Sarah Palin: bat****, or howling-at-the-moon bat****?

[KrazyHorse]

BS...quality of life and the cost of providing the necessary health care are the only important measurements of a health care system.

Think before you ****ing post. "Quality of life" as an aggregate measurement suffers from the same problems that "life expectancy" does as a means of comparing health care effectiveness; there are SIGNIFICANT confounding factors (innate AND behavioural) in any such a broad measure.

[Krill]

As you can see, it's hard enough getting survival rates into a form which is suitable for cross-country comparisons. We'll tackle quality of life once we've got a handle on years of life...

You're never going to get that far, not with new drugs constantly in development. You can't treat QoL as a purely statistical exercise, there has to be qualitative judgement calls in there.

[Krill]

BS...quality of life and the cost of providing the necessary health care are the only important measurements of a health care system.

Think before you ****ing post. "Quality of life" as an aggregate measurement suffers from the same problems that "life expectancy" does as a means of comparing health care effectiveness; there are SIGNIFICANT confounding factors (innate AND behavioural) in any such a broad measure.

Trolled...sorry KH, couldn't resist.

I'm too lazy to read through the possible partisan propaganda in the thread. Would you care to summarise the useful measurements then?

[KrazyHorse]

[Krill]

Eh. Enjoy your discussion. You might want to look at a drug called Herceptin, so called Post Code lotteries and provision of care in the Mental Health/Learning Disability fields.

Those 3 things pertain to some very pertinent questions that the US needs to answer IMO. As well as the rights of the individual under detention.

Cancer might be nice for the stats, and be a vote winner, but it's just one facet of a problem that could consume an easy 20 million people in the US.

[KrazyHorse]

Krill, I'm not limiting to cancer. That was just the first example I could find of slightly more rigourous discussion of cross-country statistics.

[molly bloom]

Okay then:


Sarah Palin: thorazine, or electroconvulsive therapy? What route should we take?

Something good, cheap and old-fashioned.

A scold's bridle.


Oh, and a hysterectomy, so she can't give birth to any future potential political poker chips. She was already low in my estimation, but her moral worth fell through the cellar into Tartarus when she started using her child with Down's Syndrome as a photo-op/political ploy....

[Krill]

I know your not; if you were I would have attacked on that. I'm just helping you by giving you an extra few topics that are very different depending on which health care facilitator is providing them.

[Dr Strangelove]

Something good, cheap and old-fashioned.

A scold's bridle.


Oh, and a hysterectomy, so she can't give birth to any future potential political poker chips. She was already low in my estimation, but her moral worth fell through the cellar into Tartarus when she started using her child with Down's Syndrome as a photo-op/political ploy....

The probability of having a Down's syndrome kid is directly related to age, so no, if she cares in the slightest about her kids she shouldn't have any more kids.

[Krill]

Nice troll

[Drake Tungsten]

I've read studies that claim that the probability of having a gay son increases as the mother has more male children. As such, maybe we should institute a two-child policy that will cut down on both the number of Downs Syndrome-afflicted and homosexuality-afflicted members of our society?

[Drake Tungsten]

How Sarah Palin Rope-a-Doped All-Too-Many Liberals

As a liberal myself, I was amazed by the obtuseness of the liberal reaction to Sarah Palin’s “death panels” quote. They fell into a trap because all too many were blinded by their class-conscious, snobbish disdain for Palin, who, whatever else you think of her, is one cagey operator.

And in doing so they allowed that one brilliantly crafted propaganda phrase to undo the chance for some necessary health care reforms (portability of coverage, no disqualification for previous conditions, eligibility to some plan for all, subsidized coverage for the impoverished uninsured).

They couldn’t believe that Sarah Palin was capable of something as canny as that deadly “death panels” phrase. They couldn’t see that it was a metaphoric shorthand for something real. Instead they thought she was too dumb, that she meant it literally (to have seen the potential for rationed end-of-life care in the bill), and instead indulged in an orgy of disdain for her “crazy,” “ignorant” “lies” and malicious misrepresentation.

No! “Death panels” was a Lenny Bruce black-humored kind of line and she proved herself far hipper than the terminally square liberals who didn’t get it. And who started an ill-conceived war on the phrase which most of the country, when the facts came out, saw as meretricious or ignorant on the liberals’ part — with good reason. And caused ordinary citizens to turn against the whole cause of health care — really it should be health insurance — reform.

Liberals should have responded the way my friend Joe Conason (and a few other non-snotty liberals) did, by pointing out that we already have death panels of a sort: the ones manned by the insurance companies who ration and deny coverage for the sake of their profit margins. Would government rationing be better? It might be less greed-motivated, but maybe not. There at least should have been a discussion of the real issue of health care rationing.

Because yes, there is a “panel” in the bill that will “evaluate” the cost effectiveness of various expensive, minimally life-extending treatment decisions — decisions that any health-care program, public or private, may have to make. No, individuals won’t have to stand before it, but individuals will be affected — and sometimes suffer — from its decisions.

But liberals and, shamefully, liberal oriented media — most of them — made the mistake they keep making about Sarah Palin: because she didn’t go to Princeton she’s incapable of seeing or cutting to the heart of the matter so shrewdly. They had a chance to respond as Conason did: put her on the spot by asking her exactly what she’d do about existing insurance company “death panels.” Instead, they didn’t believe she was sophisticated enough (like them) to make the point she was making.

And then the facts began to leak out, as even the media began to read the bill and its implications and backtrack on its deeply flawed literal-to-the point of stupidity “fact checks”– and people got legitimately outraged at being treated like Sarah Palin: too dumb to understand. When in fact they — the liberals and the media — were the ones whose knee jerk reactions were ignorant.

Of course the overreaction by genuinely ignorant right-wingers (”I don’t want the government to mess with my Medicare”) and the thuggish, lynch mob behavior at town halls (boasting of shouting others’ down and other mob tactics, Hitler mustaches etc., rather than making rational arguments and respecting other citizens) including the terrorist tactic of bringing guns to town hall meetings, showed that the right could squander an advantage in legitimate debate by making an ugly spectacle of itself.

Nonetheless, when the history of the whole misbegotten health care reform effort is written, Sarah Palin has to be given credit for stopping it on a dime — and the snotty liberals who underestimated her should be held responsible.

http://pajamasmedia.com/ronrosenbaum/2009/08/28/how-sarah-palin-rope-a-doped-all-too-many-liberals/

I'm glad someone else picked up on this...

[KrazyHorse]

That's a ****ing joke. Palin didn't do ****. Health care reform is a non-starter no matter what the personalities on each side.

[Drake Tungsten]

He does give her far too much credit for the demise of healthcare reform generally. She totally scuttled government involvement in end-of-life consultations with a minimum of effort, though.

[KrazyHorse]

With a minimum effort? She made herself even more of a joke than she already was.