According to an article posted online at the Christian Science Monitor website today, recent polls are now beginning to indicate a very large majority of Americans are beginning to oppose the phony, baloney “health care reform” bill that Democratic Party President Barack Obama quickly signed into law last week because they finally realize it “will cause [health care] costs to rise and quality of care to drop”:
Some 55 percent of Americans expect their own costs for healthcare to be higher because of the reforms, and 60 percent say the nation’s overall health tab will rise, according to a Washington Post poll…. Separately, a USA Today/Gallup poll found 64 percent saying the law ‘will cost the government too much.’…
Forty-four percent anticipate that the quality of their care will decline as a result of the reforms, while only 18 percent expect healthcare quality to rise, the Washington Post survey found. Similarly, 49 percent in a Rasmussen Reports survey said they think the quality of care will be adversely affected….
Although Democratic Party hacks will make arguments claiming these polls are skewed because hordes of crazed Tea Party fanatics are manipulating public opinion, the truth is these sentiments more closely echo — if not mimic — criticisms of the so-called “health care reform” bill made by persons who support establishing a single-payer “Medicare for all” type health care system within the United States.
For example, in an article published in the Sacramento Bee earlier this week, Dr. Claudia Chaufan, vice president of the California Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, a pro single-payer group, wrote that Obama’s bill “further enriches and entrenches a profit-driven health insurance industry that makes money when it succeeds in not paying medical bills.”:
It forces millions of Americans to buy the insurance industry’s shoddy products or pay a fine, even as it offers eligible ones subsidies – courtesy of taxpayers – to purchase those products….
Millions of middle-income people will be mandated to buy commercial health care policies costing up to 9.5 percent of their income. Yet those policies will cover as little as 60 percent of “covered services,” leaving them vulnerable to financial ruin if they become seriously ill….
People with employer-based coverage will be locked into their plans’ “preferred providers’ networks.” So yes, workers will “keep their plans if they like them” (assuming they can afford the ever-increasing prices and don’t lose their jobs, or their employers don’t drop their plans), yet will have to keep them even if they don’t like them.
Insurers will be handed at least $447 billion in taxpayer money to subsidize the purchase of these policies …
Health care costs will continue to skyrocket because the bill will do nothing to reduce the $400 billion wasted every year pushing paper to market thousands of plans and separate people according to eligibility criteria, services covered, etc….
The much-vaunted insurance regulations -– e.g. ending denials on the basis of pre-existing conditions –- are riddled with loopholes. For instance, older people can be charged up to three times more than their younger counterparts …
Rose Ann Demoro, Executive Director of National Nurses United, AFL-CIO, and the California Nurses Association, wrote in the Huffington Post that the legislation Congress passed “fails to deliver on the promise of a single standard of excellence in care for all and instead makes piecemeal adjustments to the current privatized, for-profit healthcare behemoth”:
[T]his bill requires people — in the midst of the mass unemployment and the worse economic downturn since the Great Depression — to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket to big private companies for a product that may or may not provide health coverage in return. Too many people will remain uninsured, individual and family healthcare costs will continue to rise largely unabated and private insurers will still be able to deny claims with little recourse for patients.
As I’ve alluded to before in a previous posting, the so-called “health care reform” bill has very little to do with health care and has practically everything to do with bailing out Wall Street billionaires who made massive investments in private health insurance companies that now face declining revenues as a result of a rapidly shrinking customer base.
Since 2000, private health insurers have lost more than nine million customers and corrupt Democratic Party politicians have come to their rescue with this scam to prop them up by forcing millions of new people to purchase their defective, over-priced policies and subsidize their obscene profit margins with taxpayer money.
In order to ram this latest Wall Street bailout down the throats of millions of ordinary Americans, the Democrats masqueraded this giveaway as a “health care reform” bill and trotted out their snake-oil salesman, President Obama, to bamboozle the public into believing that being fleeced by the private health insurance industry is good for their health.
But if the latest polls are indicative of anything, it does seem to strongly suggest that a good chunk of the American public is slowly but surely beginning to realize that they’re going to be screwed over — and screwed over pretty badly — by the phony, baloney “health care reform” bill once its various provisions begin to kick in over the next decade or so.
How will this affect the upcoming election? Voting for Republicans to get rid of the Democrats is useless. Most people don’t realize it, but key components of the bill the Democrats rammed through Congress are almost modeled word-for-word on proposals introduced or backed by prominent Republican Party politicians in the 1990s.
For example, Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and a well-known Democratic Party apologist, was actually forced to admit not too long ago — albeit in a very weak and timid way — that the bill Obama put his signature on was “a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican … foundation”:
[D]on’t believe anyone who says Obama’s health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. The New Deal foundation would have offered Medicare to all Americans or, at the very least, featured a public insurance option.
What accounts for this switcharoo? Why have Democrats been cheerleaders for legislation that one time was being championed by Republicans? Its simple. The private health insurance industry spent twenty years trying to get the Republicans to pass it, and they couldn’t do it; so in their moment of desperation, they turned to the Democrats to get the job done.
Given that it’s quite clear both the Democrats and Republicans are in bed with the same Wall Street billionaires who are robbing this country blind, what should we do electorally? Stop making excuses and start casting your ballot for candidates that best represent your interests. If you’re tired of plutocrats picking your pockets, stop wasting your votes on their pawns.
And for purposes of disclosure, the author of this missive is the Green Party Candidate for U.S Senate in California.
Although Democratic Party hacks will make arguments claiming these polls are skewed because hordes of crazed Tea Party fanatics are manipulating public opinion, the truth is these sentiments more closely echo — if not mimic — criticisms of the so-called “health care reform” bill made by persons who support establishing a single-payer “Medicare for all” type health care system within the United States.
Ah..the old “it’s not liberal enough” thing.
Here’s an interesting read from Salon:
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/03/12/single_payer
[snip]
Like so much else about the healthcare debate, it comes down to math. “I would say that in the Senate, there are at most 10 votes for a single-payer plan,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a self-described democratic socialist, who isn’t shy about his own preference for that kind of solution, told Salon this week. “In the House, I have no idea but it’s a small minority … It’s absurd to say, ‘Mr. President, go forward and make your bill single-payer,’ when you’ve got 10 percent of the Congress supporting you.”
[snip]
Now why would only 10% of the Congress support single payer? Well let’s see…social security is in the red, medicare is close or already in the red with horrific fraud. We are already trillions (more) in debt…forever. Starting to get the picture?
Nobody follows my advice, but I like giving it anyway. And my advice to you is to run as a democrat. I just got back from the green party website and, honestly, the difference between today’s democrat and the green party is negligible.
Duane, Duane, Duane. This bill more than most seems to be a sort of Rorschach test. A lot of us look at it and see the millions of lives it will save and improve, and how it finally reins in a lot of insurance abuses, and how it’s the first progress on health care in 35 years, and how difficult it was to even get this through today’s whorish Washington, and how even this thin gruel is practically causing a civil war due to all the Republican fearmongering.
Other people, like you, can look at it and see nothing but corruption. You’re at odds, you realize, with many of America’s most principled leftists, like Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky, tireless critics of the Dems from the left, who still say that they would “hold their nose and vote for the bill” because it is progress and will save lives. Not to mention Congress’ greatest single-payer progressives, Dennis Kucinich and Senator Bernie Sanders, who after striving mightily to make it a better bill, still find it well worth supporting and even being proud of.
(An aside comment on your choice of that first cartoon – I can just imagine how fiercely critical you would have been of the first, weak, versions of Social Security and Medicare; you would have called FDR and LBJ corrupt whores, and you would have added that LBJ was a big warmonger in Vietnam and that if he just stopped the war he could have afforded a much better Medicare bill; and you would have been partly right… plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)
When YOU become a Senator – after you beat Barbara Boxer and Campbell/Fiorina/DeVore – you can be the first Senator on the Left who wants to repeal this bill and return to the status quo ante. Republicans will embrace you as an unexpected and useful ally! Think of it – a left-wing Senator who wants to return to a time of pre-existing conditions, of rescission, of all those tens of millions of Americans remaining uninsured and living on a tightrope.
As middleground just pointed out, Senator Sanders sadly told a group of disappointed progressives that only maybe ten senators currently support single payer. (I thought he said eight, but okay ten.) So when YOU become a senator, that’ll make eleven! (Unless Barbara was one of Sanders’ ten; she probably is, as she’s one of the most liberal Senators – in that case it’ll still be ten.) Then you can LEAD THE CHARGE to repeal this terrible bill, and bring us back to the status quo ante – until such time as 40 or 50 more pro-single payer folks join you in the Senate! Maybe much later in this century. Won’t that be wonderful!
This is why I said last week that you don’t seem to be serious, that you seem to be engaged in “protest theater.”
If you were serious you’d be getting behind Alan Grayson’s Medicare You Can Buy Into bill, the next essential step to improve the current legislation, give Americans real choice, bring down costs, and chip away further at big insurance’s power. Oh yeah, can’t do that – Grayson is a Democrat, and so are his 80+ co-sponsors.
As everyone knows, single payer will start in the individual states, which is why Senator Sanders went to the mat with an amendment to make it possible for each state to go that route if they chose; California has a good chance of being the first (either under Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, or more likely under Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom five or six years from now.) So if you’re serious you should be putting your massive energy into supporting SB 810 (as your own Green Party has been for years.) Problem though – it’s written by Democrats and supported by all the Democrats in Sacramento (except Lou Correa.)
Much easier to throw stones from the sidelines than to help slowly push the Big Stone of Progress.
And this is where I pivot, to join Duane in defending single-payer from misinformed reactionaries like “middleground.” *sigh* What a life.
Now why would only 10% of the Congress support single payer? Well let’s see…social security is in the red, medicare is close or already in the red with horrific fraud. We are already trillions (more) in debt…forever. Starting to get the picture?
I’ll begin by ignoring your alarum bells about the social security crisis (a simple fix) and Medicare fraud (addressed quite well in this latest legislation, hello Duane)
The biggest reason our nation’s debt keeps growing is out-of-control medical costs. And the only way to really start bringing them down is a single-payer universal system like all other civilized nations have. (The latest bill *euphemism alert* “bends the cost curve.” That means costs continue to go up but just not as fast as before.)
The 30% of administrative waste that private corporations eat up while insuring us very unreliably can be cut right out. Also integral to single-payer is the ability to purchase drugs in bulk, something Obama gave away to Big Pharma last year in return for their support. That and other aspects of a single-payer universal system will do much more than “bend the cost curve,” they will CUT costs by many hundreds of billions. So someone who cares about all this RED INK should be supporting single-payer.
I know conservatives like middleground can’t get their heads around it, but that’s the idea of single-payer – SAVING money for the American taxpayer & government, not wasting it!
Hi Vern,
It’s late (or very early) here in EDT, so I’m only going to tackle your patronizing response to medicare fraud. Actually, I’ll let the huffpost do it for me.
blah blah blah…”Improper payments — in the wrong amounts, to the wrong person or for the wrong reason — totaled an estimated $54 billion in 2009.
blah blah blah…President Obama now wants to deploy an army of so-called high-tech “bounty hunter auditors” to root out waste, fraud and abuse within the government’s health insurance programs. Sounds like a great idea to me — if it works.
and blah blah blah… The White House says these private auditors could recover least $2 billion of our tax dollars over the next three years. That’s a significant savings, to be sure, but it also seems like a drop in our 54 billion dollar bucket of losses.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-dimond/crime-on-the-health-care_b_509402.html
This is your idea addressed quite well? $2B over 3 years on $54B ANNUAL “improper payments”.
Now…can you just imagine the abuse in a single-payer medicare for all system. Still think it would “break” the cost curve?
The trouble with the left is that they never fully understand the ramifications of their actions.
Or to quote Bertrand Russell: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
#4 mentally unsound,
Thought you might find this helpful;
How Health Care Reform Reduces the Deficit in 5 Not-So-Easy Steps
Americans think the bill is too expensive because they don’t understand its cost controls.
By Ezra Klein
It’s hard to overstate how important the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—which makes the official judgments on how much bills cost and save—is in Washington. “I consider CBO God around here,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, recently said.
But that’s a faith peculiar to Washington, D.C. The rest of the country doesn’t know what the CBO is, and it doesn’t care. “Washington may live and die by the pronouncements of the Congressional Budget Office,” wrote the pollsters Doug Schoen and Scott Rasmussen in the Wall Street Journal, “but 81 percent of voters say it’s likely [health care reform] will end up costing more than projected.”
That’s left Democrats in a worst-of-both-worlds situation: They’ve built a bill that Washington’s toughest scorekeeper says will cut the deficit by more than a trillion dollars over 20 years. They’re getting attacked for the taxes and Medicare reforms that save all that money. But the country doesn’t believe the savings are real.
One of the problems Democrats have had is that it’s very easy to understand the one thing the bill does to spend money—purchase insurance for people who can’t afford it—and considerably harder to explain the many things it does to save money. Another is that a lot of the savings have to do with changing how medicine is practiced, which people are less familiar with than how insurance is purchased.
But the fact that the cost controls are complicated and numerous doesn’t mean they’re absent, or that they won’t work. Here’s a guide to a few of the bill’s best ideas, and how they work:
Create a competitive insurance market:
This is the bill’s first, and most important, step. Right now, the insurance market’s version of competition is pretty brutal. Companies compete to avoid the sickest people and sign up the healthiest people. Offering the best coverage for the lowest cost isn’t much of a priority, because most consumers don’t know whose coverage is best, and the ones who really do know are probably sick customers who spend their days researching this stuff.
Outlawing the bad kind of competition while enabling the good kind, which the bill does, is more than just a humanitarian measure. It’s a cost control. The insurance “exchanges” imitate the market in which federal employees (including congressmen) purchase their health care insurance. Participating insurers can’t discriminate based on pre-existing conditions, they have to answer to regulators if they attempt to jack up premiums, and consumers will be able to rate their insurers, a rating that everyone else will see when shopping for their insurance.
If all goes well, consumers will be able to log onto the exchange’s Website, compare insurance plans, and choose their favorite. That means insurers will have to compete for customers. As any free-market conservative will tell you, that should drive prices down and quality up. If it doesn’t, insurers will have some annoyed legislators to answer to: The bill says congressmen and their staff members need to buy their insurance from these exchanges, too.
The Medicare Commission:
The next cost control worth mentioning is an effort by Congress to solve the problem of, well, Congress. Medicare’s cost problem is, in many ways, a political problem: Saving money means cutting someone’s profits or someone’s benefits, and politicians are afraid to do either.
Enter the Independent Medicare Advisory Board. Modeled off of the highly-respected (but totally toothless) Medicare Payment and Advisory Commission, IMAC is a 15-person board of independent experts chosen by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and empowered to cut through congressional gridlock. IMAC will write reforms that bring Medicare into like with certain spending targets. Congress can’t modify these proposals, it can’t filibuster these proposals, and if it wants to reject them, it needs to find another way to save the same amount of money. Making the process of passing tough reforms easier is the single most important thing you can do to make sure tough reforms actually happen.
A tax on “Cadillac plans”:
The least popular, but most direct, cost control is the tax on expensive, employer-provided coverage. Today, the average employer who offers insurance pays more than 70 percent of a worker’s premiums, all of it tax-free. This amounts to an annual $250 billion subsidy for private insurance for people with good jobs. But it’s not just the size of the subsidy; it’s how we use it that matters. People have their employers pay for their health-care insurance, which means individuals don’t know how much their insurance really costs and don’t have as much incentive to keep those costs down. Imagine the pressure for cost control if the 70 percent that employers pay were coming out of our own pockets, instead of quietly coming out of our wages.
In 2018, the proposed excise tax on so-called “Cadillac plans” slaps a 40 percent tax on every dollar spent on an insurance plan above $27,500 annually. So if your plan costs $27,600, the final $100 bucks would be taxed (technically, the insurer pays the tax, but it’ll pass that onto your employer). But the idea isn’t that people will pay this tax. It’s that they, or their employers, evade it by choosing insurance that holds its costs down more aggressively. That gives insurers who hold costs down a competitive advantage against insurers who don’t. because those who don’t are not only more expensive, but also paying a hefty tax on their excess spending.
Medicare “bundling” programs:
The most obviously illogical part of our current health care system is that we pay doctors the way we pay car dealers: They get more money for every item they sell. But while we aren’t afraid to ignore a car dealer’s recommendations, we are afraid to disagree with our doctors. As you’d expect, this pushes costs higher.
The health-care bill seeds Medicare with many experiments to change this status quo, the most immediately promising of which are the “bundling” programs. Instead of getting paid for everything they do to help a diabetic, hospitals will get paid once for treating that person’s diabetes and all related conditions over a certain period of time. If this leads to lower costs and doesn’t harm patients, it will be expanded. That would be the beginning of the end of paying for quantity of treatment, and the beginning of paying for quality of treatment.
Changing the politics of reform:
Republicans and Democrats both agree that we need more cost control in the health-care system. But politicians don’t like to actually cut costs, because those votes reduce benefits and make people angry. So we’ve played a game in the past: We passively control costs by letting people become and stay uninsured, or by letting their insurance deteriorate and cover less, because those things don’t require a vote in Congress.
But because the individual mandate in the bill brings everyone into the insurance market and the subsidies for those who can’t afford insurance on their own put Washington on the hook for costs, Congress will have to get serious about holding costs down in the system. The alternatives, for lawmakers, are high costs infuriating constituents who’re being forced to buy something they can’t afford, or yawning deficits forcing them to vote to take subsidies — and thus health-care coverage — away from people who currently have it. The days of letting inertia win the day and watching the system fall apart on its own are over.
There’s more, of course. Five is just a good round number. The bill’s basic theory is to try pretty much everything in the hopes that some of it works out. The net effect is to make reform a continuous, rather than occasional, process, with different cost cops patrolling different beats. Insurers will have to work hard to stay a step ahead of the excise tax because employers won’t want to buy plans that trigger it. The industries that provide medical care and technologies will have to hold their costs down because they don’t want to become a target for the Medicare Commission. Hospitals will need to make sure they don’t spend more than their competitors because they’ll lose money under bundling.
Until now, our health care system has had few internal cost controls and the comforting knowledge that Congress doesn’t have the gumption to pass any. No longer. If the bill passes, it’s change the health-care industry will have no choice but to believe in.
Find this article at
http://www.newsweek.com/id/235246
© 2010
Anonster.
Thank you.
Based on your input I do not have to subscribe to Newsweek
Thought you might find this helpful;
You’re tying to convince ME with an Ezra Klein / Newsweek article? Listen to me…I suppose if Ezra told you his sh*t doesn’t stink, you’d believe him and tell all your friends as much.
Even so..all of the “cherrys and nuts” Erza’s piece do NOTHING about medicare FRAUD. Which was my whole point in the first place. Thanks for playing.
Welcome back anonster, we missed you. Good, informative, balanced Klein article; too bad middleground won’t look past the byline, he might learn something.
Middleground:
1. Killing the messenger makes you ignorant. This surprises me coming from you, since I see you like to cite generally “liberal” sources like HuffPost and Salon – but only as long as they’re saying something that comports with your predisposition. “Intellectually dishonest.” (Our blogger Larry Gilbert does that all the time – “Oh I was starting to believe you until I found out that was from Media Matters!” “Oh if you want me to take you seriously don’t be quoting Rachel Maddow!” etc.)
2. Sure your comment in #4 was just about Medicare fraud, you found it convenient to whittle the discussion down to that. But your comment #1, and the original post itself, were about the health care reform in general, and anonster’s citation of this Klein article was perfectly germane.
3. “EDT?” Is that a typo for “EST” or is it something I don’t know about? Are you traveling, or not even from OC? Are you one of the many far-flung OJ readers across this great nation who feel that this is just the “right room for an argument” [to quote Monty Python]? If so, welcome!
Vern Nelson wrote:
> Duane, Duane, Duane. This bill more
> than most seems to be a sort of
> Rorschach test. A lot of us look
> at it and see the millions of lives
> it will save and improve, and how
> it finally reins in a lot of insurance
> abuses, and how it’s the first progress
> on health care in 35 years, and how
> difficult it was to even get this
> through today’s whorish Washington,
> and how even this thin gruel is
> practically causing a civil war due to
> all the Republican fearmongering.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help find it somewhat amusing that every time the Democrats shove crap down the throats of the people on behalf of their allies on Wall Street, apologists such as yourself twist things around and come up with bizarre rationalizations that such defeats for the working masses are a triumphant victory over the forces of darkness — especially those evil, evil Republicans!
> Other people, like you, can look
> at it and see nothing but corruption.
> You’re at odds, you realize, with
> many of America’s most principled
> leftists, like Glenn Greenwald and
> Noam Chomsky, tireless critics of
> the Dems from the left, who still
> say that they would “hold their nose
> and vote for the bill” because it is
> progress and will save lives.
I don’t know much about Glenn Greenwald, but in respect to Noam Chomsky, a large block of the “independent left” — of which I consider myself to be a part of — sees him as being a Democratic Party apologist. Although I’ve found Chomsky’s analysis of the world to be quite useful at times, he’s a complete idiot when it comes to offering good advice on what tactics should be implemented to change the system.
> Not to mention Congress’ greatest
> single-payer progressives, Dennis
> Kucinich and Senator Bernie Sanders,
> who after striving mightily to make
> it a better bill, still find it well
> worth supporting and even being
> proud of.
My suspicion is if this phony, baloney “health care” reform bill had been introduced by President George W. Bush, a Republican, you would have been aggressively lobbying against it, calling it for what it really is: an incredibly reactionary piece of legislation.
As I alluded to you before in a previous message, key components of the crappy bill that President Barack Obama signed into law the other week are modeled almost word-for-word on legislation introduced by right-wing Republican Party politicians in the early 1990s.
Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, admitted to Jim Lehrer on the PBS “News Hour” on March 25th that the current bill is “very similar to the bill Republicans advocated in ’93 [with its] … basic approach, which is a free-market, market-based-system approach.”
It’s laughable that the Democrats “health care reform” bill — which is modelled on legislation that was one time championed by the most extreme elements of the Republican Party — suddenly becomes “progressive” now that a Democratic President puts his signature on it!
> (An aside comment on your choice of
> that first cartoon – I can just imagine
> how fiercely critical you would have
> been of the first, weak, versions of
> Social Security and Medicare; you would
> have called FDR and LBJ corrupt whores,
> and you would have added that LBJ was
> a big warmonger in Vietnam and that
> if he just stopped the war he could
> have afforded a much better Medicare
> bill; and you would have been partly
> right… plus ça change, plus c’est la
> même chose.)
The major differences between far more progressive (albeit weak) social legislation such as Social Security and Medicare and the incredibly reactionary “health care reform” bill is the latter was implemented primarily from the top down at the behest of Wall Street billionaires who own major stakes in private health insurance companies facing declining revenues as a result of a shrinking customer base.
As their pool of customers dwindles, private health insurance companies keep raising premium rates on employer-based coverage, which is affecting the bottom-line for many businesses, especially those competing on the global market. So the Democrats came to the rescue of the private health insurers with a scam to prop them up by forcing millions of new people to buy their crappy, overpriced policies and subsidize their profits with billions in taxpayer funds.
Besides bailing the private health insurance industry to the tune of a half-trillion dollars in public money, one of the underlying purposes of this bill is to shift the costs of health care off the backs of businesses and force millions of Americans to bear the brunt of paying more money out of their own pockets for it through higher premiums, deductibles, co-payments, taxes, and limiting and rationing medical benefits.
> When YOU become a Senator – after you
> beat Barbara Boxer and
> Campbell/Fiorina/DeVore – you can be
> the first Senator on the Left who wants
> to repeal this bill and return to the
> status quo ante. Republicans will
> embrace you as an unexpected and useful
> ally! Think of it – a left-wing Senator
> who wants to return to a time of
> pre-existing conditions, of rescission,
> of all those tens of millions of Americans
> remaining uninsured and living on a
> tightrope.
Of course, you know full well that is a complete misrepresentation of what I wrote. All I said was that I think the corrupt Democratic Party’s half-trillion dollar taxpayer bailout of the private health insurance industry should be repealed in favor of establishing a universal, single-payer “Medicare-for-all” type health care system within the United States.
And if even if the Republican Party were to regain control of the U.S. Senate in the upcoming elections, they’ll completely drop the ball on repealing it because Cigna, Wellpoint, Aetna, and key players in the private health insurance industry — not to mention the pharmaceutical industry — will pump millions of dollars into their election campaigns to buy them off.
[Extra text deleted]
> As everyone knows, single payer will
> start in the individual states,
I agree.
[Extra text deleted]
“Think of it – a left-wing Senator who wants to return to a time of pre-existing conditions, of rescission, of all those tens of millions of Americans remaining uninsured and living on a tightrope.”
Of course, you know full well that is a complete misrepresentation of what I wrote…
Not really. You want to
1. Become a Senator;
2. Join the Republicans in repealing this year’s bill; and
3. Pass single-payer instead.
As many hurdles as there are to step 2, it will still be a lot easier to accomplish than getting single-payer through today’s Congress. National single-payer, if we keep working hard at it, will take decades. So you ARE proposing a return to the way things were, for decades, until we finally accomplish our great ideal. I got some Don Quixote in my blood too, but when you look around at the real human costs, you gotta go with unglamorous incrementalism.
Vern Nelson wrote:
> Not really. You want to
> 1. Become a Senator;
> 2. Join the Republicans in repealing this year’s
> bill; and
> 3. Pass single-payer instead.
>
> As many hurdles as there are to step 2,
> it will still be a lot easier to accomplish
> than getting single-payer through today’s
> Congress. National single-payer, if we
> keep working hard at it, will take decades.
> So you ARE proposing a return to the way
> things were, for decades, until we finally
> accomplish our great ideal.
>
> I got some Don Quixote in my blood too,
> but when you look around at the real human
> costs, you gotta go with unglamorous
> incrementalism.
Whatever.
If I were to become Senator, I’m not ashamed to say I would do everything I possibly could to repeal the corrupt Democratic Party’s half-trillion dollar taxpayer bailout of the private health insurance industry in favor of establishing a universal, single-payer “Medicare-for-all” type health care system.
You can make all bizarre rationalizations you want, but nothing changes the fact this is an incredibly reactionary piece of legislation that will eventually lead to a decline in the quality of health care for millions of Americans as even more money will end up in the pockets of Wall Street.
The human cost will be enormous.