To Quote James Carville
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Obama's health care plan will be written by a committee whose head says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it, and whose members are exempts from it, signed by a president who smokes in secret, funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that is broke.
THE PRESIDENT:"...Now, I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care
DAVID LEONHARDT: Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.
THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.
So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.
And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.
I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.
DAVID LEONHARDT: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
DAVID LEONHARDT: So how do you — how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
"Right now, insurance companies are rationing care. They are basically telling you what's covered and what's not. They're telling you, 'We'll cover this drug but we won't cover that drug. You can have this procedure or you can't have that procedure. So why is it that people would prefer having insurance companies make those decisions rather than medical experts and doctors figuring out, you know, what are good deals for care and providing that information to you as a consumer and your doctor so you can make good decisions?"
"The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for 'death panels' that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that it's too expensive to let her live anymore, "I am not in favor of that."
The higher you aspire the more you grow.
How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.
He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.
It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge.
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise,terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.
Our strength lies in our intensive attacks and our barbarity...After all, who today remembers the genocide of the Armenians?
I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.
The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
The art of leadership. . . consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention . . . .
Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.
I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.
I don't see much future for the Americans... It's a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities... My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance... Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it's half Judaized, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?