What's the difference between Baucus' health-care "reform" proposal and Obama's speech last week?

[brentspeak]

People here are understandably livid at Baucus, but the only obvious difference between Baucus' joke of a proposal is that Obama hinted at a possible public option for a whopping percentage of 5% of Americans; Baucus' proposal rules out a public option completely. But it's basically the same crap: every citizen is to be made into a captive customer of the private insurance racket. The entire health care reform effort has been turned around by the corporate Democrats (i.e., Obama, Baucus, Bayh, etc.) to prevent health care reform.

If Worm Emmanuel is such a genius, how does he expect lifelong Democrats to continue to support the party in the face of this kind of perfidy? Many of us will still support the individual progressive Democrats of course, but the party as a whole? Not if a mandate without a universal public option is forced on us.

[Cant trust em]

1. If the idea is to prevent health care reform, why put it on the agenda at all? nt

[kenny blankenship]

6. Because the health care "system" is collapsing. Costs and premiums doubling over ten years-

do you think we can sustain another decade of that? Of course we can't. Insurance companies know this better than anyone. Middle class people are already being thrown out of the system. Not that what we have deserves to be called a "system" but one has to have a word as placeholder...
CHANGE IS COMING. The profit spiral is in terminal crash mode with people being priced out of the market- this endangers the insurance company business model. Yet they can't change it. Also, Boomers are going start leaving private insurance and going on Medicare. That's another death knell for the insurance biz. Where are increased revenues and increased profits Year over year to come from? What's a publicly traded corporation to do? That's what they're facing, and that's why they're suddenly amenable to "reform" - reforms like REQUIRING EVERY ADULT TO PURCHASE INSURANCE. As long as reform doesn't eat into their profits, they'll allow it.

You can put health care "reform" on the agenda to enact change; but you just as easily put it on the agenda in order to FORESTALL real change. You can see the dark economic clouds coming over the horizon if you're in the business, and you know that inevitably there will be a poltical shitstorm in which you, as CIGNA or AETNA or United Healthcare stand to lose EVERYTHING, especially if you know people like Michael Moore and Physicians for Health care reform have been working for years to put it on the agenda and have already succeeded in raising the public awareness. If you can't keep it off the agenda, you throw your efforts into perverting real reform.

Most of what is happening now is to forestall or ward off doing the logical thing, the step everyone else has taken already: removing the profit taking middle man from the broadest part of the health care market, ie. primary care medicine. This is not health care reform lighting the way to a better future (which most other western countries have in the present) it is a "reform" in quotation marks, pseudo-reform, designed to prop up the corrupt bloated and inefficient health care CARTEL, as it now exists.

[RoccoR5955]

2. The Baucus bill is "reform"

It's more corporate welfare for the people who gave him 3 million. Be real. What we need is an end to corporate electioneering.

[grantcart]

3. You may be the only in the blogosphere that needs this explained to you

[Baltoman991]

4. If you have

to ask then it really isn't worth the time to explain it to you.

[SpartanDem]

5. "I don't think this is a mirror of what the President has talked about "

Q Now that five committees have bills is it fair to say -- it seems to be fair to say that this bill is the one that tracks most closely to what the President wants.

MR. GIBBS: I think there are certainly some parts of it, but I don't think this is a mirror of what the President has talked about and I don't think that would be accurate.


http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Briefing-by-White-House-Press-Secretary-Robert-Gibbs-9/16/09/

[Thrill]

7. No Obama said there should be a Public Option. Just like he said today

There is no Public Option in Baucus bill

[emulatorloo]

8. "Obama hinted at a 'possible' public option" --- EPIC FAIL n/t