The bailout of the banking industry was the result of decades of Reagan policy making carried out by both Democratic and Republican neoliberals that shifted risk from corporations to the American public.  It is only the tip of iceberg. This shifting of risk is the flip side of the coin to wage stagnation and deflation that acts to increase the debt and loses of the American people.

To understand, why this is the case requires an understanding of what risk is.  This is not an easy task.  However, to have a working definition, let's just say that risk is the chance in any given transaction for one to be a winner or a loser. It is the concept of working the odds. What are the  odds that you will obtain a job that will cover your debt from college?  What are the odds that you will have enough money to pay for health care premiums and save money? What are odds of bank failure if they are too big to fail?

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To obtain cost containment, the public option needs to have the ability to negotiate pricing. This should be obvious to anyone who claims to be concerned with fiscal responsibility, the debt, the deficit and economic issues in general. The great lie of the Blue Dogs is their claim that they care about fiscal responsibility when clearly they do not give a rat's ass about fiscal issues outside of how they can use such debates to advantage regressive interests.

Indeed, one of my concerns was that the bill coming out of the Waxman committee would harm fiscal responsibility by restraining price negotiation. By so doing, the Blue Dogs showed their true color because price negotiation is one of the ways you would think one would attempt to reduce the cost of any such bill to the American voters.

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Earlier today, I happened to catch John McCain on a news show. He was making the claim that oil prices had fallen because of President George W. Bush lifted the Executive Ban on drilling for oil in ANWR and off-shore areas in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Pacific Ocean.

I didn't really pay much attention to his claim until I received an email from a conservative mailing list I signed up for that made the same claim. It looks like this is going to be a new line of attack from the Right, so I decided to investigate the claim. There should be enough information in this diary and the linked articles to help any of you win a discussion on this issue.

A search for a video or an online article with McCain's quote in it wasn't available. However, here is a quote from the conservative mailer I received. It contains another quote from a columnist in the Toledo Blade who is making the same claim.

More after the jump...

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There is a tendency on big issues for people to want to either a) personalize it because it's so big, b) ignore it all together or c) coming up with tweaking that does nothing but sustain the status quo. The problem is that the reason to change health can be understand as an issue of systemic failure, not charity. This has been the mistake of the left to define the debate in terms of those who do not have healthcare due to poverty or insufficient income rather than as a system that improperly insures even those who do have healthcare insurance when compared to other countries. That is to say that 8 percent inflationary increases per year or expected percentage of GDP increase to 19.6 percent  by 2016 from 15 percent now and even more so going further into the future is not sustainable economically when this is compared to the outcomes of healthcare coverage in America. Remember this stat- we pay twice as much for healthcare in America on average compared to other similar countries of our status, but our outcomes are typically worse off than other countries. Tweaking can not solve this problem. It will only create the illusion of change but leave the structural problems in play.

Before going into further detail on why the present healthcare system in America is not sustainable, let's discuss a brief history of healthcare. History is frankly not something we Americans excel at, but this is the very thing that entrenched interests can use against you to continue their goals of preventing change.

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