Kaus/Limbaugh #4: Trump Boehner's Budget Deal with Medicare
Blue Yeti ·
Apr 15, 2011 at 4:49pm
The Ricochet debating society returns with another rapid fire episode. This week Mickey Kaus and David Limbaugh mix it up over Trump, who really came out on top of the budget deal, and wind things up with a detailed debate on entitlements. Take notes folks, there will be quiz at the end of the podcast.
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Comments :
Re: Kaus/Limbaugh #4: Trump Boehner's Budget Deal with Medicare
This was a really great episode. It actually made my hour of house cleaning fun!
I look forward to the "Bash Peter Robinson" segments in future episodes ;-)
Sep '10
Re: Kaus/Limbaugh #4: Trump Boehner's Budget Deal with Medicare
What can I say? I'm just smitten! With both of them! Great conversation!
I would like to throw out a question for Mickey: I'm sympathetic to your moral view, but why not charity? Why must helping people be a function of government? Is the problem the word charity? Because the problem for government is the mechanism. It doesn't work the way it's drawn on paper. And it takes so long to get from here to there that no one remembers what the plan was once it doesn't pan out. Would not charity—updated to mean the competitive supplying of assistance to help meet human/critter/earth needs—be a better mechanism for dealing with the complex, overlapping problems we now face?
Jun '10
Re: Kaus/Limbaugh #4: Trump Boehner's Budget Deal with Medicare
Mickey made a great point about the WPA that I had not considered before. Rather than just giving people money as welfare benefits, why not require them to work to earn that money? Think about any neighborhood where many of the residents are unemployed and live off welfare and food stamps. If we required them to work for say 20 hours a week doing simple tasks like picking up litter, painting over graffiti, mowing lawns, etc. it would:
Same goes for all these folks who keep getting extended unemployment benefits. If we're paying them anyway we might as well at least get some work out of them in return. Makes a whole lot of sense to me!
Jul '10
Re: Kaus/Limbaugh #4: Trump Boehner's Budget Deal with Medicare
I'm afraid Mickey Kaus has received a somewhat distorted view of the deal with Medicare and Medicaid. First off, doctors accepting either do it as an act of charity. A recent schedule reimbursed doctors $5 for an office visit. In 1965, an office visit cost my family $20, not adjusted for inflation. Not only is what is or is not covered, and under what circumstances, a matter for a massive stack of regulations, but doctors under medicare are forbidden by law from discussing, prescribing, or billing uncovered treatments.
Those kinds of laws demand breakage, and doctors most certainly do. Any doctor worth his salt would chafe under such restrictions.
Extend this nonsense to the whole system, and your doctor is someone willing to see patients for $5. $40/hr, minus rent and receptionist (leave medical insurance out of the equation for a moment, since these wise guys will eliminate that), and you are paying for the privilege of saying you are a doctor.
Obviously, the numbers will be played with, but even under ObamaCare the numbers of doctors who said they would be leaving practice if it stood when it was passed were 49%.