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Edited on Fri Jul-13-07 11:32 AM by rodeodance
Sen. Levin has an amendment for Children's Health care (S-Chip Program)--which the Senate was/is- debating on the Senate floor this morning. He said he is afraid it might be filla-bustered by the Republicans!!! Please call your Senators Now and ask that they vote AYE on this important amendment.
Thanks in advance.
.........It's always nice to see the President take a principled stand on something. The man formerly known as "43," and now perhaps better named "29" for his record-breaking approval rating, is promising to battle any expansion of government health insurance for children -- and not because he hates children or refuses to cough up the funds. No, this is a battle over principle: private health care vs. government-provided health care. Speaking in Cleveland this week, Bush boldly asserted:
I strongly object to the government providing incentives for people to leave private medicine, private health care to the public sector. And I think it's wrong and I think it's a mistake. And therefore, I will resist Congress's attempt ... to federalize medicine...In my judgment that would be -- it would lead to not better medicine, but worse medicine. It would lead to not more innovation, but less innovation.
Now you don't have to have seen SiCKO to know that if there is one area of human endeavor where private enterprise doesn't work, it's health care. Consider the private, profit-making, insurance industry that Bush is so determined to defend. What "innovations" has it produced? The deductible, the co-pay, and the pre-existing condition are the only ones that leap to mind. In general, the great accomplishment of the private health insurance industry has been to overturn the very meaning of "insurance," which is risk-sharing: We all put in some money, though only some of us will need to draw on the common pool by using expensive health care. And the insurance companies have overturned it by refusing to insure the people who need care the most -- those who are already, or are likely to become, sick.
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But Dr. Reddy -- who is, incidentally a high-powered Republican donor -- has a principled reason for his piratical practices. "Patients," the Los Angeles Times reports him saying, "may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford." He dismisses as "an entitlement mentality" the idea that everyone should be getting the same high quality health care. This is Bush's vaunted principle of "private medicine" at its nastiest: You don't get what you need, only what you can pay for.
If government insurance for children (S-CHIP) isn't expanded to all the families that need it, there is no question but that some children will die -- painfully perhaps and certainly unnecessarily. But at least they will have died for a principle.
Barbara Ehrenreich
Health Care vs. the Profit Principle
Posted July 12, 2007 | 12:35 PM (EST)
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