Interesting Nugget From Today's Meet The Press

[angelatc]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32420049/ns/meet_the_press/page/2/
With tax cheat Tom Daschle, Rachel Maddow, Dick Armey and Sen Tom Coburn, an MD who still practices on Mondays.


SEN. COBURN: Let me finish, Tom. We, we talk about neonatal mortality. Where’s the neonatal mortality? It’s not in the private insurance plans, it’s in Medicaid. Well, here’s the government-run program that is failing us in terms of neonatal mortality, and yet we use as an indicator neonatal mortality to say we need more government rather than less.

and just for a grin,


MS. MADDOW: That is so disingenuous, that’s unbelievable.

I wonder where Coburn got that statistic from?

[angelatc]

Another Maddow moment:


MS. MADDOW: I, I think the policy about what we actually do makes a big difference in terms of how much we have to spend and how much savings we get. One of the reasons that I think a lot of liberals and Democrats are in favor of a strong public option is because the administrative costs are so much lower in a government program, frankly, like Medicare, than they are in private insurance. We waste so many billions of dollars on the administrative costs of having the private insurance-based system that we have now. When you compare us to other industrialized country that don’t have that much of a reliance on...

First of all, that's not true. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/administrative-costs/?apage=2#comment-195423

Second, the "we're wasting billions of dollars in the private sector" attitude is repulsive. It isn't their money. My money is only wasted if I say it's wasted, and I say the government wastes money.

[angelatc]

Wow. Dick Armey is suing the government to get out of Medicare. Here's why.


REP. ARMEY: The Medicare law that was written by the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and the chief lobbyists of Blue Cross/Blue Shield, voted on without amendment as an amendment to Social Security, first imposes severe sanctions on physicians and medical providers that don’t comply with its requirements, and it says to seniors at the age of 65 you can no longer buy the insurance that you bought prior to 65. And now by virtue of an internal memo—not a regulation, not a law—they tell seniors today...

MR. GREGORY: All right.

REP. ARMEY: ...if you don’t sign up for Medicare you’ll lose your Social Security.

MR. GREGORY: I want to...

REP. ARMEY: Now, if—you tell me what, what, what that has to do with anybody’s notion of liberty...

[priest_of_syrinx]

One of the reasons that I think a lot of liberals and Democrats are in favor of a strong public option is because the administrative costs are so much lower in a government program, frankly, like Medicare, than they are in private insurance.

http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/fail-owned-cigarette-smoking-fail.jpg?w=500&h=210

[Cowlesy]

Wow. Dick Armey is suing the government to get out of Medicare. Here's why.

Heck yeah Dick Armey --- good one there.