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scads and scads of highly paid lawyers and lobbyists to bend and contort everything back toward their profits and away from the good of individuals and the country. Imagine Diebold & brethren tossing Obama out in 2012 and installing Sarah Palin or Jim DeMint or John McCain (if he should remain fit enough via his senate health care plan to be installed in the White House). How quickly would the provisions of this bill fall to pieces under their 'tender loving care' and be dismantled? Individual patients have little enough chance against such lawyers and lobbyists with Obama running the government, and no chance if Pukes are running the government. And the country has no chance of retaining the provisions of even this sorry-ass bill with Pukes in power. How fast did George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld dismantle the Constitution? Less than a year, as I recall.
It is also too complicated, as with the tax code, and the insurance corps have scads and scads of well-paid analysts and accountants, on top of their highly paid lawyers and lobbyists, to exploit every complication, while the rest of us--including the sick and the elderly and the poorly educated and workers and parents with no time--are mindboggled with bureaucratic fine print just trying to obtain bottom-line health care. Ever try to negotiate the Medicare drug nightmare? This is the same.
We needed something simpler and more solid, which either evicted insurance corps from the health care system or severely curtailed their power, as well as the power of the drug corps and others who make big profits from illness. We needed a simple, straightforward, progressive tax, like Social Security and basic Medicare. You pay into it according to your ability to pay; the fund covers your basic health care needs in a cost-controlled system.
This bill will not likely even have a public option to create true competition on costs--and the inflated cost of medical care for profit is likely where this bill's system will break down under the pressure of highly paid lawyers, lobbyists, analysts and accountants.
As FDR said, "Organized money hates me--and I welcome their hatred." We needed a system that "organized money" hates, because that is the only kind of system that will work to provide health care for all at a reasonable cost.
I applaud provisions such as the one that tries to stop the insurance corps from dumping a customer when he or she gets sick. But how long is that provision going to last under industry assault? They have the lawyers; you don't. Put a Puke or a "Blue Dog" in the arbitrator's chair and you have no chance at all. You have little enough chance with a real Democrat, and you can be sure that, as that system is set up, it is inherently going to disfavor dumped customers because we have too few advocates with too little power and the insurance corps have many--entire law firms that run Washington DC.
Consider this analogy. Why is it that, when an ordinary citizen consults a secretary of state's web site, or seeks information about voting systems in other forms--say, attending hearings--unless you are a computer expert savvy in the alphabet soup of corporate "provider" hardware and software, you have no idea what they are talking about? And, further, if you were to seek review of the programming code that runs these machines--say, you hired your own computer expert to review it for you--you would be told that it is a "TRADE SECRET" and you have no right whatsoever to see the code by which your vote is counted.
I have actually seen an interview of the county registrar of a large jurisdiction in which the registrar accuses an inquiring citizen (a computer expert) of not being a "professional." I believe that what she meant was that the citizen computer expert was not one of the elite, inner circle of private corporate owners and technicians and their hired hands in government who are privy to the SECRETS of vote counting. Even someone who knows the language is barred. As for your average voter--your grandmother, your dad, Joe Blow at the office, the people who collect your garbage or roof your house, or, indeed, professionals in other fields (doctors, nurses, accountants, English teachers)--we all have no clue, any more, as to how our votes are counted and are barred by law from knowing.
What's wrong with this picture?
That's what private corporations do to "the commons." They make it possible for them to easily negotiate the complications of modern life, and no one else, and they up the ante of complication as a method of exclusion. They introduce of culture of secrecy into "the commons," as further exclusion. And on top of all that they charge us taxpayers a lot of money for the very privatization of everything that benefits the rich. Electronic vote counting, with its constant need for upgrades and maintenance, run by private corporations on their 'TRADE SECRET' code, is the most costly way to perform this relatively simple task, as well as the least secure. That the task is the most essential, bottom-line requirement of democracy--the counting of our votes, to determine the "will of the people"--makes this over-complication and obscurity even worse.
Vote counting is something that everybody should be able to see and understand. It should not be complicated and obscure. And God knows it should never contain 'TRADE SECRETS.'
A government health care program that seeks to have medical care available to all citizens should be simple, straightforward and fair. The fact that it is not going to be is probably fatal. It is set up to fail, because it was set up largely by the very profiteers who have caused the medical care crisis.**
The program needed to create a solid foundation in public service--not a bunch of private parties running around, each trying to chip off the juiciest morsels, each trying to sabotage the rules, each with batteries of lawyers and lobbyists trying to screw each other as well as the victims--the "consumers," te patients--with the goal of profiteering on every level, with every product, and with the death of sick people still being the preferred outcome (if the truth were known) to insurers, and decisions continuing to be made on the basis of cost and not on the basis of medical ethics. Such a system inherently attracts vultures--as our current system has--and vultures swallow each other up, creating monopolistic vultures with too much power.
Our nation's voting system is now run by a handful of rightwing-connected, private corporations--with one of them, the worst of the lot, the one with the most extremist rightwing connections--ES&S (which just bought out Diebold-Premier)--now controlling 70% of the U.S. vote counting 'market.'**
I am not kidding when I say that Sarah Palin or Jim DeMint or John McCain can easily--EASILY!--be Diebolded into office in 2012. Then what happens to your health insurance? How fast would they fuck up this complicated, big business-friendly program? How fast would they dismantle any provisions that protect the "customer" (the sick person, the patient)?
Like our voting system, our health care system is now in the hands of very rich people who truly mean us ill. And all I can say is, "Look out!" They have all the lawyers, lobbyists, analysts, accountants and P.R. propagandists, and we have almost no one on our side in the halls of power. They will loot us again on health care--as they have on anything else you can name: privatization of war, privatization of energy, banksterism/bailouts, the S&L lootings, privatization of prisons, privatization of "the war on drugs," private monopolistic control of the public airwaves, filthy amounts of private money in political campaigns (which almost all goes to the corpo-fascist 'news' media), privatization of the CIA, privatization of many aspects of education (with jacked up costs--always)--all manner of privatization, along with starvation of public services for corporation invasion of anything left of our "commons."
We needed to establish our "commons" on health care. We were prevented from doing so. And we will pay dearly for it. And I think that this failure is related to the loss of our 'commons" in the most critically important system of all: vote counting.
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**(See Dan Rather's "The Trouble With Touchscreens," www.HD.net. The program has a section on who fucked up the punchcard ballots in Florida 2000, that was then followed by the "fix" of this "broken" system--the Anthrax Congress creating the $3.9 billion e-voting boondoggle, by which the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines were fast-tracked all over the country, during the 2002 to 2004 period. The same corps who caused the fuckup in Florida then benefited from the e-voting boondoggle in more ways than profit--they gained 'TRADE SECRET' control of the whole system.)
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