velvetpage: (stabbity)
[personal profile] velvetpage
You know that thing about how 45 million Americans have no health insurance? Well, the McCain campaign has come up with a way of making the problem disappear.

I'd like to direct your attention to the following quote:

Mr. Goodman, who helped craft Sen. John McCain's health care policy, said anyone with access to an emergency room effectively has insurance, albeit the government acts as the payer of last resort. (Hospital emergency rooms by law cannot turn away a patient in need of immediate care.)

"So I have a solution. And it will cost not one thin dime," Mr. Goodman said. "The next president of the United States should sign an executive order requiring the Census Bureau to cease and desist from describing any American – even illegal aliens – as uninsured. Instead, the bureau should categorize people according to the likely source of payment should they need care.

"So, there you have it. Voila! Problem solved."


I don't even know where to begin categorizing the monumental stupidity of that statement. Does this guy really not understand that going to an emergency room for the care offered there - and being billed into bankruptcy for it - is very, very different from getting routine care on a regular basis before the problems get out of hand? Has he never heard the term, "preventative medicine"?

I just don't get it. How can this possibly be anything positive? It's just another way to sidestep a problem and pretend it doesn't exist, when millions of people can attest that, yes, it DOES. I would have more respect for a campaign that said, "You know, this is a problem, but it's something that should be solved on state level." That's passing the buck, true, but it's politically defensible and it at least recognizes that there is a problem. But this? It's assinine and dishonest and uncaring.

Link courtesy of [livejournal.com profile] wyldraven.
From: [identity profile] velvetpage.livejournal.com
In Canada's defense, less than a third of our nation voted for the current PM, and his government is a minority one. The majority of us DIDN'T vote for him, and won't next time, either - but he'll land another minority because there is no one better at the moment who has a prayer of winning any seats west of Ontario.
From: [identity profile] wrkclsvoice.livejournal.com
I have to brush up on my Parliamentary system of government. I always liked how flexible your system is, but ours has the benefit of simplicity.
From: [identity profile] velvetpage.livejournal.com
In a nutshell: we don't elect a prime minister directly, we elect a member of parliament in each electoral district (riding.) The party with the most members elected is asked to form a government by the Queen's representative (who is appointed by the previous prime minister) and the leader of that party becomes the PM.

This means that in order to get a seat in Parliament, a new party has to get more votes than any other party in one riding. If there's only two parties, that means 50% of the vote, but it's quite common for three or four parties each to get a sizeable chunk of the vote in any given riding. Most of the time, though, it's a three-way race. There have been several elections lately where the Liberals got a majority of the seats in Parliament while taking home about 35% of the popular vote, because the vote was split so finely in many ridings that the count had to be very precise. The guy who won in my riding last time won by less than seven hundred votes, out of some forty thousand cast.

We need parliamentary reform, but the parties that are in power have no interest in seeing it happen - they're benefitting from this system quite nicely.
From: [identity profile] wrkclsvoice.livejournal.com
Your system is much more Third Party friendly, but still "winner take all" like ours. You can have a party in power that 66% of the electorate didn't vote for. That is interesting... You don't do the "coalition government" thing up there?

It's also less democratic since the people don't pick the PM directly. Canada is a more advanced country than the US, so it works, even if it's imperfect.
From: [identity profile] velvetpage.livejournal.com
In most republics, the office of the Head of State is separate from the office of the Prime Minister. France, for example, has both an elected president and a Prime Minister elected in a system similar to Canada's. The States is weird that way in that the two offices are combined, leading to one fewer check and balance.

We do the coalition government thing if there's a minority, if two parties can agree enough to make it work. At the moment they can't, so we're going one bill to the next while the PM looks for a way to bring down parliament.

There have been suggestions about proportional representation. There was even a vote on it in Ontario last year. But it was defeated, mostly because the information about it was bad or non-existent. One of the reasons I sometimes vote Green is because the Greens promise to bring in some form of PR, and I think it would be a better thing for the country if they did.
From: [identity profile] wrkclsvoice.livejournal.com
Hello again! I thought I'd ask another question, if you don't mind, about the parliamentary system. I often hear of "no confidence votes" and governments falling with special elections being called to replace them. This idea is very appealing because Americans can make some pretty bad decisions in the ballot booth, and it would be great to have another way to get rid of an Administration or Congress, other than waiting till the next election. The Bush Administration has been eight years of "no confidence" and it would be under constant pressure to be more fair and effective if it could be fired. Does Canada do this, and how does it work? Thanks.
From: [identity profile] velvetpage.livejournal.com
Certain bills are always bills of confidence (like a finance bill) and other bills can be made bills of confidence at the discretion of the person presenting them, and there is such thing as a simple confidence motion. What happens is that every MP votes, and if the motion/bill passes with more than half the MPs voting for it, then Parliament is said to have confidence in the government and it stands. If it fails, the result is that Parliament does NOT have confidence in the government, and the prime minister is required to request that the governor-general dissolve parliament, which triggers an election.

However - and this is a big however - the two biggest parties are centrally controlled, meaning the leader of the party requires his MPs to toe the party line. They can and do kick people out of the party who don't follow closely enough. If a party has a majority government and tells its members that they must vote the party's bill or risk being kicked out of the party, most will do it. So votes of no confidence usually happen in minority government situations, when all opposition parties can gang up on the governing party and bring them down.

This time around, everyone knew the Liberals weren't ready for an election. The PM has spent half his term in office playing political chicken, proposing things he knew the Liberals would hate, in order to tempt them into a vote of no confidence. Since Canadians didn't want an election, there was a chance that forcing an election would backfire on the Liberals, resulting in a majority government for the Conservatives. But the Liberals refused to rise to the bait, so Harper dissolved Parliament without waiting for a vote of no confidence.

May 2020

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