Obama’s Senate Health Care Bill: A “Uniquely American” Idiocy

[SHRED]

Idiotic and tragic too.

:cry:

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Obama’s Senate Health Care Bill: A “Uniquely American” Idiocy
By: Scarecrow Monday December 21, 2009 7:52 am

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America’s private, for-profit health insurance and delivery systems have failed. Their so-called "markets" are not competitive, and that can’t be fixed with puny exchanges that may or may not be created by skeptical — or recalcitrant — states. The insurance and hospital sectors are highly concentrated, dominated by market power that allows providers and insurers to overcharge Americans by 50 to 100 percent more than other nations pay for equal or better care and universal coverage.

So you would think any genuine reform effort would use the power of the federal government to bust up or at least confront the oligopolies and use its leverage to counter the industry’s market power, rationing-by-price and price fixing. But the Senate bill protects the industries, shields them from competition and expressly precludes national public entities from demanding better prices on the public’s behalf.

With government collusion, the private actors created a system of inhumane rationing that denies insurance to nearly 50 million and hawks fraudulent coverage to tens of millions more. The failure of the insurance system leads directly to the most egregious rationing of actual health care of any industrialized nation. Only in America is a private system allowed to bankrupt and deny care to millions, causing tens of thousands to die every year.

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Other "good" features try to rein in the abuses of the private insurance sector, but these weak features leave the private insurers too much flexibility to escape the regulations and provide minimal to no effective price oversight for an industry that survives through price fixing and market power. It is scandalous that the White House would cut special deals to preserve industry profits, while leaving the drug industry’s monopoly pricing scams essentially unregulated and prohibiting the government from negotiating better prices for the public’s benefit.

FULL ARTICLE:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/20052

[ixion]

1. k/r

spot on.

[freddie mertz]

2. Truly said.

[golddigger]

3. K&R for truth. n/t