IGX

Turdacious wrote:I'm referring to Medicaid-- although Medicare could use reference pricing far more effectively to save money..
Not that the administration is committed to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independen ... #Reception

Agreed. IPAB was used to make the budget effects of the ACA look better, but I'm convinced that no one who voted for it expects it to not be gutted. And it's not just a matter of reference pricing. We currently pay for a lot of very expensive procedures that have either not been shown to work, at least not in all of the contexts in which they're used.

Better education for poor kids would include getting rid of perverse incentives to classify kids as disabled, breaking teacher unions, more focus on voc-ed, better NCLB standards, and clearer differentiation between needs of poor kids in urban and more rural communities.

I agree with this too, but we would also need to begin these interventions at a younger age than we do now. A lot of damage can be done in the first five years of a kid's life. Unfortunately, the current administration is focused on universal preschool, which sounds nice but is less likely to help than more targeted interventions.

I've rambled here about how I think Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are two sides of the same coin. This article is imperfect but it explains it better than I can.

This article kind of illustrates Spells' point with some of Barack O'money's largest billionaire contributors. Robber barons in the mold of the gilded age though I don't have any personal animosity towards a hardworking robber baron.