Republicans pushing "Junk Health Insurance bill"

[sidwill]

Junk Health Insurance

California and 41 states passed tough HMO Patients' Bill of Rights laws because Congress refused to act. Now, a President Bush-backed bill would take those protections away and allow HMOs and insurers to replace real coverage with junk policies.


The U.S. Senate is just a few votes away from the biggest rollback of state patient protection laws ever. A vote is scheduled for the first week of May - send a fax to your Senators today!
Watch Recent TV Coverage


http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/healthcare/AHP/

[Inland]

1. "The Joy of Federalism" (Liberal government in these times)

Essay reviews liberal attitudes towards federalism and the possibility of keeping the captured fed government out of the state's business as we work on the blue states.:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/books/...
By FRANKLIN FOER

"Liberal energies once devoted to expanding the national government are being redirected toward the states. New York's attorney general Eliot Spitzer, declaring himself a ''fervent federalist,'' is using state regulations to prosecute corporate abuses that George W. Bush's Department of Justice won't touch. While the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since the middle of the Clinton era, 13 (mostly blue) states and the District of Columbia have hiked their local wage floors in the intervening years. After Bush severely restricted federal stem cell research, California's voters passed an initiative pouring $3 billion into laboratories for that very purpose, and initiatives are under way in at least a dozen other states.

"Instead of retreating to Vancouver, liberal federalists would retreat from national politics and focus on effecting change in their own blue states -- passing health care reforms, expanding gay rights. At the height of the liberals' postelection angst, The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, declared: ''We can secede emotionally, however, by turning our backs on the heartland. We can focus on our issues, our urban issues, and promote our shared urban values.'' It's like the path evangelicals beat after the Scopes trial, when the religious right took a 50-year break from mainstream political activity and quietly tended their own institutions. "

The essay concludes:

"Some Democratic political strategists are also guiding liberals in this direction. In election postmortems, they have urged the party to follow in the Truman-Reagan-Gingrich tradition and rail against the corrupt interests ruling Washington -- ''an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party,'' as James Carville described it at a Democratic hand-wringing session last November. Proponents of this strategy now reside in nearly every corner of the party -- from Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to the Democratic Leadership Council. Positioning the Democratic Party as the great modern-day defender of states' rights against imperial Washington jibes neatly with this strategy. Progressives once championed states as laboratories of democracy. Now many of them are hoping these laboratories will produce the Democratic electoral cure. "

How many posts have noted that it is the red states that use bankruptcy, red states that don't get the tax breaks that are slanted for the rich, red states that live with toxic waste dumps and hog farms. Does it make sense to let them stew in their own problems and insulate ourselves in the blue states, creating model societies ready to go when the national insanity passes?

[sidwill]

2. This bill will negate that

by sweeping aside state mandated health insurance protections.

The Insurance industry has rather adroitly picked up on a rather devious and of course lucrative tactic that will sweep aside years of work by progressives to protect and expand safeguards for health care consumers.

This will adversely affect populations that are "at risk" according to insurers like diabetics, seniors, the disabled, and women.

For more info look here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=983527&mesg_id=983527

[rodeodance]

4. nominated

[Inland]

7. Right.

That's why I posted it: I've always thought that the opinions on what was appropriately "federal" and what was appropriately "state" turned on who was in charge of what, and the republicans have decided taht Massachusett's health care and California pollution controls should be run out of Washington. Libs, on the other hand, have distrusted the concepts of state's rights, and it may be time to dust off federalism.

[rodeodance]

3. Hit it everyone--

[Chimichurri]

5. Just sent a fax - it's neverending. These guys are like a virus.

[sidwill]

6. Whats the most disheartening to me is

that corporate America knows that they can always always insure (no pun intended) profitability simply by splashing a couple of million into the political process because there is no shortage of politicians who will take their money and support any initiative they want, no matter how heinous.

This trend for insurance companies to both weaken patient's access to the courts via tort reform and to undermine state mandated protections will eventually result in the perfect situation for insurers:

A nation where most insurance coverage is legally required, patient protections are limited, and access to the courts is almost impossible.

Hell, with that trend, we might as well pool our money and start our own insurance company.

[sidwill]

8. kick

kickety kick