Top Ten Ways To Tell Your President & His Party Aren't Fighting For Health Care For Everybody

[Karmadillo]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/31

Top Ten Ways To Tell Your President & His Party Aren't Fighting For Health Care For Everybody
With the corporate media relentlessly distorting the public discussion around health care reform, it time for some clear, bright lines to help us tell who is doing what to whom, and whether any of it leads to health care for all of us. Here are ten of them.
by Bruce Dixon

Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate were swept into office on a promise they would deliver affordable and accessible health care for all Americans. But the corporate media journalism limits the national health care conversation to what insurance companies, drug companies, for-profit health care professionals, their executives, lobbyists and politicians of both parties and other hirelings have to say. So it isn't as easy as it ought to be to tell what the politicians are doing about accomplishing health care for everybody. Hence we offer these ten points. This is how you can tell whether your president and his party are fighting for the health care you deserve.

1.Their plan doesn't cover the uninsured till at least 2013.

2013 isn't "day one." It's not even after the midterm election. It's clear after the president's second term, if he gets one. Congress passed Medicare in 1965 and president Lyndon Johnson rolled out coverage for millions of seniors in eleven months, back in the days before they even had computers.

22,000 Americans now perish each year because they can't get or can't afford medical care, and this year three quarter million personal bankruptcies will be triggered by unpayable medical bills. Why this president and these Democrats are in such a hurry to pass health care now that doesn't take effect till two elections down the road doesn't make sense in any kind of good way.

2.Their "public option" isn't Medicare, won't bring costs down and will only cover about 10 million people.

The "public option" was sold to the American people as Medicare-scale plan open to anybody who wants in that would compete with the private insurers and drive their costs downward. But in their haste not to bite the hands that feed them millions in campaign contributions each hear, the president and his party have scaled the public option back from a Medicare-sized 130 million to a maximum of 10 million, too small to put cost pressure in private insurers. Worse still, the president and his party are playing bait-and-witch, not telling the public they have reduced the public option, to nearly nothing.

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3.The president and his party have already caved in to the drug companies on reimporting Canadian drugs, on negotiating drug prices downward and on generics.

This explains why Big Pharma, the same people who ran the devastatin g series of anti-reform "Harry and Louise" ads to spike the Clinton-era drive to fix health care are spending $100 million to run Obama ads using the president's language about "bipartisan" solutions to health care reform.

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5.The president's plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, will require families to purchase health insurance policies from private insurers.

This is something the policy wonks call an 'individual mandate", under which Individuals will be "mandated" to purchase affordable insurance, though companies would not be required to offer it. In Massachusetts, the prototype state for the Obama plan, a family with an income of $33,000 can be required to spend $9,000 in deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses before the insurance company is obligated to pay a dime. As in Massachusetts, public money is used to purchase private insurance for the very poorest citizens. With the revenues of insurance companies on the decline, individual mandate programs are a welcome bailout for the private insurance industry.

lots more...

[Political Heretic]

1. I'll recommend this, however the original Source is the Black Agenda Report

..and that place is notorious for uncritical, hyperbolic commentary with a level of fundamentalist absolutism that I can hardly stand.

Still, despite the use of a few too many superlatives when almost everything is still up in the air and nothing is settled, the article does accurately describe the gloomy direction that so called "health reform" is currently heading. It is rapidly becoming insurance "reform."

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

2. Depressing article but I didn't disagree with a single point.

The timeframes are absurd - 2013,etc. Some practices of the insurance industry should be illegal as of TODAY - specifically prior condition exclusions and rescissions. As the author notes, I guess we can just continue to let people die and go bankrupt until these arbitrary dates ( which provide one last window for the private insureres to gorge themselves with inflated profits at our expense) come to pass. Why, President Obama, why? Why Democrat, why? Why can't you just do the thing that is right on the face of it?

Gutting public option - I saw in his interview with Karen Tumulty that was posted here the other day, President Obama said something for the first time (at least that I am aware of) when he spoke of a public option "funded from premiums". That would be as opposed to tax payer funded like a Medicare or Medicaid system. I saw that quote, I didn't bother to make a response in the thread, I turned off the computer, and I said to myself - "That's it. That's the ballgame." Because now President Obama is supporting the ghost of a public option and one that many, many people have said is designed to fail if it is funded only by premiums and I just can't believe that President Obama doesn't know that. He does know that. That was one of the very first gambits that was laid out by Schumer as a way to have a public option that is not really a public option.

So, I am firmly of the belief that we will end up with Romney Care, mandated private insurance with some subsidies for the very poorest, the rest of us just left as trussed up citizen/hosts unable to attempt to swat away the bloodsucking parasites that use our health dollars to line their own pockets, fund the lobbying industry and fill campaign coffers.

Who or what is going to stop this from happening?

[Karmadillo]

4. Your post sums up the dilemma well. We put our time and money

into electing politicians who appear to have little intention of using their time and influence on our behalf. Until we have a political party dedicated to the American people and not the American oligarchy, it's hard to see how we can ever expect to end up with real health care reform.

[Amos Moses]

3. K&R