Come on, that's disingenuous, and you know it. The Feds insure the highest risk population (the elderly) via Medicare, and they can't terminate anyone's policy whenever they feel like it. So, of course they deny claims that other insurers don't have to deny -- the private insurers already refused to carry the sick person's policy in the first place, or jacked up the rates so as to be prohibitively expensive.



Then explain the thousands who show up at clinics held by the National Association of Free Clinics. One was just held in your state of Louisiana recently.


Go ahead and move the goalposts -- I don't mind. First you claim without any basis that we could cover all the uninsured with the cost of this bill, then when called on your fact-free assertion, you backtrack and insist that the numbers must be wrong.

The fact is that CBO has a Panel of Health Advisers on staff who are tasked with understanding the real-world implications of the legislation, not simply spitting out numbers based on what Congress tells them. The CBO is not a rubber stamp -- they do their own research and forecasting, and are the only referees on the field. Their forecast was good enough to pass Bush's tax cuts on the wealthy, but now that they're giving their blessing to something that helps the not-so-well-off, they must be a rubber stamp bunch of stooges who just slap a sticker on the bill's cover sheet.



I assume you own a credit card, so do me a favor. Without digging out your agreement, which is no doubt dozens of pages of 6-point text, tell me if any of the following terms/conditions are in your agreement:

• Double cycle billing
• Universal default
• Trailing interest

Now, I'm sure a responsible, hard-working fella like yourself never plans on being behind on his payments, so surely these will never come into play. But, in the real world, people do miss payments, or are forced to carry a balance for a few months, and instead of paying the advertised interest rate, they end up paying more due to these arcane fine-print clauses that let the banks either jack the rates up, or apply payments to portions of the balance that were borrowed at a lower interest rate.

These are all gimmicks that the banks have come up with to extort money from people. What other excuse is there for this?


This is exactly what happens when free markets run amok, and no amount of "personal responsibility" is going to make everyone able to follow along with the ever-increasing complexity of credit card terms. It's a boondoggle, plain and simple, just like health insurance.

You are right that the banks that issue credit cards are a business, but they've made a business out of tricking people with agreements that nobody can read. These abusive practices are a direct result of a lack of regulation, some of which was recently addressed with legislation, but the banks are already working on their next gimmicks, which will no doubt add more pages of incomprehensible text to all of our agreements. How does that benefit the consumer?


Fantastic, so when he stops by the BBS to debate you, go ahead and use those tactics. Until then, I would hope you can engage the arguments I've made, rather than refuting ones I haven't.


This is the best argument you've made, and I agree that under-enrollment in Medicaid is the problem. Unfortunately, the only way to improve that is to fund it more to educate people on who is eligible, and to reach out to them to help them sign up, just as a private health insurer would advertise to them. I assume you'd support an increase in Medicaid funding to increase enrollment of people who already qualify?


Ah, so you see my cherry-pick and raise me a cherry-pick from Rasmussen, which is known to have a large house effect that favors conservative candidates and positions.

Look, I have my polls, you have yours. We can argue about which side of an obviously polarizing issue the public narrowly favors, but remember that much of the criticism of the bill is coming from the left, who wanted it to be more progressive. You're always going to end up with people not liking the finished product after it gets through Congress, but in a choice between "reform the system" or "status quo", the public favors reform.

Additionally, those 55% of people are idiots, because repeal is impossible. (Two thirds of both houses of Congress to override Obama's veto -- good luck with that!)


That's absurd -- you have Redrum and TigerJimmy supporting your side of the debate quite well. All we're asking you to do is defend the assertions you made earlier, and frankly, it's been demonstrated that several of them were made carelessly and without supporting evidence. There are differences of opinion and political philosophy, but when you're backing up your positions with shoddy evidence (or none at all) you should expect to get called on them. Go ahead and walk away from the table if you're not prepared to show your work, but it's not an unfair fight just because you came unarmed.