"Healthcare Reform" Will be a Boondoggle for Private Insurance and An Intolerable Burden on the Midd

[a kennedy]

By Mark Karlin

If "healthcare reform" were such a threat to private insurance, then why are they opposing the public option?

The reality is that the bill the WH worked most closely with -- the Baucus Bill -- does little to rein in insurance profits and fat cat salaries, while providing them a windfall of at least 30 million new insured lives.

I've written several earlier editorials about this grim reality, including" "Free Market" Welfare for Wall Street: Now Max Baucus's Welfare for Big Insurance and Big Pharma": "Big Insurance to Government: You Make it Affordable, We'll Gouge the Profit!"; and "Private Insurance Companies to Make Out Like Bandits Under So-Called 'Healthcare Reform.'"

I also noted the striking fact -- unfortunately not emphasized by the White House -- that if government administered insurance is so bad, then why have none of the Western nations -- even under Conservative governments, as Canada is now -- privatized their health systems? Even Maragaret Thatcher -- the Iron Maiden -- didn't touch the National Health Service in Britain. And in Britain, physicians are actually employed by the government, something that is not even proposed in what the corporate mainstream media considers the "fringe" idea of a single payer system (notice the word payer, not provider).

So, we read with great interest a recent column by James Ridgeway of "Mother Jones" (who recently quoted BuzzFlash on this issue) on just one of the ways that the private insurance companies will continue to get rich off of the American people.

In an article entitled, "How the Baucus Plan Screws the Over-50 Crowd," he notes:

The people who stand to get screwed most by Max Baucus's health reform plan are those who aren’t old enough to qualify for Medicare, but are still old enough to be discriminated against by insurance companies.... Under Senator Baucus’s plan, insurers would be permitted to charge older people five times more for their health insurance premiums than younger people.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/9453

[yurbud]

1. My senator, Dianne Feinstein, wanted an amendment that capped health insurance overhead at 10%

I don't know if that got into any of the bills yet.

[tinrobot]

2. Since when did Obama work most closely with Baucus?

The reality is that the bill the WH worked most closely with -- the Baucus Bill

This statement is untrue.

In a Sept 8, press conference, Gibbs said it was "not surprising" that K Street lobbyists had the proposal before the president. How can the White House work most closely with a bill that lobbyists saw but they didn't?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/9/9/779207/-Gibbs:-Lobbyists-saw-Baucus-plan-before-White-House

Your other points are accurate, the Baucus bill will absolutely screw the middle class if it passes as is (I doubt it will)

[DCKit]

3. Thatcher may not have touched the NHS, but she sure did poke it with a stick.

Marge was enamored of the Republican tactic of underfunding, then declaring a program in crisis and/or unworkable. Fortunately, there was too much resistance.