Reply #65: Your "par for the course for Dean bashers" was disrespectful [View All]

[dpbrown]

You've had my response, including the cites to places that showed the date Dean took office, deleted twice now.

The tone you took was irritating and disrepectful.

I "included" 1991 because Dean took office at roughly mid-year. I thought that would make it more "fair" not more "unfair." The point I made, if you read it not from the standpoint of expecting to be bashed, was that the numbers didn't show a dramatic upsurge under Dean, that the major argument in favor of Dean was that the numbers were unreliable, and that the high points in lack of coverage were all under Dean, anyway.

I concluded that the major point, and one not made by the original poster, was probably that Dean hadn't really made things better, insurance-wise - and maybe that was more significant than whether he made it worse or not.

Taking it out made little difference. The averages are still in the 10% range, and the peaks are still under Dean in lack of coverage.

Whether or not the numbers are unreliable, Dean still doesn't look like a miracle-worker in getting people covered with conventional health insurance in Vermont, despite a big infusion of federal dollars.

Dean will be open to being smeared as a "tax and spend" Democrat with his health care plan, because it can be summarized as simply throwing more money at a broken system to buy coverage by making private insurers even richer without making them any less likely to exclude people who are more likely to use the insurance - and that's the scheme that no plan other than universal single-payer addresses.

As a plan goes, universal single-payer is still a more economically sound option.

And as a baiting post, yours should have been the one deleted.

Dan Brown
Saint Paul, Minnesota