Indefensible.

Which ones? Smokers? Insurance executives? Tobacco executives?

 

That's an amazing double-twist back-flip, Zeke. You admit that he's right and then insult him as though you proved him wrong.

 

400% of poverty where? Where I live, poverty X 400 is not even close to 80K. If you're talking somewhere like New York, 80K for a family of four is scraping by. It's not the poorest of the poor, but it's still poor. The bill isn't just targeted at the poorest of the poor, and that's why it's a pretty good bill. Why does everything have to be targeted to the absolute extreme, anyway?

 

Combined income of $80,000 for family of four in NYC is low-frills, barely paying the bills. I don't have a problem taxing smokers more to help fund health insurance for kids at this level.

Anybody consider the costs of leaving these millions of kids without health insurance?

 

What exactly does MCBamr's 80K figure prove even if it is accurate? Are we supposed to be shocked and appalled that this bill could theoretically provide healthcare to children of a family making that much? Sorry, not feeling it.

As has been said several times, this bill was not meant to cover the dirt poor or unemployed, it was meant to cover those who fall through the cracks in our flawed system: those who make too much for medicaid but can't get affordable quality health insurance through employment. Why should their children be screwed over because mom and pop are trying to make a decent wage? Right now, those families might be better off just quitting to be eligible for welfare and medicaid.

 

Or they could watch a regular TV instead of a $4,000 plasma TV. Or they could drive a used car instead of the newest Lexus. I'm tired of people saying they can't afford health insurance for their kids when they have all this other shit.

On that note, the Dems sure picked a heck of a family to throw in front of reporters ... and prove my point. Let's see ... they live in a house worth some 400K, their kids go to 20K a year school, they own their own business. Yeah, we should be paying for their health insurance. They didn't fall through the cracks. They axed the crack wide open and jumped right through.

 

Agreed. How dare a family of four with a total income of "up to" $80,000, living in a high cost-of-living area, fatten their bellies by sucking the government teet. Health coverage for the poor my ass. This will have every Dick and Sally Lower-Middle-Class-small-business-owner, or family-without-insurance-from-either-spouses-employer running junior to the doctor every time he catches the flu or breaks an arm. The nerve of these people.

On another note, has the federally-funded bridge-to-nowhere been completed yet?

 

Yep, plasma TV's are at the root of the health insurance crisis in this country. Right.

 

It's the modern day "Welfare Queen" argument. It makes less sense than it did the first time around.

When that gets tiresome they'll try to blame brown people.

Watch and see if I'm not right.

 

I wondered when this sewage would seep onto the board.
And almost everything Rush -- and Malkin and all the rest of them -- told you is wrong. The house wasn't worth 400k when they bought it. The kids are on heavy financial aid. The little girls is going to need intensive therapy for the rest of her life, and the boy was in a coma. But that doesn't matter because shit-for-brains talk-radio hosts and insane bloggers went stalking this family to feed their own prejudices and their mouthbreathing audiences. They don't give a rat's ass about sick kids or the common good. They believbe in bullying people who can't fight back. A passel of cowards, and liars besides.
Of course, why give money to SCHIP when we can buy commercial timers for fatheaded abstinence programs that don't work.

 

OT, do you happen to work for a cigarrette manufacturer? Because from my understanding, that's where the money to fund this bill was primarily going to come from, not the general public. You keep bleating about "we" being forced to pay for it with little regard for what the bill actually says. And, btw, it wouldn't be paying for "their" health insurance, only their children's.

And the $35 billion amount is a comparatively trifling figure next to the hundreds of billions we've pissed away to private contractors in Iraq and unnecessary pork in recent years. Why were you not on here expressing outrage at the Bush Administration for approving those expenditures? Why only when its a children's healthcare bill?