Health Care Crap

Among other's.

Now this is something that I should not have just learned. I guess that it would just be too much to expect that American doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies make a reasonable amount of money.

This Pretty Much Explains It

Fuck Them All

For god's sake. We luvs us some mushie middle of the liberal road shit. Fuck 'em all. I got mine seems to be what most of the people in Washington say, even those who are identified as liberal. Why is it that a guy who ran as being just a little liberal needs to be pushed to be even just a little liberal? No one ever sees the need to push him back from a radical leftist position to something more "centrist." He always starts from the right, ALWAYS!

When the public option is destroyed, he will not use that defeat to push a more progressive agenda, he will curl up with the right wingers of both parties and hug and kiss them and tell us all what a great deal we've gotten. Then he will throw more money at the banksters because that will again be necessary. And there will be more and more people who have no health insurance, or perhaps they will be required by law to buy it, and they will get the same kind of coverage that minimum auto insurance provides.

Health Care

Oh my god. Is this guy real? Why yes he is. He is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be stupid and lazy. Pravda on the Potomac cannot self destruct too soon for me. Leaving only reactionary pieces of shit in it's place. Good better the enemy we all know than one that pretends to be our friend when it suits them!

The second point, is that I am positive that it will be better not to pass a health care "reform" that doesn't have a very strong public run by and completely owned by the government insurance package.

Stopping real health care reform by the blue dogs and republicans will not be Obama's Waterloo (depending of course on how he handles it), but to move our historic metaphors back a dozen or so centuries a Pyrrhic victory for the right wing corportists.

It should be obvious that we can run against those ass holes, using the fact that they kept us from getting decent health care. That is I am positive a better outcome than to try to get some piece of shit through that really helps no one except the incredibly wealthy insurance company owners. Because we are really not going to be able to "build" on a piece of shit legislation.

Why do they do it?

Another far left radical

I have long wondered why the right becomes so enraged and hysterical about policies and people that are just kind of, well really "moderate" and not really progressive or liberal at all.

I think the reason is if they can paint the Clintons and Obama as far left liberals, then they can prevent any kind of change and then roll things back to those glorious days of yesteryear, when Robber Barons roamed freely over the American land scape.

So any minor change, one (like government health care) that brings the USofA into the middle 20th century and up with all modern democratic governments becomes a radical far left liberal (I don't understand it, but "far left liberal" seems to be the phrase du jour, if you define jour as decades) agenda to destroy our freedoms.

I would guess that what they are trying to do, the smarter ones at least, is to make any progressive move so painful that no politician will want to experience that sort of pain, so they will fore go it. The rest are just dumb fucks.

I watched it happen with Clinton, and at that time I wondered. He managed quite a few real conservative changes, yet he (and Hilliary) were both constantly attacked as being radical far left liberals (oh yes, and major drug dealers and murderers). WTF?

Of course they have successfully moved the discourse so far to the right that the kind of health care that was enacted by Bismark is too far to the left for us. So what happens instead of real health insurance is that we have now apparently come up with a mandatory insurance plan that includes penalties for those who don't buy private insurance. Some far left liberal plan.

I suppose that if the entire house of cards collapses again under Obama or doesn't recover then the "far left liberals" will get the blame and we will be back with another "Bush/Chaney moderate" of some sort. If it happens under the reactionary right then any change will be so moderate that we will end up with ...........................Obama and no real change after all.

Yet Another Post on Health Insurance

Actual unretouched photo of health insurance CEOs at work.

Sara Anderson had a comment on the Fucked Again post of a couple of days ago. She said, and I think I'm being fair, (you can look at her comment on that post): That requiring all people to buy insurance would require people who are young and healthy and probably don't now need health insurance to purchase it and therefore make the risk pool larger and since the new people would use the insurance less, the individual cost s/would go down for all. She caused me to think about what I'd written.

To paraphrase myself: I don't agree with what I see as her point. People buy all sorts of insurance (home insurance, life insurance, etc.) without being required to do so. I have family members who have made good livings selling insurance for a long time.

People do not buy health insurance because it is so expensive. When I quit working at legal aid, my wife (du jour) and I continued to pay for insurance even though we were both healthy and relatively young. Even under COBRA the price kept going up and up. Once we were off it sky rocketed. We had no health problems (other than allergies) and were both under forty.

I think the obscene profits and the insurance bureaucracy will simply be continued and institutionalized under mandatory plans forcing people who have little to spend it now on insurance, so the big boys get richer. And the rest of us will continue to be denied or physicians will have to have staffs to simply fight with the insurance industry to get the money out of them

The short answer is that I do not trust the insurance industry to not take the mandatory money and simply use it to increase their profits rather than lower the rates for everyone. I also do not expect service to be any better absent massive government oversight, which will in the long run simply not happen.

More Health Insurance Stuff

Krugman makes some very interesting points concerning how far to trust insurance companies. About THIS far. No really, however far that is on your computer and no farther. They will lie and cheat. Requiring everyone to buy health insurance may give the insurance companies a lot more money from people who will (for the time being) not use the insurance and therefore one could, in a just world, expect the industry to lower costs across the board, but I doubt it (a lot).

However, given the industry's history unless the government forces the industry to lower its' profit margin, they'll just take the money and run with it. Managing these companies profits would be well neigh impossible politically and probably completely impossible practically.

Crook's and Liars point out that it doesn't work that way in Massachusetts. The costs to the individual are still astronomical.

SCHIP

I am simply amazed at the right's attacks on government sponsored health care. The incredible fear of "socialism" is just amazing.

All western industrial nations in the world have government health care of one type or another. All that is except the USA. We are told that those health care systems are not as good at delivering medical goods and services as that in the United States, but it doesn't matter what kind of government, conservative, liberal, middle of the road, is in power that is one thing that is never tampered with: universal health care.

We may not be able to get more children covered. God God what is the matter with us? Are we that stupid? Do we not live in a representative democracy? Well OK we don't live in a representative democracy, at least not for some time.