Think medicare. It under pays providers by a substantial sum and is loosing money and has an unfunded liability of around 37 trillion dollars. Social Secuity was well run during its first decade. Congress got a hold of it soon thereafter. It’s going broke and has another multi trillion dollars unfunded liability.

The major problems in health care are caused by government: one is the employer provided health care. Second the state mandates and small markets. Third medical legal actions are heard in common courts rather than specialized court. Fourth medicare, medicaid and the other government run heath programs. There are others, but these four cause a dysfunctional health-care industry structure, and it is highly regulated today.

These problems are not addressed in the health-care plans. The health-care industry is impeded by this poor structure.

These structural problems need solution. A public healh-care plan does not address the solution issue and most likely will make matters worse. In a few years, it will become one of the critical health-care problems.

I see your point but there is one big problem with your blog. You wrote: “Then it occurred to me: Joe Lieberman is the Left’s Sarah Palin.” Mr. Lieberman is not “left”, he has been rather conservative and has acted pretty much like a Republican. I know that you were trying to create some sort of parallelism and that is all fine and good but it does not really work in this case. While Mr. Lieberman can and does make everything about him, that is hardly a quality unique to either Ms. Palin or Mr. Lieberman, it is really a necessary quality for any successful politician.

There is a saying in the acting business (which includes politicians and lawyers) “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake, you can succeed at anything.” Lying and being insincere are likewise necessary qualities for politicians but most are not every good at it. Most avoid saying anything at all to avoid being insincere for this very reason. It is difficult to construct a lie that works for large numbers of people, a multitude of lies are generally needed which are often contradictory to each other. This creates tension in the liar which is often communicated unintentionally to the audience. A dangerous situation which is easily avoided by making no definitive statement of any kind.

What Ms. Palin does better than anyone else is say things that are completely untrue with complete sincerity and honesty. Her audience can sense this quality and they respond positively to it. She can do this because she actually believes everything she says. When she said that she was opposed to ear-marking Federal funds for specific local projects (i.e. “Pork Barrel”) she really believed that. That she might be the governor of the state with the highest ratio of pork barrel dollars to citizen (twice as much as the next closest state) and that she herself might have requested and engineered such funding caused her not the slightest confusion or tension. The two issues are completely unrelated, it is just another example of the liberal media ganging up on the good simple Christians people of Alaska. Whatever it is she is saying at the moment she really and sincerely believes and that it might contract something she really and sincerely said five minutes earlier or that it might make no sense whatsoever is not a problem. This is why her fans love her.

This is Mr. Lieberman completely lacks, he totally believes in nothing except re-election. He is completely unconvincing when he explains why he says he will filibuster the health care reform bill. He is doing it because the insurance industry, largely based in Hartford, is against it and it shows. His lack of true belief and sincerity positively pours out of the very pores of his skin.

Ms. Palin truly believes everything she says while Mr. Lieberman truly believes nothing he says.