The Swamp find Giuliani relating his plan for combatting rising Health Care costs to Plasma screen tests:

“Plasma TVs. Gosh, they used to cost $15,000. They now cost $2,000. Or the TV’s that used to cost $3,000 or $4,000. They now cost $200 or $300. How did they get driven down in price?” Giuliani asked the group rhetorically on Sunday.

“They didn’t get driven down in price by lower quality. The quality’s higher. They got driven down in price because millions and millions of people bought them. And then, the people who made them realize that we can price the product much lower, but if we sell a lot of them, we make more money. That’s not happening with our health care,” he said.

Though he says he’ll release more details in the next few months, Giuliani’s says his plan is aimed at a broad middle—an estimated 45 million Americans who make too much money to be covered by Medicaid and earn too little to be covered by an employer-sponsored insurance policy or afford one on their own.

Not to sound like a skeptic but under this logic why am I paying $4 for a bottle of 24 Advil’s which is basically a mild pain reliever thats been around for quite awhile and used by millions of people and bought in bulk by hospitals all over the nation? Shouldn’t Advil cost like, a cent or two a pill instead of sixteen cents and shouldn’t it be going down in price every year instead of up like TV’s do?

We know a large percentage of costs associated with health care already are administrative costs which include advertising to stay competitive? If everyone is fighting to get you to buy into their private program wouldn’t that raise the cost of advertising & overall marketing?

I have been reading the Health Care plans of the candidates and I have written pretty detailed posts about Obama’s & Clinton’s. Last week Rudy Giuliani started talking about his so I wanted to note why I haven’t done the same for the Republican former mayor as I have for the two Democratic Senators.

Frankly the Giuliani plan had almost no details other than he wouldn’t give you Universal Health Care, wouldn’t figure out what to do with the uninsured BUT would provide tax incentives for individuals to deduct the cost of private plans with the idea that Americans seeking private insurance would take the burden off of employers.

The problem is he provided no information on how he would fund such a system.

Now I have been and will continue to be critical of the enormous price tags that will result from the Edwards & Obama plans but as Media Matters points out some reporting has gone after the Dem plans as big government spending machines but have ignored the price tag and the lack of explanation of a Giuliani plan. The Democrats on the other hand have indicated they would roll back the Bush tax plans as one way of paying for theirs. The problem is they also have other plans on how to spend that money and the numbers don’t entirely add up.

In short there is little substance to the Giuliani plan which is why I haven’t written more.

In the Republican debate which no one I’ve talked to watched yesterday Mitt Romney referred to Rudy Giuliani as being “pro-gay-marriage” and he now takes it back saying Rudy is “pro-civil-union”. We can all breath a sigh of relief.

Found via Michelle Malkin:

Photo from Associated Press which reports protests broke out against Senator Barack Obama’s comment that he would “bomb Pakistan” if he had actionable intelligence against al Qaeda.

More info and pictures at Gateway Pundit

A story in the Times Caucus Blog about Nancy Robinson who is a gun-control advocate from Boston and came to the blogging convention YearlyKos seeking support for her issue and Andrew Rasiej who co-founded TechPresident. Robinson found little support from the blogosphere and Rasiej gave her (and the paper) an understanding of why and how to resolve it.

The basic idea? Bloggers are trying to unite the party, avoid the divisiveness over an issue like gun-control and many are gun-owners themselves. Rasiej’s suggestion, start blogging yourself and tie the site into a database of gun-deaths around the country to put a personal face to the issue. Read the article for a recap of the conversation and some thoughts about blogging and lobbying in general.