Roosevelt

[Wayne Goodwin]

Anyone watching the two hour special about Roosevelt tonight on PBS ? Starts at 8pm and shows again at 10 pm . May be good to watch ....

[T2Friends]

I agree.  I have been watching each night.  Great series.

[crestofwaves]

I love to figure out who the voices are.  I got Paul Giamatti easily, and Eli Wallach, believe it or not;  I could not figure out that Meryl Streep was Eleanor.

Yes, he Burns tells an excellent story.  I remember watching The Civil War when we bombed Iraq back in 1990 instead of watching the actual war on CNN, then I really was sucked totally into it for the next several nights.

[crestofwaves]

I feel like I am in class this week with this documentary.

[ProblemAgain]

lots of parallels between the roosevelt presidency and the present, aren't there?

[crestofwaves]

All the "fixes" he tried to get the economy back on track--whoa--the conservatives must have had conniption fits. They are quite the same things Obama has tried, is trying. 

One big difference: the Roosevelts knew how to engage Congress and our president does not.

[ProblemAgain]

and in both instances, conservatives howled and screamed about socialism and marxism, yatta yatta yatta...

oh i was talking to a person about health insurance and so forth. (this is from preaffordable health care). he uses a cpap machine for breathing when he sleeps which is paid for thru his insurance that he has had for years thru his employer. anyway the machine he had broke. he notified the company and they told him they don't repair them anymore but to get a prescription from his doctor for a new one and they would ship him a replacement. he got the script and sent it and waited and waited and still no machine. finally he got pissed, went on the internet and bought the machine himself. the total for the machine was $400.00. a couple weeks later, his new replacement arrived. in digging thru the paperwork that came with his replacement to be paid by insurance is the bill...same machine, same brand, everything the same except the bill to the insurance company is $1,600.00   when he called them and told them the difference between the bills, he was told not to worry about it. there is a perfect example of why the cost of health insurance has gone up so much in the last 20 years, a lack of ethical behavior by the health care industry and the insurance companies that serve them rather than us

[crestofwaves]

Disgusting, really.  My eyes were opened by the article in Time a couple of years ago that addressed the costs in hospitals, etc.

[ProblemAgain]

this is almost a hijack (but then consider that one of teddy roosevelt's planks in the progressive party was universal health care which germany had as early as 1883 under otto von bismarck) anyway did you see the study done regarding the cost of tests, xrays, catscans and mri's etc. and the difference between the billings for cash, for insurance, for medicare and etc etc....? in some instances, the difference between a cash billing and a billing under insurance could be as much as 10 times the amount. i seriously doubt that paperwork and filing claims will multiply a cost to ten times the cash price. unfortunately one of the costs of getting medicare passed in '65 was that the negotiation for lower prices was disallowed as a sop to suppliers of all devices and medications. thus you have billings for 4 times the price you could find it for in a 15 minute internet search.

[crestofwaves]

Yes. I believe the article I was read was called Bitter Pill--it was years worth of investigative journalism into the disparity between what something cost actually and what hospitals charged insurance companies in their agreements.

[Wayne Goodwin]

That's why I bought my own wheel chair . Paid around $340 . I could get one through Medicare . Cost me around $65 per month for 13 months then it would be mind . Hard telling how much Medicare would have been charged for it in all ...

[crestofwaves]

Smart move, Wayne.

[P.A.]

Of course Roosevelt was working with a congress controlled by democrats. Not one that tried to block everything he did.