Re: Republicans are bursting at the seams with poopy
- From: "susan" <hotdawgs@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Aug 2009 17:00:53 -0500
I actually tried to read it after I had gotten several emails telling me
both how great and how awful it is.
I found 2 places to read it - one never would download for me (it's over
1000 pages long) and the other had no pagination so I couldn't look up to
verify *see page 152* etc.
This email is the only one I could verify most of the points in it. and
point #1 being the most troubling if true.
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.
This remnant of a public option is not Medicare, as Howard Dean insists,
and it will not lead to the sort of everybody-in-nobody-out health care
system that most Americans, whenever they are surveyed say they want.
Some Senate and House Democrats want to ditch even the pretense of a
"public option" in favor of something they're calling a private insurance
"co-op", which as near as anybody can tell has the same relationship to an
actual cooperative that clean coal has to actual coal.
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.
4.. The president and his party have received more money from private
insurers and the for-profit health care industry than even Republicans, with
the president alone taking $19 million in the 2008 election cycle alone,
more than all his Repubican, Democratic and independent rivals combined.
Democratic senator Max Bacaus got $1.1 million in 2008. Democratic
senators Harkin, Landreau and Rockerfeller each got over half a million, and
Senator Durbin got just under half a million. Other Democratic senators got
a little less. Four Democrats in the House, Rangel, Dinglell, Udall and
Hoyer got over half a million apiece in 2008, with other Democrats not far
behind.
Is there any wonder that the insurance companies, like the drug companies
are also running "bipartisan health care reform" commercials using the
president's exact language?
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.
6.. The president's plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue
dogs too, could force you to buy junk insurance.
Think about an insurance policy that costs a lot, but is full of
loopholes, exceptions and steep deductibles and co-payments. That's junk
insurance, and for many it's the only insurance companies offer. Even more
pernicious is the widespread practice among insurance companies of
"recission" in which claimants are routinely investigated and disqualified
in the event that they finally make a claim. Insurance companies admit they
do this to half of one percent of policies per year. That means if you hold
a health insurance policy twenty years, you don;t have insurance - you have
a ninety percent chance of having insurance.
7.. The president's plan, as well as those of Democratic "blue dogs" and
Republicans, are to be funded in part with cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
Private insurance companies have always hated Medicare because it is far
more efficient than they are. Medicare's administrative expenses are under
five percent, as compared with the one third of every health care dollar
taken by the for-profit insurance companies for their advertising, bad
investments, billing and denial machinery, executive salaries and bonuses.
Private insurers have, over the years, purchased enough influence in
Congress and previous White Houses to restrict Medicare's payment rates and
partially privatize it. But president Obama's plan, perhaps the most
friendly to Medicare and Medicaid, calls for over $300 billion in cuts to
the programs that now provide medical care to those with the fewest options,
while failing to guarantee that care will come from elsewhere. In
Massachusetts right now, hospitals are turning away poor people they used to
be able to provide care for because funding that used to go to those
institutions is now plowed into the state's "individual mandate" system.
8.. The president, with the cooperation of corporate media and the
Republicans is trying to make the argument about himself instead of a
discussion on the merits of his policy.
The president and his critics are happy to talk about whether this will be
"his Waterloo", or his Dien Bien Phu, as if that matters more than the
22,000 Americans who die each year from lack of medical care, or the three
quarter million who will go bankrupt because of unpayable medical bills. The
concentration on whether the president looks good or bad takes up air, ink,
and coverage time that might otherwise be spent explaining what is and isn't
in the various proposals, and why.
If the president were not afraid of his own supporters publicly examining
the merits and demerits of his proposals, he would mobilize those 13 million
emails and phone numbers collected during the campaign. The reason he has
not sone so already is that most of his own supporters favor a
Medicare-For-All single payer health care system, HR 676.
9.. The president and his party, and the corporate media have spent more
time and energy silencing and excluded the advocates of single payer health
care, mostly the president's own supporters, than they have fighting blue
dogs and Republicans.
But no matter how diligently the spokespeople for single payer are
excluded from media coverage and invitations to Obama's policy forums and
round tables, no matter how many times the White House cuts their questions
from transcripts and video of public events, the calls, emails and letters
keep pouring into Congress and the White House demanding the creation of a
publicly funded, everybody-in-nobody-out system, a Medicare-for-All kind of
single payer health care plan.
10.. Despite the president's own admission that only a single payer health
care system will deliver what Americans want, he and the leaders of his
party insist that Medicare For All, HR 676, us utterly off the table.
Before he became a presidential candidate, Barack Obama identified himself
as a proponent of a single payer health care system. All we had to do, he
told us, was elect a Democratic congress and senate, and a different
president. Now that this has been done, he insists that "change" is just not
possible, and we have to settle for less. The president continues to admit
that only a single payer health care system will cover everybody, but
insists that America just can't handle that much change.
The truth is that Barack Obama campaigned as the candidate of change, and
a health care system that covers everybody from day one with no exceptions
is what people imagined they voted for when they swept him and an
overwhelming number of Democrats into office.
A single payer Medicare-For-All system will eliminate 500,000 insurance
company jobs and replace them with 3.2 million new jobs in health care for a
net gain of 2.6 million new jobs according to a study by the National Nurses
Organization. That's as many jobs as the US economy lost in all of 2007.
Single payer will create hundreds of billions in annual wages and local and
state tax revenues for cash strapped cities and towns. It will lift the
shadow of bankruptcy for medical reasons from two thirds of a million
American families yearly. It's what we deserve.
It's what we voted for, and we won't stop demanding it.
.
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