The Woes of Complexity

[alan1]

I was visiting a message board I used to post on and found this from 2 years ago (something I posted in Feb of 2010).

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The Woes of Complexity

Face it, you are stupid, my president thinks so.
In Mr Obama’s state of the union address he commented that the subject of health care was “complex” and that he had not “explained it enough”.
Wow, I think he had plenty of opportunity to explain it in his 25+ speeches about it. See them here, Speeches about Health Care (59) | In Obama's Words | The Washington Post
Gee, all that intelligence of his and you and I are just too damn dumb to understand him. Good thing he’s looking out for us unwashed masses.
It’s health care, not nuclear physics, guess which one I understand better.

The real story is that they took 2000+ pages to address health insurance reform, but are trying to sell it to us as health care reform. Is there anything in the bill that actually addresses the cost of health care?

Why do our politicians think you and I are just dumb and ignorant? We know how to read and we know how to form thoughts based upon our research. Are they scared of us? I hope so, they should be.

Mr Obama and the congresscritters can tell us it’s complex all they want to, but it’s actually kind of simple, just like their minds are. Their obfuscation is just confusing themselves.

Let’s all be stupid together and vote them out of office.
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I still think we should do what I said in the last sentence.

 

[editec]

Obama is right.

The Health Care delievery system, and finding a solution to it that serves the people is a highly complex problem.

One doesn't have to be stupid NOT to understand it.

There is no simply solution to this solving problem.

There are however, simply solutions that won't solve it.

Those simple solutions that solve nothing typically appeal to simply minds whose grasp of complex problems is so deficient that they imagine they truly get it.

They don't.

 

[rdean]

I was visiting a message board I used to post on and found this from 2 years ago (something I posted in Feb of 2010).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Woes of Complexity

Face it, you are stupid, my president thinks so.
In Mr Obama’s state of the union address he commented that the subject of health care was “complex” and that he had not “explained it enough”.
Wow, I think he had plenty of opportunity to explain it in his 25+ speeches about it. See them here, Speeches about Health Care (59) | In Obama's Words | The Washington Post
Gee, all that intelligence of his and you and I are just too damn dumb to understand him. Good thing he’s looking out for us unwashed masses.
It’s health care, not nuclear physics, guess which one I understand better.

The real story is that they took 2000+ pages to address health insurance reform, but are trying to sell it to us as health care reform. Is there anything in the bill that actually addresses the cost of health care?

Why do our politicians think you and I are just dumb and ignorant? We know how to read and we know how to form thoughts based upon our research. Are they scared of us? I hope so, they should be.

Mr Obama and the congresscritters can tell us it’s complex all they want to, but it’s actually kind of simple, just like their minds are. Their obfuscation is just confusing themselves.

Let’s all be stupid together and vote them out of office.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I still think we should do what I said in the last sentence.

Turns out there was a lot of things that address the cost of health care. They problem is Republicans have convinced themselves health care is bad. They seem to have a history of convincing themselves of all kinds of thing. From the strange, to the bizarre to the ridiculous.

 

[Greenbeard]

The real story is that they took 2000+ pages to address health insurance reform, but are trying to sell it to us as health care reform. Is there anything in the bill that actually addresses the cost of health care?

...yes. Herein lies the problem. The legislation is about 900-odd pages long, yet that certainly isn't 900 pages of insurance market reforms. Private insurance reform is in Title I (of ten). There's a good amount in that particular title, sure, from new marketplaces for individuals to look for coverage to new options for insurers to sell policies out-of-state and in multiple states. But that's only one section of the legislation.

The rest is Medicare and Medicaid reform (including program integrity), payment and delivery system reform to start changing the way health care is delivered to increase the value (health outcomes per unit cost) we get from it, quality measurement and public reporting, pricing transparency, health care workforce development, public health and prevention, acceleration of the FDA approval processes for certain biologics, and so on.

Those who think it's only health insurance reform are probably listening to what people talk about when discussing the ACA, which is probably the insurance market reforms 95% of the time (with the vast majority of that conversation focusing on a single provision, the individual mandate). Health care is indeed a little more complex than that. Lot of ins, lot of outs, lot of what-have-yous.

Why do our politicians think you and I are just dumb and ignorant? We know how to read and we know how to form thoughts based upon our research.

Perhaps because "we" complain about the audacity of someone trying to explain things to us because "we know how to read," yet we don't demonstrate the capability to even read a table of contents before determining what is and isn't in a piece of legislation.