Congressman Joe Wilson (R, South Carolina-2), he of the “You lie!” outburst last night, might take to heart a reminder from President Obama’s Tuesday address to the nation’s schoolchildren:
If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave.Let’s hope that Congressman Wilson can try harder to behave, by showing courtesy to others and not interrupting.
Speaking more seriously, I’ll note that Obama’s refusal to be rattled (“That’s not true” was his only response) offers a useful model for any teacher contending with disruption and rudeness. Keeping cool is the only way to go.
comments: 4
Excellent!
AMEN.
Personally, I'd like to Obama more "rattled," but by the opposite side from that which harbors the Joe Wilsons of the world.
But then, I guess that somehow, the most powerful man in the world just can't stand up against a few insurance companies. As Doug Henwood put it,
"A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization — the value of all the outstanding stock — of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs’ decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we’d save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.
"In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.
"Will Obama propose anything like that? Of course not. Instead, he’s going to propose that Americans be required to buy insurance, probably with some government subsidies. So instead of euthanizing the private insurance industry, Obama & the Dems are going to provide them with tens of millions of new customers — compelled to buy their product by law, and with some degree of public subsidy. That’s lunacy."
I favor a single-payer system, but I think that Obama is interested in proposing what’s possible.
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