I put toothpaste in my hand instead of shaving cream.

I have a hard time understanding that logic. My insurance is only cheaper for me because I work under a union contract, it is no less expensive for my employer. We have given up work rules, pay increases and other benefits to maintain affordable insurance. By work rules I will give an example, in the bad old days if you were a CNC lather operator you ran one lathe and that is all you did.

In my world I run four robotic fed lathes, give a lunch break to the inspector maintain and adjust my lathes trouble shoot the robot when it hickups, maintain fluid levels in all remove finished stock and do whatever it takes to maintain production. This maintains my life style and that of my employer, so sorry if you think hard work should not be rewarded but is that not the american dream?

What type of insurance do you have? Who pays your healthcare if you have it.

Not very credible ......

Any proof?

That bloated tick never worked a day in his life. Modern Capitalism is not doing very many people much good right now either.

The minimum wage in Australia is 16 bucks an hour, Icant help but wonder why some of our Australian friends are not fighting to eliminate it and let the whims of the marketplace dictate terms of pay

Thats why the government needs to step in peoples health should not be a for profit business.

I pay 167 and some change a month for my family plan, ten dollar co pay and everything else is paid 100%. My union negotiated our insurance and we have given up some pay increases to get good affordable insurance. The point I am making is this. I KNOW I have a great plan but I also know others pay so much its almost unaffordable for them. That is the trouble its not Obamacare its not dem or republican its a social issue on all levels. Why was insurance so affordable to our parents generation and now its rising ten percent a year until no one can afford it?

I think its the end of republicans as we know them........ the people have had enough of the crazies.

True but you will not find the level of cognitive dissonance in a democrat or progressive many find the corporate serving democrats to be as vile as the republicans.

Take the shutdown as an example. The republicans took a stand on something Obama was re elected on, the supreme court upheld etc etc.

The republicans have no health care plan they are totally content to see prices rise ten percent a year ............forever. I welcome any government control on this health insurance fraud. Its a foot in the door to reigning in the bastards who would take food from kids mouths to line their own already over stuffed pockets .

Seriously? I am so amused at some of the moronic thought processes.

Some folks really think its ok to hold the economy hostage to get what you cant get by winning elections? We can talk about this after we default on our republican created debts, perhaps then reason may set in for some of you.

Logic is not a trait of being a republican ........ we all know this

Yea that's why he is a well respected professional

BILL MOYERS: And now to the people who refuse to let democracy work. The people who hate government so much they’ve shut it down. Unable to abide by the results of democracy when they don’t win, they turned on it.

Republicans have now lost three successive elections to control the Senate and they’ve lost the last two presidential elections. Nonetheless, they fought tooth and nail to kill President Obama’s health care initiative. They lost that fight, but with the corporate wing of Democrats, they managed to bend it toward private interests.

So we should be clear on this, Obamacare, as it’s known, is deeply flawed. Big subsidies to the health insurance industry. A bonanza for lobbyists. No public option. And as The New York Times reported this week, “Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law.” Largely because states controlled by Republicans refuse to expand Medicaid.

As far as our bought and paid for legislative process goes, Obama’s initiative made it through the sausage factory. Yet even after both the House and Senate approved it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court upheld it, the Republicans keep insisting on calling the law a “bill,” thumbing their noses and refusing to accept that it is enacted legislation.

Now they’re fighting to prevent it from being implemented. Here was their order of the day on Thursday from the popular right wing blog RedState.com:

“Congressmen, this is about shutting down Obamacare. Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don’t realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it. This is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until the President defunds Obamacare. And if he does not defund Obamacare, we leave the whole thing shut down.”

Once upon a time when I was a young man working on Capitol Hill, it was commonplace that when a bill became law, everybody was unhappy with it. But you didn’t bring down the government just because it wasn’t perfect. You argue and fight and vote and then, due process having been at least raggedly served, on to the next fight.

That was a long time ago. Long before the Tea Party minority, armed with huge sums of secret money from rich donors, sucked the last bit of soul from the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln. They became delusional. Then rabid. Like this:

SENATOR STEVE KING: If Obamacare is ever implemented and enforced, we will never recover from it. It is an unconstitutional takings of God-given American liberty.

BILL MOYERS: That’s false, of course. Just like those right-wing talking points that keep grinding through the propaganda mills of Fox News:

AINSLEY EARHARDT on Fox and Friends: Thanks to Obamacare, doctors will be forced to ask patients about their sex life, even if it has nothing to do with the medical treatment that they are seeking at the time.

BILL MOYERS: Not true.

MICHELLE MALKIN on Fox and Friends: That healthcare plan puts a discount on the lives of elderly people and would result in the redistribution of health away from the elderly and the infirm to other special favored interests and patients.

BILL MOYERS: Again, not true. Nor is this, from the multi-millionaire fabulist Rush Limbaugh:

RUSH LIMBAUGH from the Rush Limbaugh Show: What we now have is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world. Obamacare is just a massive tax increase, that all it is.

BILL MOYERS: That’s just a tiny sample of the lies and misinformation perpetrated by the right with the song and dance compliance of its richly paid mouthpieces. Sarah Palin set the bar for truth at about ankle height with those fictitious “death panels” that she still insists will decide our rendezvous with the Grim Reaper.

SARAH PALIN on Cashin' In: Of course there are death panels in there, but the important thing to remember is that’s just one aspect of this atrocious, unaffordable, cumbersome, burdensome, evil policy of Obama’s and that is Obamacare.

BILL MOYERS: Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees. They demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline. They demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled, and the big, bad regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities.

When the president refused to buckle to their extortion, they threw their tantrum. Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the Union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn the place down, sink the ship of state, and sow economic chaos to get their way. This says it all, they even shuttered the Statue of Liberty.

Watching all this from London, the noted commentator Martin Wolf, of the capitalist friendly Financial Times, says “America flirts with self-destruction.”

This man is the biggest flirt of all, Newt Gingrich. It was Newt Gingrich who twenty years ago spearheaded the right-wing’s virulent crusade against the norms of democratic government. As Speaker of the House he twice brought about shutdowns of the federal government once, believe it or not, because he felt snubbed after riding on Air Force One with President Clinton and had to leave by the backdoor.

It was also Newt Gingrich, speaker Gingrich, who was caught lying to congressional investigators looking into charges of his ethical wrongdoing. His colleagues voted overwhelmingly, 395 to 28, to reprimand him. Pressure from his own party then prompted him to resign.

Yet even after his flame out, even after his recent bizarre race for the presidency bankrolled with money from admiring oligarchs, even after new allegations about his secret fundraising for right-wing candidates, Gingrich remains the darling of a fawning amnesic media.

NEWT GINGRICH on Crossfire: I’m Newt Gingrich on the right.

BILL MOYERS: On CNN.com the other day he issued a call to arms to his fellow bomb-throwers, “…don’t cave on shutdown.”

At least let’s name this for what it is, sabotage of the democratic process. Secession by another means. And let’s be clear about where such reckless ambition leads. As surely as night must follow day, the alternative to democracy is worse.
© 2013 Public Affairs Television, Inc
Bill Moyers

Journalist Bill Moyers is the host of the new show Moyers & Company, a weekly series of smart talk and new ideas aimed at helping viewers make sense of our tumultuous times through the insight of America’s strongest thinkers.. His previous shows on PBS included NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers on Democracy, and Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special assistant for Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television. He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three George Polk awards and is the author of three best-selling books.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/07-11

Update.............

According to ABC News:

Eyewitness News has learned that among the bikers on the Henry Hudson last weekend, were five off-duty NYPD officers. Sources say at least two detectives witnessed the attack on Alexian Lien and did not directly intervene. And investigators are still working to determine what role, if any, was played by the other three officers. What is clear, sources say, is that the men did not begin to come forward until late Wednesday, four full-days after the incident.[1]

http://intellihub.com/2013/10/05/5-duty-cops-among-bikers-assaulted-man-front-family/

Well your wild claim of Soros ruining all sorts of poor countries cannot be found.

IF a person wishes to have reality based thinking one would have to take note of all the "poor" countries the US in general has destroyed or ruined, or if we prefer the propaganda term, "liberated".

Please tell me what countries and how he did it please.

As usual Mr Conrad you contribute nothing to the conversation but childishness. Please tell us your first hand experience with the healthcare in Switzerland.

Right now, we are witnessing an epic battle for the future of this country. And depending on how this battle turns out, America will either fulfill the ideals of its founders and become a society that works for everyone or surrender to the billionaire hustlers who want to destroy everything the Founders stood for.

The origins of this existential battle are pretty simple. Throughout this country's history, believers in two different visions of what American society should be have duked it out over every single aspect of public policy.

On the one hand, there is the vision of America as a "we society," a society that recognizes certain things, like health care or education, as basic rights, and agrees to provide these things in common to everyone, regardless of race or class.

This vision was shared by most of the founding fathers and by people like president Franklin Roosevelt, who proposed a Second Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union address that would have made economic rights like education, housing, and Social Security protected under the Constitution just like the rights to free speech.

"We society" Americans believe that we're all in this together and want to create a country that ensures that everyone can, if they wish, enjoy "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." They believe the best way to do this is to use government to regulate business and to provide things, like healthcare, that the free-market makes too expensive for everyday people to afford.

The other vision of society that has shaped this country's history sees America as a "me" society. Believers in "me society" America, like the Tea Party's favorite "philosopher" Ayn Rand, want individuals to get as much wealth as possible, even if doing so comes at the expense of the economy, the country, and even the planet.

The best way to do this, believers in a "me" society say, is to shrink government and let private enterprise or private charities provide services, like education or healthcare, that everyone needs to survive.

The richest .01 of Americans are natural defenders of a "me society." That's because doing so works to their benefit, and they frankly don't give a damn about the rest of us. If they get sick, they can afford the best hospitals; if they have a kid, they can send them to the best schools. All they really care about is protecting their wealth, and they do so by lobbying for policies that deregulate big business and big banks.

Today, the difference between "me society" and "we society" America is probably best represented by two wealthy donors: George Soros and David Koch. Both men are multi-billionaires, but use their wealth to fund organizations with very different values and goals.

While Soros sends money to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of La Raza, groups that ensure that our country provides equal opportunities for all, Koch and his brother Charles send their money to groups like the Heartland Institute and Mackinac Center, groups that work to dismantle protections for middle-class Americans and lobby for policies that benefit the corporate elite. Soros donates to programs which cut into the power of the wealthy and improve the lot of average read the rest at Americans; the Kochs donate to programs which increase the power of the .01 percent.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/51962/obamacare-the-gops-waterloo