After reading this all I have learned is that Daldoma is smarter than anyone else in this thread.
You guys sit here blaming wars, or programs, or individuals, but it's pretty obvious that our greatest problem is the lack of cohesion amongst politicians and their constituents. Neither side is willing to bend and is more concerned with making their opponents look guilty than they are with actually creating a better future.
Barkingturtle you seem like an intelligent chap as well but I'm not sure what got up your ass to the point of resorting to name calling that you did. In my opinion your argument is based on pointing out what is wrong rather than offering any solution towards fixing those problems. I'm with the others here, you can't compare a our nation to Norway and you can't expect implementing their model for governance over ours would elicit similar results. Too much of our money and interest is invested outside of our own borders, including military and defense spending, to maintain the social programs they do. Socialized medicine will never work in the US simply because we're too big and not because of greed or any large scale lack of compassion.
Personally, what I think we need is for politicians to think smaller and be willing to compromise on those small issues. You can't expect to reform one of our biggest industries or programs completely and then get people to just fall in line. Healthcare reform affects too many people's lives in the business sector to expect them to shut up when they're seeing their livelihood change in the course of a few months. You act as if the insurance companies have the government in their pocket but it's one of the few industries where they are only allowed to make a certain percentage of profit per entity. Think about that, if you owned a car part store and the government said you could only make 4% profit over your total operational cost it would be infuriating. They're capping companies to keep them from making too much while forcing small business to carry insurance for every employee by 2014 or begin paying fees. That's complete crap, business owners shouldn't have to provide everything for their employees. They give them jobs, it should be up to the employees to manage their money effectively enough to pay for their own insurance. If someone is willing to offer a benefits package it should be considered a perk and not a government mandated entitlement. This is a perfect example of illogical expectations between extreme liberal doctrine and government ordinance. The worst part is that this type of program will mean less jobs overall because the owners will have to burn positions, redistribute workload, then increase benefit management spending to make heads and tails of the ever-changing laws associated with this reform.
Again for me it all comes back to a lack of accountability on all fronts. Why actually make some sacrifices when you can simple entrench yourself and point fingers as shit gets worse? If we had instead started smaller and mandated that all individuals carry health insurance by law and tested those waters for awhile we might have some actual progress. Overhauling everything will never work, but with a four year window of power partisanism will continue to reign.
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