House Liberals Write Directly To Obama: No Public Option, No Support
In a letter delivered to the White House moments ago, the two leaders of the bloc of House progressives bluntly told President Obama that they will not support any health care plan without a public option in it — and demanded a meeting to inform him face to face.
The not-yet-released letter — the first joint statement from progressives since news emerged that Obama might not address the public option in next week’s speech — is their sharpest challenge yet to the president, given the extraordinary sensitivity of this political moment. The letter urges him to mention the public option in his speech.
“Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Mediare rates — not negotiated rates — is unacceptable,” reads the letter, which was sent over by a source. It was signed by Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Raul Grijalva, the two leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“A health reform bill without a robust public option will not achieve the health reform this country so desperately needs,” the letter continues. “We cannot vote for anything less.”
“We look forward to meeting with you regarding a robust public option in any final health reform bill and request that that meeting take place as soon as possible,” the letter says.
Last month, five dozen House liberals wrote a letter to Nancy Pelosi ruling out support for any bill without the public option. While today’s letter doesn’t bear all those signatures, it signals that House progressive leaders intend to try to maintain a united, potentially confrontational front even as the president prepares to make his case in a major, make-or-break address to Congress.
Should Obama jettison the public option, progressives will come under tremendous pressure to back the plan anyway. White House advisers will likely insist that liberals mustn’t deny the president a historic victory and enable a defeat that could cripple the first African-American presidency.
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Update: The full letter is right here.
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Off topic, sorry, but jesus kee riste, what is the nature of the intimidation that is continually and predictably being brought to bear on these individuals?
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/gonzo_on_support_for_torture_probe_um_never_mind.php?ref=fpa
White House advisers will likely insist that liberals mustn’t deny the president a historic victory and enable a defeat that could cripple the first African-American presidency.
Oh hell to the no. I am black and find that extremely offensive that RAHM EMMANUEL is going to try to play the race card. Blacks and other minoritieis will benefit from a public option.
I am through with Obama and know of many other blacks who are losing patience with him. Someone should tell Obama that he will become another David Patterson and lose the black vote if he sells out.
@Greg: If they DO end up passing a robust public option based on Medicare rates, and the blue dogs vote against it, how do you think the dogs will fare in the 2010 elections?
I’ve lost count of how many petitions I’ve signed for public option.
I’m glad they’re sticking to it.
@sbj,
The blue dogs will be fine as a public option means otherwise demoralized libs will be out to save their behinds in close races. The BASE makes the difference as to who is on the 51% side vs. the 49%.
“I am through with Obama and know of many other blacks who are losing patience with him. Someone should tell Obama that he will become another David Patterson and lose the black vote if he sells out.”
It’s this **** that is driving me off the internet again.
What part of “Repugs regaining the majority” sounds good to you?
”
Man progressives can be damned short-sited if not downright purblind.
If the Repugs manage to kill this and they ride in on the disaffection of the left, I will never forgive the left.
I can’t take anymore Repug rule and neither can the rest of the country. The economy definitely can’t take anymore Repug management and the Constitution? Forget it.
@kris: I hope for the democratic party’s sake that you are correct. I don’t think you are. You’re saying the progressives will work hard to reelect those who voted against the public option?
That is hopeful news. Thanks.
“White House advisers will likely insist that liberals mustn’t deny the president a historic victory and enable a defeat that could cripple the first African-American presidency.”
Wha? Assuming much?
@sbj
There are many blue dogs who support the public option. Those that don’t will get a primary and a motivated base will come out to defeat them.
@ Tena
This is about campaign promises. I am fairly young and like others worked my heart and soul out to get Obama elected for CHANGE. I want to see Obama succeed and the only way Obama can succeed is if he doesn’t sell out his campaign promises. Mandating insurance to younger folks like myself who are just starting off in life without a public alternative will be devastating.
Dammit what is wrong with Medicare for all? My grandma loves it. Why isn’t the white house advocating for this?
Good for them. We should let them know that we are behind them on this stance.
A Bill without a Public Option, would be just a Potemkin Village Facade.
Better to just pass a bill that makes the Insurance Companies cover everyone, and give them no government funds to help them, than pass a phony reform bill. At least, with the cover all provision, we would be putting the Republicans on the hot seat for a change, since they want only the Private Insurance people to run health care coverage, so of course they would be appalled if there were any government funds involved.
If the public options goes down, then let us make sure that the Private Insurance crowd have to cover all, and that will drive prices so high, that the people will soon experience sticker shock, and come begging for the government to step in. So will small businesses.
We should have a fall back plan. That is my suggest one. It would give the Republicans all that they are begging for, and it would blow up in their faces, once the new rates start arriving in the mail.
This threat must be about as credible to Obama as Obama’s tough talk is to the Iranian regime. That is to say not at all.
So-called progressives would never vote against Obamacare in any variation because they know that the plan all along was to sneak the camel’s nose under the tent then turn our healthcare system into a Canadian single-payer system. It might take longer to do it without the public option, but these career vampire/legislators always take the long view.
Having said that, I hope the House Dems keep pushing the public option because I don’t want this debacle to end yet. We need to hear more from Diane Watson. And maybe we can get Charlie Rangel more involved.
Oh and look the Black Caucus is warning Obama
http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0909/Black_Caucus_warns_Obama_on_speech.html
Mmhmm
you libs are just starting to get it….it isn’t anything about you. Its only about the O. If it doesn’t make him look good, he’s not doing it. I think it was the great Rev Jeremiah Wright that said “he’s a politician, he’ll say anything he needs to say, even though he doesn’t mean it”.
Ah, I do miss Rev Wright. I think if you had him out there pushing for government option, you’d have a winner on your hands. Sign a petition to get him out in the media again…I know he’d do it…for you!
The report of this letter is welcome news. It’s exactly what I would tell the President myself. No public option, no bill! And that means a REAL option, like in the letter. Anything less is coming down on the side of the piratical insurance industry. Anything less will show everyone where this president stands, and after that, he’s on his own.
@kris:
Don’t most blue dogs come from conservative districts? You are proposing that a more liberal primary challenger will go on to defeat a moderate Republican in those districts?
Tena, You won’t forgive the left?#@$$^
If we do not get a meaningful healthcare bill (public option), what good is voting for dems (which I have done for almost 40 years)? At this point, outside of NOT being obnoxious, Obama is continuing many of the Bush policies, most especially on foreign policy. How can we progs. cripple a presidency that insists on crippling itself bending over backward to negotiate with people who ONLY want you dead, certainly politically and perhaps, physically.
If the Congress gets rolled and the President tries to play the race card, this administration and, perhaps, this party is history.
Tena
What you don’t seem to get is that its not the progressives or liberals who are the problem. Its the f*cking Blue Dogs and ConservaDems. An overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress support a public option. So liberals and progressives should cave to the minority in the Democratic party who are bought and paid for? F*CK THAT! If you have beef its with those bought and paid for Democrats who live to oppose the Democratic agenda. How about calling them out instead of talking sh*t about liberals and progressives?
.
And for that matter why the hell isn’t anybody in the media point that fact out either, that its the Conserva Dems in the Senate who don’t number more than a handful who are the ones that will kill health care reform if they insist on a bill without a public option? Chris Matthews was the worst yesterday.
.
http://tinyurl.com/kl2mh9
Oh and one more thing, the “left” is also the overwhelming base of the Democratic Party. If we don’t really matter then I guess us not participating in the midterms won’t have any affect on the elections. Pass a bill with out a public option and you will be able to test that theory and thats real.
Obama appears to have lost control of his party.
Can someone direct me to where I can see who signed the letter? Thank you.
Is this a joke? A public option based on Medicare isn’t in any of the bills right now (not even the House). Such a public option wouldn’t pass the House and wouldn’t get anywhere close to 50 votes in the Senate. They might as well send a letter demanding a single payer system because it is only marginally less likely.
And I say this as a single payer supporter.
@sg
I saw Chris Matthews act a fool yesterday. The sad part is that the blue dog that he interviewed WANTS a public option and looked downright scared. Chris was trying to bait him into being all Broderlike and rah rah about how he is influential but he wouldn’t bite.
Screw Chris Matthews
@Teena: Health reform with an individual mandate but without a public option is a giveaway to the insurance companies, and may make our lives worse, not better. If the democrats pass this type of “reform”, they will likely enjoy the same public pat on the back that congress is getting for the bank bailouts. Those repugs that you fear are absolutely salivating at the chance to blast the dems for a crappy reform effort, and will trumpet each and every corrupt item of the bill every chance they get. There is only one option to getting out of this alive for the dems, and that is to actually pass health care reform. “Centrism” in this debate is a red herring – you are either for health care reform that studies show will work, or you are for giving more money to Insurance and Pharma with the same rate increases and denial of care that we are already experiencing. Forgive that.
Tena and the Blue Dogs are DINO’s (Democrats In Name Only) or Pachiderms That Wear Donkey Masks if you prefer! They should go back to being liberal Republicans, like they were when we called them Rockefeller Republicans.
There is a reason why we so often hear that health care reform is complex with many “myths” and “misunderstandings” associated with it. Our elected representatives are trying to solve an unsolvable equation. They are trying to reduce health care costs and expand coverage to everyone while at the same time trying to protect the inflated profits of the health insurance companies.
If you take the profits for health insurance companies out of the equation altogether the ability to lower costs and cover everyone is simple and straight forward. Single payer systems in other industrialized nations in the world have already proven that they can reduce costs while providing high quality care for everyone. Single payer simply makes the most sense economically, socially, and morally.
Can someone, whose reply I can verify and trust, explain to me why the public option is so at risk?
Consistently, polls show that the majority of American citizens are in favor of it. It seems to me a large percentage of independents and Obamacans voted for Obama because they wanted significant health care reform. Those against it are those who would never vote for Obama anyway.
The only reason I can come up with why it is reported to be in such trouble would be money influencing the political process.
I think the Dems, and the Obama administration, are playing with fire. Help me out here because I don’t get it.
@Greg – nope, not true … both the Senate and the House had bills come out of committees with the public option.
Oh the progressive are not the only group that is mad as hell. We worked our *** off to Obama elected, and to sell out to the right is unforgiveable! Actually “having a get your *** in line” message to the insurance companies to lower prices, and underwrite affordable polices in 90 to 180 days is a compromise, and then we bury them alive with a full blown Public Option that kicks into the gear on midnight! In the interm a panel will review the industry in 90 days to see if they hit compliance of 80% and then we give them an addition 90 more days = 6months to submit policies and a functional system that ensure all at affordable rates. Personally I don’t think this will work becuase if the insurance companies were interested in the doing the right thing for the American people they would have done it by now. Washington is bought and paid for and that includes the President! what the hell is he waiting on. Oh I get it he thinks we are going to forget a few monthis from now when a half assed policy is passed by congress. NOT! Infact I am prepared to raise hell in washington on 09-13-09 and dare any right wing nut, teabagging, john loving KKK to get in my way!
I don’t support health care reform either with or without a public option, because I don’t believe government can either do a better job of running things OR hold down costs. But I am curious, why this almost mantra-like demand for the “public option”? As opposed to the co-ops for example? I work with a number of Joint Powers Authorities in California that are non-profit but not run by government, and I think they’re pretty close to the co-op model, and they do an excellent job of insuring groups that can’t find insurance elsewhere. So, I think (and hope) that by shouting “Public option! Public option!” over and over, liberals are revealing that they don’t really care about “fixing” the healthcare system, they only care about showing conservatives “who’s boss”. You’re ruling, but you’re not ruling wisely.
What you don’t seem to get is that its not the progressives or liberals who are the problem.
Uh, yes they are!!! The fact is the majority of this country does not want to be run by the fanatics in California, New York or Mass. who have all run their states into the ground with their “progressive agenda”. The public option is nothing more then a government takeover of OUR health system and the MAJORITY of the people in this country have no interest in piling on the debt to our children to satisfy the “liberals” ego. Look at the polls, right now there is a good chance the Democrats will lose a lot of seats, maybe even the majority if they continue on this far left path. It’s time Obama puts Pelosi and her far left nutjobs in their place or Nov. 2010 the voters will…
To the House Progressives I would say: No universal health system, no support.
This so-called “bloc” should be standing up for HR676 and nothing less.
I’ll review the list of names, and will be very disappointed if 100% of them aren’t supporting and co-sponsoring John Conyer’s bill.
If there are any revisions to HR676 that are needed, I would push for faster implementation. 15 years is too long. Get it done in 5 or less. No reason to wait!
Hope – So if I oppose Obamacare, I’m a member of the KKK? That makes about as much sense and is about as offensive as painting a Hitler moustache on Obama. Is that what “Yes We Can” is all about? “Yes We Can tear down and vilify and slander the character of anyone who disagrees with us?” Is that change we can believe in?
@ Jodi H. and Greg: The key for progressives is a public option with Medicare rates, not negotiated rates. Only some of the bills have this.
You mean California with a Republican Governor and state congress that is procluded from doing anything of substance without a 2/3rds majority which Republicans always block?
Get da fug outta here with that bullshit. New York and Massachusetts both are doing a hell of a lot better than Republican strong holds like Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. You ought not to ever talk about states run by liberals versus those run by conservatives. Its not even f*cking close.
I am curious. We all know deep down, president Obama wants a public option but the problem is that the BLUE DOG DEMOCRATS are holding all of the democrats hostage including obama. Evan Bayh, Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, Landreau Ben Nelson, are just a few of the blue dogs who are saying NO PUBLIC OPTION. Without their vote, obama is screwed because he won’t have 60 votes. He doesn’t have enough votes to pass it in senate so what per say should he do? Threaten the blue dogs? He is at the mercy of them unless he and democrats go nuclear with a reconciliation and that will not be law and can be repealed in 5 years. And so if the republicans miraculously take control again in 2010 or 2012 they can overturn it back to nothing. So again, what should obama do at this point?
Angela at 5:07 PM,
Follow the money. Insurance companies don’t want competition as given by a public option. Insurance companies financially support too many politicians. Politicians need money to stay “on the gravy train” (with their own government-paid healthcare) to care about the needs of “we the people”. Can it be any clearer?
@sgtwhiteinfla…I share your outrage about being sold down the river by the blue dogs..especially those with their hands in the insurance money cookie jars….and I also feeled betrayed by the media in their overall coverage of this health care…or I should more accurately state insurance reform debate…but I must say I have seen commentators pointing out that it’s the Dems not the Repugs who are the problem…from the obvious like conservative Joe Scarborough to some of the most progressive like Bill Maher who rarely misses an opportunity to criticize the Pres and the Blue Dogs for not just doing it and saying bite me to the Repugs.
The debate in this thread that interests me most is Tena’s frustration with the left…and the left’s frustration with Tena. I’m not sure where I come down. I agree with Tena that we literallly can’t afford any more Repug leadership until we clean up their last mess..but I share the frustration of Kris about being tired of feeling voiceless in the Democratic Party. Perhaps some more astute observer like Bernie can share with me whether we need not just a 3rd party but perhaps a 4th and 5th. I know how messy some of those parliaments can get…but really we are tired of not being heard!!!!
I’m thrilled with the threats from the progressives to Obama even if they are hollow.
BTW can’t we leave race out of this…I voted for Obama because he is a bright man…if he is also too pragmatic/political/wishywashy…choose your term..I’ll be disappointed but I really don’t see his race as a factor. White and black politicians have sold us out before.
@Angela: “Can someone, whose reply I can verify and trust, explain to me why the public option is so at risk?”
You can check with sg, but from my reading, the Dems do not have 60 votes in the Senate for a bill that contains the public option.
SGWhite – I agree with you that the California state government has been dysfunctional. But California is a big place, and there are lots of people here, and the government is just a tiny piece of the iceberg. Do you know what a JPA is? It has nothing to do with Arnold or anyone else in Sacramento for that matter. I repeat my earlier question, are you really interested in making things better for everyone (yourself included)? If so you maybe need a more open mind.
BOBBYD12 I suggest you check out the polls on CNN, SURVEYUSA, GALLUP, etc. MAJORITY OF THE COUNTRY WANT PUBLIC OPTION. You can keep deluding yourself of this fact but the numbers don’t lie. Folks are tired of being ripped of by the insurance companies and the sooner you realize that the better. FOLKS WANT CHOICES!!
“Mandating insurance to younger folks like myself who are just starting off in life without a public alternative will be devastating.
Dammit what is wrong with Medicare for all? My grandma loves it. Why isn’t the white house advocating for this?”
Agreed that mandating coverage is a mistake. Would people get tickets if they don’t have health care? However, giving Medicare to everyone won’t solve the problem. The Medicare trust fund is projected to run out of money (go bankrupt) by 2019. Adding 40 million people to that same fund would not help its life span. I think the first step is to attack the costs of health care which are driven by the greed of medical suppliers and insurance companies. This is too large a problem to tackle all at once, what’s wrong with focusing on Medicare/Medicaid to get these running as model programs that are properly funded? It will take longer to get a final product but building something without a blueprint will be more costly and damaging than taking the time to do this right.
The majority of the country does not want to be run by a rump party, based mostly in the South, and looking nothing like the diverse population of the entire country.
Do You Want to SAVE MEDICARE?
HR 676 – Medicare for all
Who do you trust to save Medicare?
The party of Ronald Reagan, who personally tried to prevent Medicare from being born, and have legislatively tried to kill it ever since. Under Ronald Reagan the economic burden for Medicare was shifted from progressive taxes across the general population to regressive taxes on the ever shrinking middle class. Medicare part D was an unfunded mandate designed to drive the program into bankruptcy while benefiting big Pharma and health capitalists. These people do not negotiate in good faith. They do not present their positions honestly, and their motives are well known.
Medicare for all would spread the burden of funding this program across all Americans while guaranteeing a minimal right to health care for all Americans. The problem so often quoted about Medicare’s demise is a problem of funding not efficiency. Yes, there are instances of Medicare fraud, but we have professional law enforcement and judicial system, what we lack is will. But the cost of delivering the Health care by a single central payment system, with well known and published benefits which leaves doctors free to provide those services free from having to negotiate each case with a for profit insurance bureaucrat has been shown to be the second lowest only to the fully socialized Veterans Affairs medical system. Most of us have spent a healthful lifetime working and paying private insurance companies were our unspent healthcare dollars have not secured better services for our dotages, but created huge windfall profits and obscene executive pay and bonuses for the geniuses who can ration health most profitably.
But, while people of liberal social consciousness feel that this is the best solution, we also live in the real and very polarized world. What candidate Barack Obama first proposed, is nothing more then a way to let the American People, each decide which system they feel best combines their health needs, economic capability and perhaps assuage their political consciousness. What has been proposed is an open market place where all payment systems compete for the coverage dollars from each American consumer with published and known costs and benefits. Many of us (or most according to many credible surveys) would like the freedom to choose a Medicare like public system which we believe will cut at least 30% from the administrative costs that do not promote health, and let doctors and nurses do what they do best, help us become and stay healthy.
We are not advocating changing the basic relationship between Patients and Doctors, but how we pay for the services. And we will be satisfied with allowing the American People make this decision or themselves.
Many Americans believe that our Government, of the People and By the People, can actually do the right thing and do it well; if we demand competence and honesty of those we support to represent us. There are many hardworking and dedicated public servants. And we live in a country with both political and legal institutions that protect us from those who are not, without dismantling the common institutions that define our social compact. These public servants are ultimately accountable to us only if we make the effort (and have the knowledge) to hold them so. Private institutions are, in most cases rightfully, not held to the same level of accountability and sanction as those who work for and represent our interests on our behalf.
How would getting Insurance Companies out of the business of making profits and adding inefficiencies to the system harm Health Care? How do Insurance companies keep people healthy? (there is a lot of evidence of the opposite)
“What part of “Repugs regaining the majority” sounds good to you? Man progressives can be damned short-sited if not downright purblind.”
Well, the reason I can find something good in Republicans regaining the majority is precisely because I am not short-sighted, nor purblind.
Let me ask, what makes a party shift? How do you get a party like the Democrats to actually represent in tangible meaninful ways progresive values? You seem to think you do that by supporting them when they go against those values, and I do not.
The long view would be that taking lumps now and withholding support of Democrats unless they do stand with progressives is about the only way to actually motivate them to do so.
If they need my vote, well they damn well better actually represent me. (If they don’t need my vote, then me not supporting them shouldn’t much matter toward the success of Republicans then, should it?)
In reality, your attack on progresives ultimately boils down to Democrats being annoyed that they can’t simply take them for granted. Your complaint is that they actually want to support what they believe in.
If only those progressives didn’t actually have interest in supporting their own…interests. If only they would just continue to throw their lot behind leaders who don’t actually represent them.
I’m no longer willing to sit back and accept a two party system where neither party represents my values in any meaningful fashion. The Democrats can either represent my values and have my vote, or they can choose not to, and live without my vote.
I’m done with this lesser evil B.S. It doesn’t lead to any real change. I’m willing to accept the long view for a chance to see that real change actualized, even if it means short term Republican gains.
The motivation for progressives to desert Democrats has nothing to do with short-sightedness.
There’s no evidence that extending Medicare to those below age 65 would do anything to hold healthcare costs down long term. Medicare only achieves savings by using its bargaining muscle to cost-shift to uninsured individuals. In fact, 30+ years of Medicare is a large part of the reason we have a healthcare “crisis” now. Take a look at healthcare inflation, year by year, and see how it started a dramatic turn upwards after the advent of Medicare in 1965. The numbers don’t lie. More government will only make it worse. You all may even get what you want, but you’re not gonna like it.
This might be a long shot but Obama acts as if there is someting going on here that is bigger than himself, and his supporters! I’ve notice how careful he was at Ted Kennedy’s funernal not to piss off the republicans as they sat there with the chest out as to suggest you had better not. Hm….not what could put that type of restraint on someone let’s see perhaps the lives of his wife, and children. I wonder has low down dirty ******* have actually sworn to harm his family if he passes this legislation. That would worry the hell out of me if I was him, but still I would give them the finger! Becuase he couldn’t be thinking he will going to re-elected without passing the public option. The right have always used acts of violence to stop change. Blacks lived in fear of evening looking a white person straigt in the eye or get lynched. Hmm..Mr President? Obama acts as if he’s surprise by the level of hatred. Maybe it’s becuase the didn’t grow up around these ignorant *** white trash uneducated people. But I did and they are proud of it! Even if it drowns the entire country they be damned before they see the day a black man makes a difference. To this pathetic group” Here’s the finger!” noone is afraid of the big white wolf.
RE: Present and f uture support for Blue Dogs:
I’m a very liberal Democrat from the very red state of Mississippi. Gene Taylor — a fiscal conservative — is our Blue Dog Representative from the 4th CD. Given the 4th CD constituency, we may twitch a bit and push Gene hard to act in a more liberal fashion, but when ‘push comes to shove,’ we are glad to have him. He is respected on both sides of the isle (except for the most rabid right) for his continuing help for Mississippi after Katrina. If we didn’t have Gene as our Rep., we would undoubtably have a Republican.
So — we are working very hard to improve education in Mississippi. Only an educated population can raise us from the mire of the short-sighted, (generally racist) hard-right-wing conservatives.
Heckuvajob, BIG O…Maybe you should have lined up your ducks in a row before you launched your health care campaign…ya think?
I sure hope the WH has the good sense not to try and force the progressives to capitulate by doing some political guilt tripping. Rather than always expecting progressives to give in why don’t they focus on bringing around the handful of additional people we need to get this done.
I want the progressive dems to stand firm. Don’t vote for it if doesn’t have a public option. We’ll never get what we need or have them take us seriously if we always cave. For the greater good I say stand firm on the public option.
Medicare is one of the reasons that insurance is so high. The gov’t decides how much they will pay a doctor for a service he provides to a patient on Medicare. That fee is not as much as the doctor wants and he really needs a new boat so he charges the insurance companies (whose fees aren’t controlled by the gov’t) a higher price to make up the difference. The CEO at the insurance company wants his new boat too so they increase the premiums on their coverage. If the gov’t offers a Medicare-like plan to everyone then the doctors will jack the private costs so freakin’ high that everyone will have to drop private coverage and get their health care from the government. Then that’s the end of private health care and the next big American step toward the S-word.
Bobbyd12 is ignorant… the truth is California, New York, and Mass all send far more tax dollars to Washington, then come back from the federal government. If these states could keep their own money, there wouldn’t be any crisis!
P.S.- That tax money is going mostly to those Red States who all receive far more tax dollars from Washington then they send in… it’s a fact, Jack.
BobbyD12 is right. The public wants the public option. But have you heard the news media ever mention this? They’re scared to death of Obama doing something to make him actually popular in a more or less permanent way.
Obama is living in dreamland if he thinks dropping the public option like he dropped single payer will allow the Democrats to retain enough power to rule. Instead Obama will go down in history as the greatest sellout of all time who snatched a monstrous defeat from the jaws of a victory that would have ensured Democratic rule for generations had Obama had enough guts to stand and fight. By caving in to the insurance companies, drug companies and the coroporate elites who run America Obama will finish the job the Bushies started. This will lead either to the rise of a small progressive party which may take generations to come to power and an outright fascist takeover in the interim.
This isn’t about Obama and his legacy. It is about us and our ability to have a choice rather than have a private sector option rammed down out throats.
I don’t know why I am defending Tena’s “honor”, but she has always struck me as a pretty legitimate Commie. I think the level of economic illiteracy evident in many of her comments should prove she is one of you.
All day the pundits were trying their best to rationalise why it is best for Obama to dive on the public option. These idiots are not liberal; they fancy themselves as saving Barack. What a con! The Pres needs to make a calculation: do Americans want health care reform? Do those who want the private insurers to thrive really have the upper hand? Do Democrats stand for anything? Obama has to take a stand. If he wants to sacrifice the public option that’s okay by me. But don’t send me e mails asking for money or to turn out to get the vote.
You have to hand it to the Republicans: they are hypocrites and don’t apologise. Those guys never questioned George Bush’s when he placed Iraq expenses off budget. They bought all the dishonesty. And they get to govern. Why? They have no shame.
I’m just happy the progressive caucus is showing some sack.
Hopefully, they won’t back down.
Amen Kris!!! I’m one of those black people.
“I think the first step is to attack the costs of health care which are driven by the greed of medical suppliers and insurance companies.”
Right, but especially the health care cost? Does anyone understand why this is increasing so fast?
You gotta understand the nature of the problem before you can fix it.
Is the whole health care raising cost just because they can, or is there more to it?
Health should not be a for-profit proposition period.
We have plenty of Evidence that letting Private Insurance Companies, call the shots, has not kept costs down, and has not covered all. That we know for certain, so all this rubbish about their being no evidence that Medicare can do better, is just a lot of idle guff.
If you are worried about keeping costs down, then you should be totally against letting the Insurance Robber Barons continue to skim more than thirty percent off the top of what they collect, and then still refuse to cover millions of people
Government covers the elderly, who have the most health care costs, because the Insurance Robber Barons would not, and government CHIP covers millions of children because the Insurance Robber Barons did not.
The Insurance Robber Barons are just a cherry picking cabal, who take massive amounts from the healthy, and are not even medical practitioners.
They let people stay sick and die all the time. The Insurance Robber Barons are THE DEATH PANELS, that kills people every single day, and no town hall shouter ever says boo to them.
If no one makes money in healthcare you idiot, where will the healthcare (nevermind the doctors) come from? You commies really need to read an economics book that isn’t red sometime. There are a lot of things that we can fix the way healthcare works, but “taking the profit motive out” is not one of them. That you can’t understand this is why you are losing so badly right now. I am literally giggling as I type, thinking about how dumb you must be not to understand this.
I don’t care if he was the first President chosen directly by God. No public option no support!
Insurance Companies are not in Health Care, you numbskull. They are in the rip off the healthy racket. They have never even applied a band aid to a boo boo.
They are running a giant Ponzi scheme. They are Bernie Madeoff, on steroids.
Doctors treat patients, and make a good living. Insurance Companies treat no one, and rip off billions and billions that should be used to pay doctors to treat many more patients.
Now go see your medical insurance rep, and have him perform a head out of your ****** procedure on you.
It’s not about healthcare, it’s about Obama. He couldn’t give an eff about the public option; he only wants whatever will build his legacy. Is there any political issue…anything…that isn’t up for negotiation with this guy? From Iraq to Israel right down to blackness and even his church…everything is optional if it means stoking his huge ego.
F’ the progressive caucus. arrogant and marginal, with a far over-reaching sense of what BHO’s election means re their smarmy little part of the political spectrum. go to hell, “progressives”…..
If there’s no profit in teaching, where does the education come from? If you can’t get rich in the army, why does anyone bother to join? Who the hell would be a cop or a firefighter, either?
Why does anyone in England, France, Canada or the rest of the first world want to become a doctor? Why do pharmaceutical companies sell their products there?
sgwhiteinfla | September 3rd, 2009 at 04:54 pm
What you don’t seem to get is that its not the progressives or liberals who are the problem. Its the f*cking Blue Dogs and ConservaDems. An overwhelming majority of Democrats in Congress support a public option. So liberals and progressives should cave to the minority in the Democratic party who are bought and paid for? F*CK THAT! If you have beef its with those bought and paid for Democrats who live to oppose the Democratic agenda. How about calling them out instead of talking sh*t about liberals and progressives?
—–
How about Obama calling them out instead of telling the rest of us Democrats to leave them alone.
We are not Republicans. This is not a cult. We don’t live in our imaginary world. Bush did everything the Republicans wanted and look where it got us.
I expected nothing more from Bush because Republicans believe Government is the problem.
They try to prove it every time they are in office.
If Obama had half the Balls Bush did with his ideas he could go down as one of the Greatest Presidents ever.
Why he would listen to people who are basically screaming for someone to assassinate him is insane.
Grow a pair and run the damn country.
If the Blue Dogs don’t know they will be voted out if Health care fails like 1994 then someone needs to explain that to them.
Obama.
Devereux
I think you took a wrong turn at Red State, nobody is engaging in your kind of vitriol here. Even our resident trolls are more respectable than that.
Sounds good, provided you buy them dinner, and take them to a show first, or are you from the Airport toilet stall romance, wing of the Republican party!
Baby Hugo: Someone needs to put the baby back in there crib.
Grown people are talking.
I am tired of progressives having to compromise. F’it better progressives should burn our house down than give up our birthright for a bowl of porridge. Sic semper tyrannis!
last post meant for this romantic rascal.
sub | September 3rd, 2009 at 06:18 pm
F’ the progressive caucus. arrogant and marginal, with a far over-reaching sense of what BHO’s election means re their smarmy little part of the political spectrum. go to hell, “progressives”….
…………………………
Sounds good, provided you buy them dinner, and take them to a show first, or are you from the Airport toilet stall romance, wing of the Republican party!
**** the ‘White House Advisors.’ Just **** ‘em. I’m not going to be bullied into supporting a reactionary administration that is doing the dirty work of the health care industry and trying to pass it off as reformk. Just **** ‘em all.
sgwhiteinfla, troll or not, we both know there was only one candidate in the primaries that truly believed in single payer, but for some reason she’s not the president.
Who runs America ? You got your answer when all those billions went to Wall Street. Nobody has been indicted yet and it seems has everything remains the same. Good luck.
Politics is about compromise, it has always been about compromise. What should we expect, compromise. That the way it is, that’s the way it has always been, that’s the way it will always be….
Kathleen, I don’t have time to explain what is wrong with everyone of your “points”, but suffice it to say I am still giggling. Did you know they do pay people to be in the army? Profit doesn’t mean getting rich it means making money, so that if you start out with nothing and make a dollar, we call that dollar profit. Now that I think about it, I heard they pay teachers too. In fact, I believe in the biggest (most union-controlled) school districts they are actually paying teachers not to teach.
Read about free riding and marginal costs and you will know why pharmaceutical companies sell drugs in Canada or France for less. The short answer is that once you have a drug to put into a pill, it costs you very little to make an extra copy of that pill. But you never would have spent millions or billions in the first place to develop a drug unless you knew you could make money selling the pills. So when economic illiterates like you suggest that we should take some of the profit out of selling those pills it is not scaremongering to point out fewer drugs will get developed in that scenario. Free riding is what results from Canada and European companies being able to sell their pills at a marginal profit by selling those extra pills (which again cost very little to make). Let me ask you a question, if drug makers can never charge enough to make it worthwhile to spend millions or billions to develop a new drug, do you think you will see more new drugs or fewer? The answer is fewer and this is what you are advocating.
Ignorance like this is why I would bite a finger off the hand of each and every one of you commie a-holes if I ever had the chance (and weren’t HIV negative).
Someone here asks “Dammit what is wrong with Medicare for all?”
Well, for starters, Medicare has an unfunded liablility on the order of 36 trillion dollars. Add the rest of the population to the mix and you’re talking orders of magnitude increases in that liability.
That’s quite offensive, Baby Hugo.
“Heckuvajob, BIG O…Maybe you should have lined up your ducks in a row before you launched your health care campaign…ya think?”
Exactly,Hank. Where’s that efficient, well-oiled campaign machine we saw during the election? With Obama continuing all of Bush’s foreign policy ****, you have to wonder if the White House is determined to push the progressive wing out into the street, so they can get down to business…with big business.
Some more over flow from Baby Hugo’s dirty diaper.
His latest stupid argument is that we should pay far more than all other countries for drugs. If Pharma was not making a profit in those other countries, then they would not sell them there.
Walmart sells lots of those drugs for $4.00 per month, and they are not in the business of losing money.
Someone go change Baby Hugo’s diaper. He really does reek of t*rdblossoms.
Baby Huey, why didn’t you mention all of the research and development of drugs and treatments that are financed with our taxes, through the Academic medical centers and universities’ research programs? That’s one part you never hear wingnut “economic experts” mention.
Baby Hugo, if I disagree with you it doesn’t mean I’m a financial illiterate. Andy Cardenas did not say no one should earn money. He said health care should be non-profit. And that’s not the position I’m advocating. I’m just asking rhetorically why do any of these people work in industries–yes, of course, they get paid–that are don’t generate profits. The case you made to me about the price of pills applies here, as well. What you’re not saying is that those companies (cough, Pfizer) make their billions in-start up costs in this market, which enables them to turn around and sell at production costs everywhere else. I want the burden for funding start up costs shared, and that will only happen if we’re all negotiating from a similar position.
I want the laundry list of reforms that many others want–portability, can’t be dropped (or have rates increased at ruinous levels as if you wrecked a car while driving drunk) for pre-existing conditions, universal coverage.
I want doctors and pharmaceutical companies to thrive. I frankly don’t see the point of insurance companies, but I’ll go along with it as long as they don’t pay people Wall Street rates. You want Wall Street money, go there. Don’t get rich on our health. I also would like to see risk for insurance companies spread evenly. Fine, let people shop across state lines. Add some fair tort reform to remove the incentive from specious lawsuits. But don’t make it so doctors and hospitals don’t have to be accountable. Figure out a way to make medical school less expensive.
That about does it. Time for dinner.
Instead of negotiating with / among Senator Snow and others, why does not the White House negotiate directly with the Insurance companies?
Insure all with no denial of coverage and permit portability. An immediate 30% reduction in premiums; and a another 20% reduction over next two years. Half the savings to come from Insurance (overheads and profits) and the other half from the delivery side of care. This will reduce healthcare cost from 17% GDP to 11% GDP; and make American business more competitive in the world.
With such a deal, all sides should be on board.
For lying to his supporters, he may be a one term preside3nt. However, electing a veto proof congress is needed to put through all the things that Obama promised but doesn’t have the backbone to fullfill. The Republicans found their man in George W. and now have their Boy in Obama.
For lying to his supporters, he may be a one term president. However, electing a veto proof congress in 2010 is needed to put through all the things that Obama promised but doesn’t have the backbone to fullfill. The Republicans found their man in George W. and now have their Boy in Obama. He will submit to Republicans.
For lying to his supporters, he may be a one term president. However, electing a veto proof congress in 2010 is needed to put through all the things that Obama promised but doesn’t have the backbone to fulfill. The Republicans found their man in George W. and now have their Boy in Obama. He will submit to Republicans.
f negotiating with / among Senator Snow and others, why does not the White House negotiate directly with the Insurance companies?
Insure all with no denial of coverage and permit portability. An immediate 30% reduction in premiums; and a another 20% reduction over next two years. Half the savings to come from Insurance (overheads and profits) and the other half from the delivery side of care. This will reduce healthcare cost from 17% GDP to 11% GDP; and make American business more competitive in the world.
………………………
With such a deal, all sides should be on board.Have the Insurance Industry put that on the table, and then we will talk. There is no point in the President having to go chasing after something that the Insurance crowd will never agree to.
Also, if they are going to accept those terms, then it has to be for all, from cradle to grave, and rates have to remain the same for each person, regardless of their health conditions. I know that old trick of saying we will cover all, but you there, because you had a transplant at one time, will have to pay rates at ten or more times the cost of those who have never had a large medical bill.
Have the Insurance people put it all on the table, so the government does not have still pay for geriatric care, and coverage of children, and then get back to us.
The left will come under enormous pressure? Why not put that pressure on the Blue Dogs NOT to allow a filibuster. Problem solved. Why does the left have to cave? They did, I missed the fight over single payer. The ones that pay are the ones who get Primaried for not supporting Public Option.
Tena,
You’re absolutely right. Blacks, Asians and Latino are disproportionally affected by Health care. I know a lot of blacks who are growing impatient with the president–myself included.
What a WONDERFUL thread this has been! I do so love watching the Democrats tear each other apart after only 8 months in power.
says Moonbat GK:
“I am tired of progressives having to compromise. F’it better progressives should burn our house down than give up our birthright for a bowl of porridge. Sic semper tyrannis!”
What tyranny is this clown “siccing” after? This is a democratic federal Republic.
Progressives simply don’t have the numbers. Their last great lion died last week, and he couldn’t knotck off Jimmy Carter…Jimmy Carter!
And you’ve convinced yourself that The One is his inheritor…I guess that’s why to hear GK talk it, Progressives should be the “shot callers” in this yard?
GMAFB.
Tantrum,much?
If you’re a minority caucus within a party that can maybe swing half the elctorate, you either compromise or you fizzle off into the:
“Point your finger and laugh at the silly Larouchies and Ron Paulites outside the post office”
zone.
So, from my perspective, Progressoids…HANG TOUGH!
All or Nothing!
Eyes on the Prize, Baby!
Medicare has an unfunded liability of about $35 Trillion dollars. There is no trust fund, and never has been – its all IOUs from one part of the government to another. Medicare is well past broke.
Payment rates to doctors are so far below their costs that about 25% of doctors will not take Medicare patients. And its going to get worse.
That’s really a great model for single payer.
It should scare the cr*p out of anyone to give that much power to the government. Eventually, the system will be run by someone you don’t like, and who doesn’t like you. And you will have no options, and no choice. Sort of like being in the DC public school system.
Thank you to Kris & the congressional Black Caucus. As a white man, I’m not really supposed or “allowed” to criticize President Obama, because for sure then someone will insist that it’s because I’m a horrible racist, rather than listen to my specific policy complaints. I’m always heartened when people are willing to even go against what might be in their own “interest” to support what they believe is the right thing.
As a self-identified progressive, I will say this to those who kvetch that “oh, but blocking the President on this will spell doom for the Democrats!” — I give not a fig for the Democrats (or Republicans). I have some *ideals* that I believe in (one is that government is not always worse than private industry at running large concerns, and another is the crazy idea that you shouldn’t be bankrupted just because you get sick). I will use my voice, my money, and my vote to support and further those *ideals*. But I’m not part of a cult of personality; if McCain would have been more supportive of my ideas than Obama, I would have voted for him, despite the (R) beside his name.
I think that Democrats (centrist, corporatist Democrats) have gotten a little too smug and lazy in assuming that liberals and progressives would always “shut up and do what they’re told” and not get uppity.
This is the last straw; if Obama and congress blow this, this will be the end of the Democratic party’s relevance for generations to come. And honestly? If they’re that corrupt and incompetent — let alone anti-progressive — then good riddance.
That’s what I was going for sbj. And liam, laughable man, laughable.
Do you dorks in here really not understand that people in Canada and the UK, e.g., wait for months to get CT scans because there are not as many to go around as we have in the US? And the reason we have more CT scanners is because some a-hole makes a profit on selling the machine and someone else makes a profit on operating the machine. You take the profit out of providing healthcare, then there is less incentive to build the new scanners or develop the new drug.
You are the ones lying when you claim the NHS in the UK or the Canadian system is so much better than the US. A substantial portion of you think Cuba is a good model. Keep preaching that nonsense because there is nothing I can do to discredit you more than that. We will never agree because you think government is the answer to everything. That message barely carries the Dem primaries, I think we see what taxpayers think about it.
Freehold:
“Medicare has an unfunded liability of about $35 Trillion dollars. There is no trust fund, and never has been – its all IOUs from one part of the government to another. Medicare is well past broke.”
Why, NOW you’re talkin’ a language that Obama can relate to!
Insurance Companies add no value to the Health Care Industry. They do not perform surgeries or conduct physical exams. They do not research cures or design new treatments. they simply collect money, pay or deny claims and add or drop their customers from their insurance rolls. They take 30cents out every health care dollar and they spend that 30cents on admin, wages, bonuses, etc. They add no value to people’s care. None! And when you really need them, they walk away. This is why a public insurance option is so important. I am approach 65 and will be elegible for medicare, but I still want my children and grandchildren to know that the government that collects their money in the form of taxes gives back the assurance that they will not have to go broke buying health care insurance or paying for an illness.
By the way, Baby Hugo. I lived and worked in the UK for six years and never had to wait for needed treatment under the NHS. This includes a lumpectomy and a hysterectomy. As soon as my doctor identified the problem, I had what I needed. Moreover, my doctor even met me at his office on a holiday to treat one of my relatives who was visiting. Not system is perfect, but if you poll most of the people in the UK, they will tell you that they would never trade their system for ours.
Baby Hugo doesn’t understand the difference between “payment” and “profit”. According to Baby Hugo, health care couldn’t possibly function unless a profit motive were retained. And yet that is exactly how health care functions in many European countries.
Almost all medical research in the US is publicly financed. In Baby Hugo’s fantasy world, this couldn’t possibly true, because government programs in health care are impossible.
It is difficult to function in any debate when you start with flawed, immutable axioms.
If the conservaturds split the votes yeah. run a pro gun lib as an independant
Obama has turned out to be a whimp and sh.its his pants everytime the Retugs spew their lies…the wrong person ended up being the democratic nominee and it surely would have played out differently if the Obama folks didn’t play the race card. This s.o.b. is so weak it just blows me away–how the fu.ck did this happen to the democratic party. Holy shite!
Diana Zin:
“They take 30cents out every health care dollar and they spend that 30cents on admin, wages, bonuses, etc. They add no value to people’s care. None!”
A valid point, and I’ll address it for you.
If you started a company that only skimmed 25 cents of every dollar, but paid the claims no different than the rsst, and passed that nickel back in the form of savings on premiums, would you not make a fortune by folks who would choose your coverage over “Brand X”’s?
Assuming a fair and free marketplace,(which is a BIG assumption, I grant), sure you would.
And you’d keep your eye open for the company that would only skim 20 cents off the dollar…or, as you age and you need more maintenance, you might be willing to pay the guy with the 30 cent vig who has a reputation for not dropping clients.
Your call, right?
But let’s flip this upside down and make this a government-run monopoly.
Here’s Uncle Dr. Sam, MD, who skims 50 cents off the dollar, and then inflates your currency so the remaining two bits in your purse is worth maybe a dime.
You don’t have a choice now. You just get to pay it and hope you’ll be happy with what they give you.
SOLERSO:
“run a pro gun lib as an independant”
Dude…if you ever find such a critter, throw a rope around it or at least take it’s picture.
“American Rifleman” will make it the centerfold!
Sangy:
“the wrong person ended up being the democratic nominee and it surely would have played out differently if the Obama folks didn’t play the race card. This s.o.b. is so weak it just blows me away–how the fu.ck did this happen to the democratic party.”
The Democratic Party undone by it’s own “racial politics”?
How did this happen?
The words:
“Divine Justice”
spring to mind.
I am glad to hear that the Progressive Caucus is not going to back a bill that doesn’t include a Public Option.
FDR said, “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob” and the Republicans give us BOTH!
WHY IS OBAMA NEGOTIATING WITH TERRORISTS!?!?!?!
What good is the overwhelming Democratic majority we worked so hard to ensure if we don’t get the change we so desperately need????
The country wants CHANGE – NOT REPUBLICAN LIGHT. We have been DYING under the weight of Republican Greed for far too long.
When Dick Cheney was confronted with the fact that the American People were not behind the war, his answer was, “so.”
The People support the option and to those who don’t, I say “SO!” We need to join the rest of the civilized world and provide health care to all our citizens regardless of their wealth! This is a moral obligation and ONCE AGAIN Republicans are on the wrong side of history! THE DEMOCRATS ARE NOT IN POWER TO CONTINUE REPUBLICAN GREED!
The Prez sold out to the corporations. And now that i think about it….the true Prez is Rahm. Sad. Anyway, the Prez played this same type of game when he was President of Harvard Law Review. He tried to maintain a balance;No matter the cost.
^
^
^
^
(has issues…sounds “bitin’ mad” everyone tip-toe away quietly until the sedative kicks in!)
When you think of public policy, think of Mark Fuhrman. Watch this jack-o make up lies on the spot about the VA hospitals.
http://progressnotcongress.org/?p=2777
sbj: “Don’t most blue dogs come from conservative districts? You are proposing that a more liberal primary challenger will go on to defeat a moderate Republican in those districts?”
Not at all. Rather, we’re simply proposing that President Obama and incumbent congressional Democrats not play their own long-suffering base for chumps, and instead keep their word to do the right thing by the very people who elected them to do exactly that in the first place. When one governs informatively, compassionately, affirmatively and responsibly, one doesn’t have to worry about deploying the smoke and mirrors and bull dung in the next election cycle.
NOTE: Threats made tonoc that BO will NOT be supported for rerun in 2012 if he doesn’t hold out for public option….. I am almost there.
Bong Hits For Jesus:
“Rather, we’re simply proposing that President Obama and incumbent congressional Democrats not play their own long-suffering base for chumps, and instead keep their word to do the right thing by the very people who elected them to do exactly that in the first place. When one governs informatively, compassionately, affirmatively and responsibly, one doesn’t have to worry about deploying the smoke and mirrors and bull dung in the next election cycle.”
You seem to think that Obama would have won the General election without “moving to the Center” and convincing Centrists, Indies and RINO’s to vote for him.
If you hang around these parts, and places like it, you can be forgiven your mistake. The Far Left Libs/Progs are very good at chanting themselves into some form of group psychosis and rolling out of the sweat lodge spouting their own shared, but whack-tastically wrong, version of reality.
The reality is that the Prog/Libs, along with the slobbering butt-kissers in the Bi-Coastal Media, put The One over the UberFrauFuhrer in the primaries, (which wasn’t hard, considering that people had gotten to know her by that point…”Pantsuit Stalin).
But had he stayed the Left’s creature, even so feeble a candidate as McCain, (who has made a career of irritating the GOP base by being Democrats’ “Favorite Pet Rethuglikkkan…watch him do tricks!”), would have cleaned his clock.
Whatever he may have implied to you in the primaries, I don’t recall the “Imposing Socialized Health Care” wording between the “HOPE” and the “CHANGE” on the stickers, you?
Nor was it to be found on the “Yes, We CAN!” placards.
Now, if you think that he’s reneging on some contract that he made with you for your vote, and you would like to rescind that vote, then the way to do it is join with the folks called “Birthers” and demand that he produce his vault-copy “Certificate of Live Birth”, and hope that he will not or cannot, thereby invalidating his Presidency and all his actions on Constitutional grounds as he will be a fraud unqualified to hold the office.
If you’re not ready to do that, then you pretty much have the option to STFU and STFD for another 3 years and 4 months.
@Lou Filliger, If the co-op program in CA is working so well in finding health insurance for Californians, why are there so many uninsured people in CA and why is the number of uninsured Californians increasing?
8 million uninsured californians in 2009 up 13% since 2007
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/pdf/uninsured_rate.pdf
The fact of the matter is that co-ops fail to achieve universal coverage. PERIOD! Health care is a basic right and a basic need and must cover all Americans at all times unless of course you find it acceptable for people to literally die on the streets because they can’t afford health insurance.
I’m fed up with Obama. I had backed Hillary Clinton (although I wasn’t crazy about her) because I thought she had the political wiles and strength to get things done, not as well as LBJ but… After Obama beat her in the primaries, I did back him and believe his spiel and donated,etc. I also donated to many health care change groups. Now he appears to be totally caving on the issue. He’s willing not only to get rid of a public option but will gut any bill of anything meaningful. What do they mean, let him have a victory with an historic bill? This is a meaningless piece of paper and as long as the insurance companies are there, NOTHING will change. He thinks they’re going to pull the wool over our eyese with Olympia Snowe’s “trigger” so that if certain parameters are not met then the “trigger” will be pulled and then we’ll have a public option? Part D Medicare already has a “trigger” and no one is going to pull it. I have one generic prescription the price of which has increased 30% since last year and all they tell me is to apply for low income assistance! I don’t have low income, but that’s the best they can do? The insurance companies have a stranglehold on us.
I’m fed up with Obama. He’s no LBJ. Neither is Rahm Emanuel. They should both go back to the minor leagues in Chicago.
And as for those “blue dogs”, Birch Baye would be embarrassed by Evan Baye’s behaviour.
@Jay, your facts are all wrong. The doctor is not getting ripped off by Medicare. In fact, doctors and hospitals are actually staying in business because of Medicare because it is far easier to collect from Medicare than from insurance companies and because collections from Medicare are typically far higher compared to collections from insurance companies and individuals (I’m citing an anecdote from a recently retired medical biller at a large, renown hospital in CA). I guarantee that, if Medicare were not around, all hospitals will be on the verge of bankruptcy. Try obtaining health care under that scenario.
Doctor and hospital costs are actually being driven up by restrictions and bureaucratic burden placed on them by insurance companies and by the total lack of tort reform i.e. unnecessary restrictions on where medical tests can be performed, ordering unnecessary tests in order to avoid malpractice lawsuits, and increased bureaucratic costs from having to haggle with several different insurance companies.
See interviews by Private Practice Doctor: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/22/president_obamas_longtime_physician_opposes_white
Furthermore, it’s the health insurance companies that are driving the cost of Medicare higher. Maintaining the opposite that Medicare is driving the cost of private insurance higher is simply false. The higher costs that doctors and hospitals incur through dealing with private insurance company bureaucrats are actually passed onto Medicare and, ultimately, to the taxpayer.
What the heck does “african american” presidency have to do with it? How about just plain old democratic presidency?
If there is one thing RAHM EMMANUEL Hates more then anything it would Dems. in his own Party that have the Guts to stand up to His Chicken-**** Deal Making.
Greg,
You said that a public option is not in any of the bills, not even the House, but HR 676 is a public option, single payer, medicare for all. John Conyers has presented it time and time again and represented it in January and H.R. 676 currently has 86 co-sponsors
Diana at 8:32:
First, insurance companies are not supposed to provide health care. Insurance helps people manage risk.
Second,your numbers are wrong. Take Humana as an example.
For 2008 (latest annual report), they took in about $28 billion in premiums and paid out $24 billion in benefits (or 86% of premiums). The benefits / premiums ratio has been steady for the last 5 years.
Expenses were about $4 billion (about 14% – not the 30% you claim). They have about 30,000 employees, and most of this expense goes to pay the employees.
They paid about $350 million in taxes. After tax profits were about $650 million (or about 2% of revenue).
The long term average profit margin for the S&P500 (the largest 500 companies in the US) is 5.6%, or more than twice the margin that Humana earned. Health insurance is not actually a very profitable business.
If there was a gold mine in insurance, you’d be hearing people bragging about going to work there, and hear about venture capitalist funding insurance start-ups. When is the last time you heard someone advised to go into health insurance to make their fortune?
If you took all the profits from insurance companies, it would reduce health care costs about 1%. Compare this to legal tort reform, which is estimated to reduce costs by 2-10%.
Of course, it would also destroy the value of insurance stocks held in teacher and union pension funds and individual retirement accounts.
Lets use real numbers.
Anon – My rheumatologist agrees with what you write, he says Medicare pays faster and better than those with private insurance. The drugs used to treat these diseases are very expensive and he told me that, for his private insured patients, he often carried six-figures in used medicines that the private insurers stall on. I know that is true, I have had to re-schedule two infusions because my private insurance company was more than three months behind in payments.
oh and sbj and ex-canuck – thanks for responding to my question upthread.
@ Lou Filliger: “There’s no evidence that extending Medicare to those below age 65 would do anything to hold healthcare costs down long term. Medicare only achieves savings by using its bargaining muscle to cost-shift to uninsured individuals. In fact, 30+ years of Medicare is a large part of the reason we have a healthcare “crisis” now. Take a look at healthcare inflation, year by year, and see how it started a dramatic turn upwards after the advent of Medicare in 1965. The numbers don’t lie. More government will only make it worse. You all may even get what you want, but you’re not gonna like it.”
You’re totally hopeless because you’re misinterpreting the data and because you’re ignoring the statistics from other parts of the world. Take a look at Canada which has a single-payer Medicare for all health care system in place. The cost of health care per capita and as a total percentage of GDP is less than 50% that of the U.S.
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20071205/
http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm
The fact of the matter is that the U.S. overspends for health care while achieving much poorer results. Extending medicare to people under 65 will lower costs because more people will be enrolled in a health program that has 3% bureaucratic overhead in Medicare vs. 20% in privte insurance companies.
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/chefs/Hacker_-_Public_Plan_-_Final_1_21_09.pdf
Furthermore, with more enrollees Medicare will be able to negotiate for lower drug and treatment costs.
And contrary to your assertion, there are studies that suggest that a public option will lower costs. I encourage you to read them even though I know you won’t believe them.
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/chefs.htm
Finally, costs of private insurance plans will inevitably increase as more money is devoted to corporate profits and less money is devoted to treatment.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/16/former_insurance_exec_wendell_porter
Seems more prudent to take these changes in increments than try to make drastic, wholesale changes. Make people responsible for their health and health care. Tax the hell out of cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, and everythign else that put health at risk. Put it in a fund designated for health care. Let people be responsible for themselves, kinda like our great pioneer forefathers were. They even seemed to take care of each other a lot beter than we take care of each other today!!!
Freehold, then how do you explain that one of the largest Health Care Insurers recently posted a billion dollar profit for one quarter? Moreover, how do you explain the huge CEO compensation packages for some of these companies?
No public option? No sale!
I’m NOT ‘buying’ that a re-thug sliced and diced bad facsimile of ‘reform’ in the form of a ‘gift-wrapped’ opportunity for the insurance companies to further pad their bottom lines is ‘the best we can get’.
Apparently, things aren’t ‘bad’ enough, the helath care ‘crisis’ isn’t affecting enough people (I think the ‘tipping point’ will be when about 1/2 the working [or unemployed] folks don’t have ANY insurance/healthcare.
So, in the meantime, ‘pass’. And, use the rethug obstructionism to grab A SUPER MAJORITY IN THE SENATE in 2010 and, we’ll have another go.
Accept this sh*t sandwich of a ‘best we could do deal’ and you will lose the progressives, eg the ‘ones that brung ya to the dance’ and, look for a primary challenge in 2012 from Hillary. You mentioned the possibility of being a ‘one-termer’ [for sticking to your principles]? Try on being a ‘one termer’ for abondening them and see how that ‘fits’.
I’ll be ‘there’ for her, IF she literally signs a pledge to do health care right.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/torture/happy-hour-roundup-76/#comment-67803
Corporations have one legal obligation and that is to their shareholders profits. Corporations that have no interest in my health have no place coming between me and my doctor and making decisions related to my survival. it’s also not just one Corporation skimming profits. It’s the insurance companies, the private hospitals, the imaging companies and pharma combined. How is it that all of these companies can pay their shareholders, their advertising, their bonuses, all on top of their operational costs? The insurance Corporations do it by denying coverage to people who have paid for it and they give bonuses based on denying that coverage. They also put a cap on how much they’ll pay. It’s a national disgrace that our citizens have suffered for so long without single payer health care like medicare. It’s a national disgrace that more then half of bankruptcies are due to health related expenses. Republicans are very content to live in their disgrace and you will never find an issue where they are on the side of a human being. Not one. Why is it that the United States is so weak and feeble that it cannot do what every other industrialized country has already done with better outcome and for far less money? Those countries don’t allow corporations to screw their citizens when they’re fighting for their lives. Look at what Republicans did to Medicare. They gave a $700 billion gift to these corporations and no ability to negotiate for lower drug prices, a $4500 charge added to everyone enrolled, and another $400 billion charge to the taxpayers and also rationing of care. You didn’t hear Republicans complain about that. They were just fine with that. They have been trying to ruin Medicare and Social Security since they were first proposed, Nothing to help a human being ever. These people are all are a worthless excuse for humanity.
I just don’t get how it will cost trillons of dollars for Obama Health care. Did he not say, during is democratic speech in 2008 “we can have the same insurance as the Senators and government workers do.” All he had to do is have his acorn team pass out goverment insurance forms all over United States. And our insurance would have been very low without tillion dollars spending. But that is to simple for Congress. They need 2000 pages of BS.
Diana,
Thanks for the questions.
Many of these companies are very large – many millions of customers. A billion dollars is a lot of money to you or I, but as I noted above, its a very small profit margin (cents on the dollar for the dollars they handle). Almost all businesses are like this – eking out a few cents on the dollar.
If you take away this 2 cents on the dollar profit, and turn them into a non-profit utility, you get the post office.
Personally, I’d rather deal with for-profit UPS than the not-for-profit Post Office.
CEOs of large companies make a lot of money. Way more than I ever did, and perhaps more than they are “worth”. Its a big, complex job – and its worth a lot to have a very good guy vs.just a good guy. The stockholders representatives, the Board of Directors, think its worth it. I know it can be emotional, but frankly they just don’t get paid enough to matter when you are talking about a company that size.
They also make less than many baseball players and entertainers, and quite a few lawyers. Howard Stern, the radio guy, made over $300 million one year a few years ago.
This has been a “wild and crazy place today”. I left for several hours, both to get some work done and to take a break from the vitriolic conversation from both sides and to particpate in yet another march for health CARE reform.
What happened to the issue of health care, where did it go? There are thousands of people dying every year and there are too many people here who don’t seem to give a damn. Why are corporate profits more important than human lives?
Where are the politicians or our fellow Americans who care about our less fortunate citizens and are willing to go out on a TINY limb to make their situation better regardless of the consequences either politically or personally.
I have spent the last two days going to rallies and candlelight vigils and listening to the heartbreaking stories of families literally destroyed by our health care system the way it exists now. And no, these are not welfare cases, illegal immigrants, or low-lifes trying to milk the system. These are our neighbors, family members and friends. What the hell?
I’m angry and frustrated that the dialogue has turned into socialism, communism, nazism, government takeover, death panels, euthenasia, pathways to death, racism, blue dogs, bipartisanship, progressives, conservatives, distribution of wealth, health care in the Netherlands, Canada and the UK, brainwashing, brownshirts, religious fervor and all the rest of the catch phrases used to scare us from enacting change.
We’re talking about regular, hard working, middle class Americans, our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, friends and neighbors who are suffering now or will certainly be suffering in the future.
Please find that spark within you to put aside your political differences and fight for health care reform. Don’t be afraid, don’t believe the lies and distortions of the truth, just fight the good fight and do what’s right.
I’m sure I will be ridiculed and vilified by numerous posters here but I really don’t care. I support change in the health care system at all cost. This is the fight of our lifetime and will define who we are and where we stood on the issue.
You need to be able to tell your children and grandchildren that you were on the RIGHT side of health CARE reform, no matter the cost.
I know the hits are coming-OKAY
What issue hasn’t President Obama sold out Progressives on?
So, Webster Tarpley was right. Again.
Any healthcare bill without public option is worthless. President Obama will lose my vote if public option not included. To hell with insurance companies and the lobbyists. Now we see what Obama is all about. Strong or weak. Oh, and by the way, Afganistan is a huge mistake. Get the hell out while you can. I see Vietnam all over again. “Oh, just give us a few more troops and we can win this thing.” Not!
Some one needs to ask some real questions about how to lower the cost of health care. Why no tort reform? That alone would pay for a program to insure the 15 million that actually don’t have insurance and open up all health insurance companies to interstate commerce? It’s as Dean says too difficult to deal with the lawyers about tort reform because they are getting filthy rich taking doctors to court. Take a realistic look at who is stopping tort reform and interstate commerce for the insurance industry.
Because of who is in charge of congress right now…. I’ll give ya 2 guesses who is stopping it and the first 1 don’t count.
I sit here reading the article as well as many of the replies. I honestly don’t understand how this can be a make it or break it of a presidency. It seems to me that this is more about America and being American. I am tired of this one pointing the finger at that one and so forth. I am tired of a government that is looking toward the dollar and not the ones that make it. I am all about a person earning however much they can in a legal sense. I don’t believe that a person should have to forfeit as much money as they do to get even the most basic of health care. And saying that, God forbid if they have a huge health issue! We are suppose to be a government of the people, by the people. We are quickly losing our voices in what we should have do/do not want.
Seems to me that the insurance companies are playing god with peoples lives over what they will and will not cover. Deciding for the doctors that there is “other options” of treatment. All the while people are losing their lives. And those are the people that have medical coverage. For the poor souls who don’t or have health care provided in the form of a medical card…
I have known people that the insurance companies tied the doctors hands and kept people from having procedures that had they been done when they should have might have saved lives. Alternately I have seen doctors run test that were unnecessary to make a buck. This is lives we are talking about…Would you want your life placed in the hands of an insurance company that felt that the course of action your doctor was taking was too costly and unnecessary if it potentially meant life or death? Would you want to be scared into thinking there was something terribly wrong with you because a doctor wanted a new car?
As for the pharm. companies…I worked in a pharmacy that dealt with patients from many nursing homes. I always thought it was funny that shortly after the drug reps came by there would be a certain increase in a “new drug” that was mostly an old drug that it’s time limit for $$$ was up and other companies could manufacture drugs similiar for a lesser cost. I had several pharmacist tell me that the newer drugs had a slight variation to make them more marketable.
We need to be able to take care of the sick…and we need to make it to where the doctors are getting paid, the pharmacy is making money…just not at the expense of human lives…
I think we should threaten a voter boycott – as in no voting in 2010. We want publicly inanced elections, without which we are doomed to pat-to-play for ever with Republicans and Blue Dogs crafting all legislation with their industry financiers. I called Lynn Woolsey’s office and told her to stick to her guns with healthcare and said I had no insurance myself and would rather die in the streets than have healthcare reform become a payoff to insurance and pharmaceutical companies
LindaS,
Lots of good reform ideas out there that I’d support.
1. Legal tort reform. Reduce the need to practice defensive medicine, reduce costs by perhaps 2-10% (estimates vary). Would also free up lots of testing capacity.
2. Treat privately purchased and employer provided health insurance the same for tax purposes. Encourage people to select and own their own health insurance independent of employment. (Unfortunately many unions strongly oppose this as their very expensive insurance plans would exceed tax limits).
3. Encourage actual insurance (pays for rare, hard to predict, large risks) as opposed to the current pre-paid all inclusive medical care model. Insurance on your house pays off when your house burns down, not to clean your gutters every fall and your carpet every spring. Or even to replace your roof every 20 years. Routine care should not be paid for by insurance.
4. Encourage high deductible insurance limits and tax-advantaged Health Savings Account. Again, insurance should not be involved in routine care. This would greatly reduce the amount of paperwork everyone has to handle. Think about what’s happened with Lasik eye surgery.
5. Allow a real national market for health insurance (purchase across state lines). Today insurance in some states (New York, New Jersey) is very expensive because residents can only buy all-the-bells-and-whistles plans. This will increase competition between insurance vendors.
6. Reduce regulations that impede customer driven solutions like quick clinics in Walmart.
7. There are some people who do not earn enough to purchase the amount of health care they want/need. Lets be honest. This is charity care. It would be better – certainly more honest – to be open and explicit about how much of this care will be provided, under what conditions, and how it will be paid for.
8. Admit that the Federal government has promised about $35 Trillion in Medicare services that they have no money or plans to pay for. Its just not going to happen. Its about 10X worse than the Social Security problem.
The likely response from the politicians will be increased taxes, restrictions on services (aka rationing),and delayed eligibility. I think you’ll get all three, in that order (because its the order of least visibility and thus least political pain).
You’ll see this start to hit the wall in a few years. Its incredibly dishonest not to warn people still young enough to make other plans that they can’t depend on this.
The dumbest thing I read in this whole thread is this notion that we shouldn’t give all this power to the government… so who should have all this power? Unelected, greedy, could care less if we die, pieces of **** who are stealing from us every day as we have right now? We the people are the government, we must demand, or these greedy ******** will always screw us!
The Obama Healthcare Reform is dead! A rotting corpse in a corrupt and racist administration. Democrats wake up, you are being used by racists and socialists, and in Van Jones’ case, self-avowed communists to destroy America. Yeh, we are getting change. Open your eyes, and stop drinking the Obama kool aid. Obama is not John Kennedy or FDR. He is more like Adolph Hitler!
The “public” option will be used as such. If an employer does not provide insurance to his employees he will have to buy into the government plan, at lets say 8% of payroll. Since insurance costs a company, say 12% of payroll most uninsured, if not all, will buy into the government plan. Companies with private insurance already will therefore be at a competitive disadvantage and will be forced to drop their private plans for government. Private insurance will be driven out by government subsidized insurance. Now the government is in full control of your health care. Seeing as how the government always is in financial straights the easiest way to save money is to deny needed tests based upon statistical models (the PSA is a perfect example of a diagnostic test that is life saving for some, but would never survive a cost benifits analysis)and reduce fee scheduals for physicians and other health care providers (as is done in Medicare and both the British and Canadian government plans). Fee schedual reductions lead to decreases in qualified candidates into medical schools, therefore it becomes necessary to import foriegn physicians with less rigorous educations and speech impediments. The lack of specialists is most alarming in this type of system because the promise of preventitive savings is always illusory. Long waits for biopsies frequently result in waiting too long for necessary surgeries. Some of these people sell all of their belongings and come to the US for their medical care. I have witnessed this first hand. The “public” option is simply another name for socialized medicine where the government provides a lame medical program for everyone, as opposed to an excellent one for 90% who have worked hard to earn it, and a minimal one for those who have not.
Of the 40 million who do not have insurance about 10 million are illegal aliens, about 15 million earn more than $50,000 per year (in other words they can afford it but choose not to purchase it – they do have that right don’t they? This is America after all.) Another 10 million are already insured through other government programs. That leaves 5 million uninsured in a country of 310 million people. My insurance costs my employer and I about $300 per month. Where is the crisis? I’m very pleased with the system we have now. It is affordable and everyone except a very small minority is covered. Take care of that 5 million with a few inexpensive clinics and call it a day on socialized medicine. Hell, these are the same people who brought you the DMV, the IRS, $600 toilet seats, a bankrupt Medicare system and 1.6 trillion dollars of debt in 6 months.
“Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked”. Bob Dylan…
Obama’s time to stand naked is now. It’s break or make time for him.
Some interesting comments. As a labled sexist/racist anti-health care person I am sure posting here won’t do a bit of good but I try and keep an open mind.
Honestly I would give a person of any race or gender as much as I could for health care. I do not wish to see anyone in pain or dying but that being said I also do not wish to pay for someone’s hang nails or whatever frivilous “emergency” they may have for the week. I would also support a single payer system if people paid a rate adjusted by how much they used that system. That would be fair to me as someone who goes to the doctor 4 times a month should be charged more than someone who goes once a year.
the fact is I don’t trust that it would work that way even if some progressives saw that as reasonable.
It has seemed to me that anything touched by the government in health care so far has done nothing but limit mostly my gender by: cost (women pay the same rate as men in group insurance even though they use it more until age 55 by legislation) Funds given to research (like breat cancer over prostrate cancer) Departments (there is a women’s health but not men’s) well the list is endless really.
The cost one is particularly frustrating to me since the government has seen fit to legislate that cost when women screamed about it but totally ignore that men still pay more for other kinds of insurance. Bottom line I don’t see anything fair in a progressive bill for my gender.
Now if I am wrong and it could work then enlighten me as despite what I am usually called on these liberal sites I really do try and be open minded about it.
Big Insurance/Big Pharma = Wall Street all over again.
Some of you are so cluless, let us know things worked out for you after you or a family member has cancer or is sick and your insurance company denies you, lose your job,.. then try paying $1200-$1400 a month to get high risk shoddy coverage that still denies claims. Welcome to your future, you won’t have many shoulders to cry on because we will remeber how you were so against a real health care reform. You’ll have no empathy from me. Because you lost the chance to get this really changed. No ones ever knows when catastrophic health can come so quickly. Maybe your Momma can sell her house to save you, but sure it will have been foreclosed by then….so you will just be shet out of luck!
What a pathetic sad place America has become due to racism and self importance greed.
As a Canadian physician, I take exception to the fact that our “single payer” system would not work in the U.S. There is definitely a need, considering that there are more uninsured Americans percentage-wise than any industrialized nation. To get such a system working would require getting all the stakeholders together to work out a deal that would ultimately benefit all Americans. But from this side of the border, few of us see that happening. There are too many powerful interest groups, lobbying groups, angry people confused on what single payer really means. Canadian health care isn’t perfect; not everyone gets what they want immediately, but I must say it is certainly better than what is there now. I know from first hand experience: I visit the U.S. regularly to attend medical conferences, and I purchase health insurance to cover my stay in the U.S. Over the past 30 years of going to such conferences (typically several per year), I’ve had a few incidents where I needed to use such insurance. In each case, I had to use the emergency room (because of the time of day the incidents occurred), and the wait was excruciatingly long, the doctors harried and rushed, and the service mediocre at best. America can do better healthcare-wise, but I really doubt that any real change will come out of the Obama health care plan. It will just the same old stuff. How sad. I don’t know why Americans don’t just vote out those who oppose universal health care. If I were an American, that’s what I would do.
**** ‘em! This “public option is off the table” **** is NOT what I voted for. Is there some point when we’re actually going to see some CHANGE??
lol.. this is friggin so amusing… the majority int he US do not support this plan, they don’t support the public option, contrary to what some want people to believe.
We have tea parties going across the country, 100,000 expected at a rally in WV on Labor day, all opposed to a govt takeover of Health care and look at you ridiculous lib’s.. pissing and moaning because the Blue dogs have principles and will not bow down to the anointed one and his socialist agenda….
The WH and Dems in congress are scared to death of losing their majority r9ight now because the overwhelming sentiment is NO PUBLIC OPTION and they are in real danger of losing power. look at Reid , down dbl digits to a Basketball coaches son..
Dem’s need to get a grip and realize the country is mostly right of center, these far left wingnut job congress people and posters on here are the huge minority..People want less Govt.
Ohhh and to address the Insurance companies.. Ok, all those people that hate them, YOU go out and startup a non profit insurance company.. whats that sound?? Crickets?? Yea thats what I thought.. you want all those companies to work for nothing so that YOU can benefit, so who is being greedy here, the insurance companies that work hard, pay out billions every day in claims, or the stupid lib’s that want the to work for free for their benefit?
This is tiring me. I can imagine what President Obama is going through. But he brought it on himself. He is the president and he should now be taking charge. Tell them what you want and what you don’t want. He promised a “change we can believe in.” Now it is time to fess up. The public option is the only way to go to get all people insured. If he believes in his own rhetoric, a public option is the only option. Healthcare and health insurance are two different entities. Health insurance companies, which should include the public option, pays for healthcare.
Thank you Roger S. Undisputed fact – U. S. is only doing marginally better than Cuba in longevity area. What’s our excuse? Cuba can point to our economic embargo. What is our excuse? Analyze this reality and tell me again that our “free enterprise market” works in the health care area.
What are the commonalities of the countries at the top of the list? What parts of their systems will work for our nation and what do we need to change in our national policies to help us get to healthier, longer lives?
I’m not interested in being able to strut around talking about how I have better access to pills and machines if they are killing me faster than whatever ails me. Name calling will not change the fact that having someone else sick on the streets or in a place of business that I frequent also jeopardizes my health. Universal access to health care protects everybody. I don’t care how we package it or call it just so it works better than what we have now. Say what you want about “communists” and “socialists.” I want everybody to be able to walk into a health center and get treated like my friend did when he was in Nicaragua and got injured. They fixed what ailed him. Nobody asked him to prove citizenship,let alone monetary capability. Contrast that to my brother who had to not only show his insurance card, while his son was being left untreated, but had to explain why he was seeking treatment outside his local area. (Gee, maybe because my brother was visiting the area to attend a funeral?) Still, the horror stories that have been related by others let me know that my brother was lucky. At least his son lived through the delay.
After reading how many Democrats took money from insurance companies to finance campaigns, I’m clear that this is not about party loyalty. I am ready to write in on my next ballot “none of the above” if nobody has the guts to get this work done because they are worried about getting re-elected.
Where were all the objections to our great, great, grandchildren having to pay for our debts when Bush was handing out all our tax dollars to contractors in Iran, Iraq, etc.? How many businesses went running out of the country to avoid paying taxes and spent all that lobbying money to get even more tax breaks? Some people get mighty concerned about spending at the most interesting times. Why is it that property always takes a more prominent status than human lives? We expect the government to help us rebuild our homes after major floods and fires without thought to budgets, but quibble over who should get help with our most precious homes, our bodies.
Amazing. Before Jan 20 I was conservative, but now I am a racist – because liberals say so! And liberals wonder why no one believes what they say or wants them designing the healthcare “solution”.
Libs=Morons. You listen to Olbermann, a hack who was not even a good sports guy, Maddow, muff diver extra ordinaire, and Chris Mathews who blows his wad everytime he looks at a picture of Obama, TRILLIONS of dollars to insure illegals, people who pop out babies one after another or are just plain to lazy to look for work because the government is sending them a check. The gov could not handle cash for clunkers, how is it going to handle 1/6 of the economy. Wait until your taxes go up, but then again, most of you minimum wage earning hacks to lazy or stupid to make good money believe in the Robin Hood Theory of Gov, steal from the rich to give to the poor.
Typical libbies… crying like babies when it doesn’t all go their way.
Don’t for get to stomp your feet and hold your breath.
Freaking losers!
I’m tired of all this health care debate. The simple fact is we all deserve health care not just those who can afford it. We should do away with private insurance companies altogether, everyone should get together and stop putting up with all this BS from the upper class why do they make all the deisions for us, the rest of us should stand up and stop letting all these rich ******** decide for us.
Damonh:
The simple fact is we all deserve health care not just those who can afford it.
If you “deserve” it, regardless of your willingness/ability to pay for it, then who owes it to you? Form whence does this obligation spring?
Democrats are a little more polite about the way they screw their fellow human beings than republicans. In substance, however, they have sold the folks they represent down the river by every administration since Johnson. If your job has gone to Mexico or China, don’t blame the republicans.
So for those who say we should stand behind any health care bill whatsoever as long as it gives Obama some sort of cover, good luck! Your optimism is your neighbors ticket to bankrupcy when the insurance giants finish with them. At some point, you simply have to say no. Enough is enough.
Democrats are a little more polite about the way they screw their fellow human beings than republicans. In substance, however, they’re the same. They have sold the folks they represent down the river over and over and over. If your job has gone to Mexico or China, don’t blame the republicans. If you don’t like our collective worship of death in foreign countries, don’t blame the republicans. If you don’t like the government insisting it has the right to spy on its own citizens, don’t blame the republicans. If you don’t like that your elected representatives can torture innocent people and suffer no consequences whatsoever, don’t blame republicans.
To those who say we should stand behind any health care bill whatsoever as long as it gives Obama some sort of cover, good luck! Your optimism is your neighbor’s ticket to bankruptcy. At some point, you simply have to take stock and note that the two parties, and all the players in them – including Obama, are like ping and pong. A bad bill is better than no bill is simply a slogan. It has no clothes. Enough is enough.
R Allen: Pining for an original thought…
During the 2008 campaign I argued strongly for the need to stand up and defeat the Republicans. I still think this is important, but I am becoming convinced that it is time for progressives to stand up and be the political force that their numbers justify.
This may be even more important than passing health care. It is time for progressives to show some spine and stand for something important. If necessary, it may be time to turn to an new, truly progressive political party to replace the now moribund Republican Party, letting the Democratic Party remain the centrist-right party that it has become.
The reason so many people on both sides of the line are up in arms about the HC is that it affects all of us. 1000+ pages of double talk and magician’s slight of hand doesn’t help. The Town Hall Meetings that were supposed to enlighten everyone also did nothing. Not knowing how the HC will affect the American citizens in each of their individual situations is frustrating. Even more frustrating is when you ask a politician for clarification. They flap their gums and nothing but hot air comes out. They are basically telling “We the People” to shut up and forget what The Founding Fathers put in writing. They will dictate what we get and who gets it. I am way past my tolerance with our politicians no matter what party, race or gender. It is about time to bring our troops home close our borders, do a clean sweep across our nation for illegal’s and deport them. Than tell the rest of the world that we are declaring bankruptcy as a nation. We need to start from scratch with the basics. Laws that make sense and are not clouded with double speak. The rest of the world will whine and call us names but really who cares? They B*tch about us no matter what we do. Let’s become the Proud America that we used to be and call Do Over.
Too bad Obama is caving in to the radical right as well as the insurance and drug companies so soon. The progressives absolutely must stand united on the public option (medicare), enough is enough! This President has already thrown the **** under the bus so for the rest of you, welcome aboard!
Paul:
…it is time for progressives to stand up and be the political force that their numbers justify.>/b>
What are those numbers, and how did you determine them?
My guess is that the very reason the progressive agenda is in now trouble is that the numbers aren’t very high. Support for Obama the charismatic orator should not be conflated with support for Obama the progressive policy maker.
the first public hospital was in florence in renaissance italy during the raging bubonic plague. Public healthcare is a renaissance notion not socialist and it is paralleled with the greatest wealth, creative, intelectual, and artistic movement ever. Contrary to what the rep pundits would have you believe the facts are these and by not implementing public healthcare the country is shooting itself in the foot.
Some people cannot see the forest from the trees. Passion and not pragmatism is what too often does in the Democratic Party. Members need to learn how to Govern and realize that ideology is what did in the Republicans last time around. Think about Senator Kennedy’s recent comments about his biggest regret in politics being that he did not take Nixon’s proposal on Healthcare reform back in 1972……think where we might be today had that “initial step” been taken back then instead of demanding a revolutionary outcome at that time.
The “trigger” Obama’s going to talk about next Wednesday is actually rootin tootin Newt Gingrich’s hit man – in the guise of Olimpia Snow – pulling the trigger before collecting for services rendered on the final contract on Americans. Gently, gently, now, Bam! Oh the joy of forcing people to buy insurance with no restraints whatsoever on the insurance giants!
A free country where you are enslaved by law to shell out more each year to the lucre hungry maggots of big business. And where these giants are free of any restraints whatsoever. And where democrats are free of their spines and republicans are totally free of a single rational thought.
Ya know It doesnt matter what he wants or doesnt want. If he says he wants a public option. The Republicans will shift and want one. If he says he wnats a public option the repiblicans will keep on about socialism. He cant win. Whatever he wants whether its good for the country or not hes gonna be fought tooth and nail. The republicans dont care if its good for the country or not they care about getting back in the white house …period and will stop at nothing and nothing is too low for them. The man cannot even welcome schol kids back to school like any other president thats ever done the same thing, without some republican lying about what its about. Even when president G.W.B. was in office (and that W stands for Warmonger) I never said I was ashamed of my country. But the republican smear tactics have done it…Im ashamed of the right side of my country.
Damonh:
“everyone should get together and stop putting up with all this BS from the upper class why do they make all the deisions for us, the rest of us should stand up and stop letting all these rich ******** decide for us”
By “rich *******” you mean Axelrod, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, Kennedy before his passing, et al?
What you want isn’t to stop “the rich” from supposedly deciding “for us,” but for you to decide for “the rich.” You want their money for yourself. Because you “deserve” it. Just say what you mean.
lean from the past.
John E:
“Im ashamed of the right side of my country.”
Your disappointment in us is nearly unbearable.
I doubt Republicans are going to propose a public option as a way to “get” Obama. But pigs could fly, too.
Obama has no business invading school time to try to influence children to be Obamabots, and there is no denying that is his purpose. You liberals would have been out of your minds screaming “fascism” if George Bush had done it, and you know it.
Did you notice how Democrats attacked everything he did and would stop at nothing to try to destroy him? But way back then it was considered unthinkable to suggest they cared only about power and not about the country, which they imagined happening constantly and seldom ceased shouting about.
@we have already compromised: I agree. Minor point though: Obama didn’t campaign on the public option. I supported Hillary because Obama compromised on the PO before negotiations began. Check his campaign site and read his health care position.
paul:
the first public hospital was in florence in renaissance italy during the raging bubonic plague. Public healthcare is a renaissance notion not socialist…
Two points. First, there is nothing about the Renaissance that precludes occurences that happened during it from displaying aspects of socialism.
Second, there is quite a difference between government taking action to protect its citizens from a contagious epidemic and government taking action to transfer the costs of generic healthcare from the beneficiary to the taxpayer.
What has not been mentioned that needs to be pointed out is that skyrocketing legal costs also drive the price of medical coverage as well as insurance costs. The medical industry is one where a tiny mistake or an unforeseen complication can mean the difference between life and death. These are the accepted risks that come with the industry. These are also the accepted risks that can drive innovation and medical breakthrough. To insure a hospital/doctor with Malpractice insurance is going through the roof every year as more and more lawyers drum up lawsuits that are sketchy at best to sue the hospitals, but unfortunately, the Dems won’t even think about putting caps on the amount that can be sued for in medical cases. Cap the lawyers and lawsuits and you will drive down the malpractice insurance costs, which should bring down the insurance/medical costs.
THe other thing that is scary about a one pay, socialist like, insurance free for all is that you will end up stifiling innovation in the industry as all procedures and diseases will have an “accepted” treatment. Take Cancer for instance, there are breakthroughs in the industry of treatment almost daily, but since these will not be on the Obamacare menu, they will be stifled. Drug Companies take in a lot of money, but they also put out alot of money in research and development. For every drug that goes out on the market that you pay for, there are 100’s that didn’t work that were researched. Research and testing is expensive, it is a fact. Profit runs innovation and there are plenty of drug company’s that have gone belly up because there medication was not effective.
You all can blame Republicans, Privatized Health Care and Drug Companies for your high HC costs, but you should make sure you see who else has their hands out in this one…
And if the “beneficiary” cannot afford to pay?Let him just spread the disease to the tax payer
There are a couple of things that no one is talking about when they are in this debate over health care. As a insurance agent that works in multiple stats, I see first hand the effects of state mandates in your health coverages. The mandates that are required to be in ever policy varies state to state and increase the cost anywhere from 20%-60% higher!!! Not everyone needs to have AIDS testing in their policy,or even drug and alcohol rehab, but in NC if you have private insurance you must pay for thous items to be in your policies. Also major med ins IS NOT DESINGED TO KEEP YOU FROM GOING BANKRUPT. That is what the supplemental ins co are for! They pay you,so that you don’t lose every thing you worked and slaved for.Also there is no reason under the sun that any working person that wants health ins can’t afford it! I have seen servile young people make the statement that we need the public option so they could be covered. that just is not the case. All they need to do is call a Humanna or an Assurant agent and they would be more then surprised by the low cost they could be covered for! And as long as they get, keep and pay for their own ins they then no longer have to worry about pre-exiting cond! Im sorry there is no way I can support the bill as written.
Why is it that we have a Black Caucus in Congress? If we have a Black Caucus, why don’t we have a White Caucus? Why do we need any race to have a Caucus? I thought Congress represented the citizens of the United States and I see NO REASON for Congress to be racial!
Do you guys realize that doctors can charge the insurance companies anything they want, however they will not get paid that? Healthcare is paid based on codes for procedures and equipment and everyone has a set contract amount for those and the difference between what is billed to insurance and what is allowed to them is not and cannot be passed to the patients. I work in the health field so I know what I’m talking about. Insurance companies are saving people lots of money with the system we have now. People are still responsible for a co insurance amount usually 20% of the allowed charged…not what is billed. And for those that want Medicare coverage, they are actually one of the highest paying/allowing insurers so this public option would cost people more money on their healthcare than what they have now, not to mention the taxpayers because we will be paying for people’s insurance when they have access to it already.
I am fed up with so-called “Conservatives” in the healthcare discussion who are nothing more than shills for the insurance companies. This discussion never was, never should have been, nor should it ever be about the insurance companies,pharmaceutical industry, or medical supplies industry. They seem to take of themselves fairly well by spending millions of dollars on politicians(some of it diractly) to sell out their constituency by voting against the best interests of those who put them into office.The discussion is about healthcare and that time-tested theme of the right,”competition” and “let the marketplace set the prices”.Finally, I thought that thinking people could find solace in seeing the right and left come together. But noooooooo!!
Suddenly the right doesn’t want the compettion of a public option…Isn’t that the hallmark of the private enterprise system?? And if a government -run heathcare system is so bad then let’s take it away from those who already enjoy it such as, all of our Congressmen and Senators, Supreme Court Justices, Veterans, all of our military,senior citizens, and the rest of the “socialists and commies” we support through our taxes.
How stupid can the public get in not realizing that many of us are already using government-run healthcare and have been doing so successfully for many many years. I have seen nothing in the negative comments about a public option that would assure me that the 46 million people who have no insurance because they have no money would have their health needs met. And don’t give me that “affordable insurance” bit. The insurance companies and their greed brought about the need to reform healthcare and greed has prevented treatment for millions thereby contributing to many deaths….all n the name of money.
If the insurance companies wanted to ensure healthcare theu would be emphasizing prevention of problems-which they don’t. If the Republicans were concerned about their constituency and the non-rich they would have resolved this issue long ago rather than the current position of “Anything O’bama proposes, I am against it” attitude that tells the public that they are not interested in proposing, compromising, or collegially working on anything that is in the best interest of America. There is just a “we want to run(or ruin) the country again, which is why they are on the sidelines now.
And, as a senior myself, who do I want calling the shots on my healthcare?? Well, given the choice of the government, such as what I now enjoy or the insurance company, it’s a no-brainer. If the government has a problem with a payment for a service, it is after the procedure , at which point the argument is between them and the doctor as to how it will be paid—NOT IF! With the insurance company no doctor was evr involved and they simply tell you that they are not going to pay for the procedure and you are let on your own to somehow fund the procedure, so the issue is not just affordability. I have had both and it is an easy choice. Medicare ergo government-run is much more humane and reasonable. Those who are arguing against the public option appear to be emotional and short-sighted, and appear to be generating more thunder and noise than light on the issue. My experience tells me that those against a public option ergo competition should just shut up!!
umm..it is NOT the insurance companies obligation to push for healthier living, that falls on Dr’s and and the HEALTHCARE industry..Does the automotive insurance industry push for safer driving from individulas?? no, they will give you discounts FOR safe driving, but so does the healthcare industry, you pay less if you don’t smoke for example.
What really drives me bonkers is this far left Notion that healthcare insurance is some kind of “right”.. Show me where in the constitution it says the right to have insurance?? it isn’t there..The issue is people have a beef with costs, but the costs come from the Healthcare industry, NOT the insurance companies. They seem to be the scape goat for the mindless Dem party that lacks common sense. Insurance costs you more, because they have to PAY more to hospitals and Dr’s…
Are Dem’s so ignorant and Dumb that they can’t see that??
And as for a public option, that is simply the Dem’s long standing agenda to take over EVERYTHING in peoples lives, it is NOT needed, People in America KNOW it isn’t needed (Why do you think There is so much outrage out there, it’s not some fringe group, it is real, nationwide and getting larger).
The Obamanation thought he could push it through because of the Dem congress, but quickly found out, People DO pay attention and will nto stand for it. So let the Dem’s try, they have already taken first blood (moveon.org sponsored protester bit off someones finger), so let the Civil war begin.. The Dem’s and Lib’s need a good trouncing and some common sense beat into there asses
@anonymous: You misunderstood my point. I didn’t claim that the JPAs had solved all the problems here in California. My point was that instead of chanting “Public Option! Public Option!” over and over, we as a country would do well to look to models that actually work. Nobody knows if a public option would work, and it’s quite contentious to say the least. On the other hand, I’ve seen JPAs work well. Now you could expand their charter to cover uninsureds if that is your desire. I personally don’t see the number of uninsured people as the problem. I see the high input costs of healthcare as the problem. Liberals seem to have deluded themselves into thinking that it’s the evil insurance companies that have caused the costs to go so high. I saw one figure here: 30% profit margin for insurers. Let’s say that’s correct for the sake of argument. OK, so you nationalize health insurance, you get a one-time 30% savings when the insurance companies go away, but then if you do nothing else to control the input costs, the price of health coverage will start to go back up at exactly the same rate. At 6% per year compounded, it will take approximately 4 years for the 30% savings to be eaten up and then you’ll be back at square 1. I just don’t think people who chant “public option” over and over have really given the matter much serious thought.
Um… “Lou Filliger “:
Public Option (in fact SIngle Payer Option) WORKS in 27 other countries.
That’s ALL of the civilized countries in the world, and to the tune of HALF the cost for better care.
And everyone knows Medicare (like S.S.) actually runs at a SURPLUS if it were given a fund separate from the General Fund (they were RAIDED! by LBJ and every other president and congress since.)
Also medicare’s magaement overhead is 2.5% while that of Private Insurance is 30%.
So no more comments about how the government can run A HEALTH CARE PROGRAM, SPECIFICALLY.
And yes, we need GOVERNMENT lockboxes for these funds – separate from, AND NEVER AGAIN TO BE TOUCHED BY, THE GENERAL FUND.
But that’s a government ethics issue – one of many – and we’re not about to eliminate the Federal Government entirely, so that will have to be fixed.
FOR ALL THE BANDWAGONERS!
You are all so short-sighted. You are all willing to forgo the changes that will be in the bill for no bill at all! This is part of the reason why the democrats can’t accomplish anything without republican involvement. Mr. Obama would not need to satisfy anyone on the right if the democrats could unite and stop all the in-fighting. You have democrats saying they “will not” support a bill with a public option. You have democrats saying they will not support a bill “without” a public option. This is the closest we’ve been in 50 years and as usual, the democrats are going to go up in flames while holding a can of gas and a lighter. Pathetic!
RHytonen,
Private insurance overhead is about 14% – not 30%. See post upthread at 03 Sep, 11:41pm for specific data.
Medicare fraud is generally considered significantly higher than private insurance. I’ve seen numbers between similar to private (i.e. about 3%) up to 20%.
Medicare does run a current cash flow surplus (more coming in that going out). But they have promised about $35 Trillion more than past or projected future inflows will support. This is the way a Ponzi scheme works. Bernie Madoff ran a surplus for many years too.
I wouldn’t trust Pelosi, Frank, Conyers, Murtha, Rangel et al to run a lemonade stand – but these are the type of folks that will be making decisions about your “lock box”. As you point out, they have never yet been able to keep their fingers out of the cookie jar.
Finally, there is simply no way that the Feds can put that much money into a lock box. What do you buy – pieces of paper from the Treasury, every share of every stock in the US (that’s only about half what’s needed)? Gold? Its just too much money. The Trust Fund is a fantasy.
If Barack flips on the Public Option and throws it under the bus I will not only never vote for him again, but I will do all I can to convince others of his lying ways!
“Should Obama jettison the public option, progressives will come under tremendous pressure to back the plan anyway. White House advisers will likely insist that liberals mustn’t deny the president a historic victory and enable a defeat that could cripple the first African-American presidency.”
It matters not. Without a Public Option “reform” is no longer “reform”. It’s an expensive, basically useless change that will leave us with a system still damaged and highly unequal in terms of who gets care.
Reform is irrelevant unless it solves the problem. Only the Public Option will solve the problem.
It is NOT NEGOTIABLE.
NOT NEGOTIABLE … it’s not going to happen, you mean. Americans for the most part don’t want it.
RHytonen, re: public option working in 27 other countries – dictatorships work in a lot of other countries; genocide with shallow mass graves works in a lot of other countries; socialism works in a lot of other countries. The only thing that doesn’t WORK in a lot of other countries is the labor force, cause they’re all on the dole and the unemployment rate is 30% or more. I want the U.S. to be better than other countries, and a public option is not the way to do it. Even the whole concept of wishing we were like other countries is a signpost of how far we’ve slid in the last 50 years as a result of the whole “entitlement mentality”. You only have a “right” to something if you can get it.
I suggest ending Medicare. After that, re-submit to Americans the idea of Medicare for ALL. I believe there would be a much louder cry from the 65+ crowd for it’s support. I don’t know anyone 65+ who supports the public option, which begs the question, “why should I continue paying for the health insurance of those who would deny me the right of affordable coverage?”
End the current Medicare program, and start a new universal Medicare.
Hussein is a ****** and always will hang out with *******. He has no clue how to run an ice cream stand let alone the U.S.
In a word he is a ******’s *****.
Ok, so a medicare style package… um, we as a nation spent 325B on Medicare last year for 45M people. (That’s over 7K each) I don’t know about you, but to try and double that (minimum) would make it more expensive than our military, and don’t liberals complain how much that costs and stuff… just a thought.
I’m also getting aggravated with Obama’s attempts to run the middle of the road. He is just going to get run over by a Big Republican truckload of “no”. I want a public option. I want war crimes prosecuted. I want our Constitution restored.
But I have to say the things that are working against Democrats are the things I like about them the most: they don’t have a “party” agenda, they have a group mind, they don’t come from a place of fear and hate.
We came together for the election, but Obama is letting us down and I’m so sad to see this–I really hoped for better after EIGHT LONG YEARS of HELL under Republican rule.
Dropped one very important word, there. Sorry, all.
I’m also getting aggravated with Obama’s attempts to run the middle of the road. He is just going to get run over by a Big Republican truckload of “no”. I want a public option. I want war crimes prosecuted. I want our Constitution restored.
But I have to say the things that are working against Democrats are the things I like about them the most: they don’t have a “party” agenda, they DON’T have a group mind, they don’t come from a place of fear and hate.
We came together for the election, but Obama is letting us down and I’m so sad to see this–I really hoped for better after EIGHT LONG YEARS of HELL under Republican rule.
@Tena
If you can’t stand the comments posted here, then you should not be on the internet period, so please just go.
@Kris
I am African American, a Veteran of the Gulf War, and I work for the Federal government, where I have great healthcare insurance for myself, wife and our two daughters. We are all covered for the small price of $120 per month. But get this…Congress gets it even cheaper than I do. My life pretty much remains the same, no matter who’s in the White House. I have voted for republicans and democrats, but at the National level I prefer Democrats, because they seem to help Americans, who are less fortunate than myself a bit more than republicans. I must say, that Obama is becoming somewhat of a disappointment for me. I voted for him, not because I thought he could help my situation personally, but because so many of the Americans in my middleclass neighborhood are suffering and they need a President and congress to care enough about them to enact legisation that will benefit them, just as much as the large business and coperations, that our government officials have learned to worship. Many of my African American friends try to make me pull back on my criticism of President Obama, but I refuse to hold my tongue and not say what I think. Bush was an idiot and Obama is dedicated to appeasing the republican party under the banner of bipartisanship.
Maybe O can pressure congress critters to support a mediocre bill that has no public option, but he can’t pressure me. After all, it is Obama’s ridiculous quixotic quest for bipartisansip that brought us to this point; he has no one else to blame. No public option=no Obama for me ever again. Period.
You dont want government run Health care?….fine…no more medicaid or medicare works for me
due retreat globe early 1979
Dear Mr. President–PLEASE don’t waver in pushing for a public option, or another proposal, that would have the same effect, i.e. forcing competitive pricing on the insurance companies. They are not monolithic–they only think they are. The health of the American people is at stake. Thank you. Richard Shenson
What kind of health care will best protect the interests of those who are well off in this country? You can pay for the best doctors and for the best medical care for yourself and your family. But is that enough? I would caution, no. That is not enough. It still leaves you at significant risk.
Why? Precisely because cadillac health plans for the rich do nothing to protect the less fortunate and underprivileged.
Are the rich more vulnerable or less vulnerable to a pandemic if the less privileged do not have access to health resources? The less access the poor or middle class has to health care, the less likely they will be able to get early attention to treat a pandemic disease and stem its spread. Though the un-insured and under-insured may be hit early, still the unchecked progress of disease puts all of us – including the rich – at much greater risk. Even the rich will be a significantly greater risk when the poor do not have health care, as compared to when the poor do have access to health care. Disease does not recognize class boundaries.
Another consideration for the wealthy: how are your antibiotics working? Are they still effective? Will they continue to be effective? It is now well documented both in this country and in less developed countries, that if a patient needs a course of antibiotics to treat an infection, and if money is an issue, the patient will be likely to pay for the first dose but not for further doses, especially if he/she notices some improvement. This is exactly the prescription for creating “super bugs” – those infections that become resistent to drug treatment. The first dose will kill the weaker specimens of the bug, but leave “stronger” specimens. If the patient doesn’t take the full course, thinking perhaps that they don’t have the money and they’re feeling better anyway, then the stronger bugs remain and propagate. This stronger bug spreads to another victim, and if repeated, eventually the strain becomes resistant to the antibiotic. A super bug.
So by limiting or denying medication and health care resources to the disadvantaged (due to cost, misinformation, or other reasons), we are helping create super bugs. Once superbugs become prevalent, are the wealthy immune? No, not a chance. Even the wealthy will be laid low.
So unless you are going to literally seal yourselves off from the rest of society, what can you do to keep healthy? You can best protect yourself and your family by guaranteeing that everyone has access to quality medical care, as a Public Option would. Think about it.
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