I'm confused. Is Michelle Bachmann 'filibustering' in the House???

[TrollBuster9090]

Bernie Sanders is 70, and after 8 hours of filibustering in the Senate, he looked less exhausted and less crazy than this. In fact, if not for the beard, I'd find her speech hard to distinguish from the old SCTV PHIL'S NAILS skit.

But people have commented on the fact that she didn't really offer an alternative to Obamacare. Well, we all know what the alternative is: Ryancare

Here are the two alternatives facing Americans in a nutshell.


OBAMACARE:
1. Mandate a minimum level of care that must be provided before you can call your plan a 'health insurance plan.' Otherwise, you'll get some plans that actually offer comprehensive healthcare, and some plans (offered for a cheaper price) that only cover HANGNAILS and knee scrapes. But that's buried in the fine print, so you'd never know until you had a coronary, and got sent the bill for a $100 000 hospital stay.

2. Having mandated the minimum level of coverage, put all the plans up on a government run exchange, so responsible consumers can compare them back to back, without fine print, tricky clauses, or obfuscation.

RYANCARE:
1. Don't mandate anything. No minimum level of care, no direct comparisons between plans in plain english. You're on your own, but we'll give you a COUPON for a FLAT AMOUNT of money to help you pay your premiums.

Which plan is more likely to keep prices low by encouraging direct competition, and which is more likely to just INFLATE the floor price of ALL plans to whatever the COUPON is worth?

Here's the deal, people: Free market capitalism DOES WORK, but ONLY if you
A) Forbid monopolies, thus ensuring competition, and
B) Ensure that CONSUMERS have access to ACCURATE and HONEST information about the products they're buying.
Obamacare does both. (Personally, I think variants of a single-payer system would work better, but Obamacare's guaranteed, back to back comparisons will certainly work better than the system we've just gotten rid of.)

Without these two things, there ISN'T really any 'free market competition' and defenders of that system aren't free market capitalists, they're 'plutocratic communists.' America was plundered by robber barons during the GILDED AGE because the government did NOT forbid monopolies. American free enterprise did not really take off until AFTER the anti-trust laws were brought in at the beginning of the 20th Century. And most of the CONTEMPORARY robber-barroning (on Wall Street) was accomplished by OBSCURING and OBFUSCATING the true value of products, confusing consumers to the point where they don't know the true value of what they're buying. We may have (sort of) outlawed monopolies, which worked for a few decades to bring us all prosperity, but NOW we have to tackle the problem of corporate obfuscation of value. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will do a lot in this regard, and that's why big corporations hate it so much, and will do anything to drown it in the bathtub.

When people claim to be defending free-market capitalism, what they are actually defending is GOVERNMENT-ENABLED free market capitalism.

[Drale]

1. You shouldn't make fun of Michelle's beard

for all you know its a hormone problem

[B Stieg]

8. No, I think Marcus is more of a buddy problem.

[stlsaxman]

2. Eugene Levy is a eugenius!

[stlsaxman]

3. aw man- i can't WAIT until BLR gets their hands on this...

they did such a great job on her campaign commercial!

[AtheistCrusader]

5. "No!" "Cut!"

[Plucketeer]

6. I don't know...

Could they make her sound any more looney than she already does???

[Mnpaul]

4. You hear it everyday

All the vulnerable women and children dying in Massachusetts.

Oh wait.....

[mlevans]

7. I cannot believe this woman actually listens to

the shit flowing out of her mouth. It's not as though I didn't already know she was completely deranged, it's just that this stuff is so extreme I have trouble believing she's not just playing with everybody. Too wild.