Matt Taibbi's "Sick and Wrong" now posted on RollingStone.com

[Junkdrawer]

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong/print

When it came out, it was print only.

Important, ground breaking reporting.

[SammyWinstonJack]

1. K&R

[Junkdrawer]

2. Kick

:kick:

[Junkdrawer]

14. .

[Junkdrawer]

27. .

[ensho]

k and r

nt

[lumberjack_jeff]

3. Heartbreaking.

I really need to get my Canadian citizenship stuff in place.

[kentuck]

4. More and more, Taibbi sounds like a young Gore Vidal..

very enlightening.

[truedelphi]

28. Ihadn't thought of that comparison - but you are right.

That is spot on. Here's hoping the young Matt shares the longevity that Vidal has been blessed with.

[polichick]

5. So much of what Congress does is SMOKE & MIRRORS...

...pretending to be about protecting the people, but in actuality perpetuating fraud ~ filling America with pollutants (in food, beauty products and the environment), drugs (manufactured by big pharma but not the natural marijuana), war that's all about keeping the MIC fat and happy, and on and on and on. SMOKE & MIRRORS.

K&R

[Vinnie From Indy]

6. Bravo!

Taibbi is spot on!

[Vinnie From Indy]

7. K & R

This is a great read!

[asdjrocky]

8. Matt says it right.

Every single time.

[nashville_brook]

9. holy shit, this article is a real eye-opener.

[Overseas]

10. K&R and thanks to Matt Taibbi for writing so frankly. //nt

[mascarax]

11. K&R - Taibbi always worth reading (n/t)

[G_j]

12. depressing, but enlightened article

does anyone really expect even a single progressive piece of legislation to pass without real finance reform/clean elections?
:shrug:

[truedelphi]

13. Taibbi is great. And as for Obama - I really wish this man's evil twin

Had not won the Presidency - I like the guy in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE

While the evil twin goes on about how we have to work with the system we have.

[DemReadingDU]

17. What happened to that other twin?

:shrug:

[Amos Moses]

23. .....

[debbierlus]

25. He only comes out for campaigns. He doesn't actually lead.

[MellowDem]

15. Dead on...

unfortunately.

[BrklynLiberal]

16. Taibbi is always worth reading....He has also been excellent ofn Bill Maher's show.

[underpants]

18. Kicking for later read

:kick:

[underpants]

20. My god, Taibbi can write

The logic behind the idea was so unassailable that its opponents often inadvertently found themselves arguing for it. "Assurances that the government plan would play by the rules that private insurers play by are implausible," groused right-wing douchebag George Will. "Competition from the public option must be unfair, because government does not need to make a profit and has enormous pricing and negotiating powers." In other words, if you offer a public plan that doesn't systematically fuck every single person in the country by selling health care at inflated prices and raking in monster profits, private insurers just won't be able to compete.

Will wasn't the only prominent opponent of reform openly arguing in favor of the insurance industry's right to continue doing business inefficiently. Sen. Ben Nelson, who together with Baucus are the Laverne and Shirley of turncoat Democrats, complained that the public option "would win the game." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted that "private insurance will not be able to compete with a government option." This is a little like complaining that Keanu Reeves was robbed of an Oscar just because he can't act.

For a while, the public option looked like it might have a real chance at passing. In the House, both the ways and means committee and the labor committee passed draft bills that contained a genuine public option. But then conservative opponents of the plan, the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, mounted their counterattack. A powerful bloc composed primarily of drawling Southerners in ill-fitting suits, the Blue Dogs — a gang of puffed-up political mulattos hired by the DNC to pass as almost-Republicans in red-state battlegrounds — present themselves as a quasi-religious order, worshipping at the sacred altar of "fiscal responsibility" and "deficit reduction." On July 9th, in a harmless-sounding letter to Pelosi, 40 Blue Dogs expressed concern that doctors in the public option "must be fairly reimbursed at negotiated rates, and their participation must be voluntary." Paying doctors "using Medicare's below-market rates," they added, "would seriously weaken the financial stability of our local hospitals."

[invictus]

19. K&R

[Christa]

21. K & R nt

[santamargarita]

22. K&R

[debbierlus]

24. People need to read this before they post one more damn cheerleading thread about Obama

He has been DISMAL on this issue.

Absolutely dismal.

[truedelphi]

26. hey he has been good on the stem cell issue

Not that without health insurance reform any of us will benefit.

And not so good on:

Afghanistan
Iraq
Trials and penalites for those who were torturers in violation of US code and
the Geneva Convention and the spirit of the Nuremberg trials
Clean Coal (notions of idiotic worth)

And his Paulson/Bernanke/Geithner continuation of the Bush years' alliance with Wall Street will prove disastrous in about three years when this eleven trillion dollar Final Bubble bursts. That will be the real kicker.

When not only will Main Street and the middle incomed be required to pay off that eleven trillion, they will find that the Final Bubble is non-reparable and will lead to a Romania style Depression without even food on the shelves of the failing stores.

But hey - in his day, he was sure charming, and his wife was smart and pretty, and those kids were cute. So it is all worth it, ain't it?