've pissed off our allies by fabricating the most outrageous lies about the healthcare systems of Britian, France and Canada (all of which are very different from each other) and then lied again and said what Congress is trying to do is exactly the same as the made-up socialist dystopia they falsely say exists in those three countries.

And then there's the numbers racket whereby they simply pull a number out of their ass and wave it around as the true cost of this bill without the slighest mooring in conventional reality.

And to to top it all off, after fifty years of vociferous opposition and endless efforts to kill it, they've now proclaimed themselves its protector. When we seek to apply cost control measures that they've advocated consistently for years, they oppose them. When we seek to apply cost controls that were part of John Fucking McCain's stump speech during the campaign, he attacks us for them on his regular appearances on the Sunday shows.

This hasn't just been the broadcast loudmouth parasites that have infested your party's brain and the wannabe's like Palin doing this. It's been people like who are supposed to matter, who are supposed to be the grown-ups. People like McCain, Grassley, McConnell, Hatch, and, yeah, the real new mainstram of the party embodied by people like DeMint, Bachmann, Joe Wilson and John Kyl.

We started out hoping for a meaningful debate on this issue. We preserved the private insurance industry in our plans in no small part to mollify your side. Over the dark warnings and predictions of his own base, Obama repeatedly reached out to your side to try to achieve some kind of consensus. Over the strong protests of the left, he endorsed the endless series of compromises that Max Baucus made to your side in an effort to get Republican buy-in and participation, and every time he did it, Grassley and Snowe and Enzi, under threat of sanction by the Republican leadership, moved the goalposts on him and then called up their buddies in the press to tell some more lies about death panels and government takeovers the grand Democrat plan to destroy America in general. When your side demanded more time, we gave it to them, despite those of us urgently warning that their objective was to stir up a bunch of people up into a dangerous frenzy with lying and fearmongering.

So don't come whining to us about how hateful liberals refuse to treat you like you're debating in good faith. Your side is the one that lobbed all the poison gas shells into the debate. If we finally decided there was no alternative but to put on our gas masks, march across good faith's rotting corpse and impose a victor's peace upon you at bayonet-point, your own leaders are the ones to blame. Take your grievances to them in November.

Then show us you know how to go away.

Here's a guide for those last few graphs which are from a Q&A between Conrad and Ezra Klein (the original distinguished the two speakers by alternating bold format:

Ezra-
I was also struck when I read the chairman's mark that the co-op option seemed shackled. It couldn't sell to large employers. It couldn't set payment rates. The co-ops are not public. But they were being prevented from competing with insurers on a level playing field. It seemed like private insurers were being protected from competition.

Conrad-
I think there are things I would like to see that would make certain co-ops be given the full ability to compete that others are.

Ezra-
So you would like to see those restrictions lifted.

Conrad-
I would.

Ezra-
Why are they there?

Conrad-
Because that came out of the Group of Six discussions.