Hillarysworld

"From theBlack Agenda Report, via the always excellent Violet Sox:

Top Ten Ways To Tell that Obama is NOT Fighting For Health Care For Everybody

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

1. Their plan doesn’t cover the uninsured until 2013.
2013 isn’t “day one.” It’s not even after the midterm election. It’s clear after the president’s second term, if he gets one. Congress passed Medicare in 1965 and president Lyndon Johnson rolled out coverage for millions of seniors in eleven months, back in the days before they even had computers.22,000 Americans now perish each year because they can’t get or can’t afford medical care, and this year three quarter million personal bankruptcies will be triggered by unpayable medical bills. Why this president and these Democrats are in such a hurry to pass health care now that doesn’t take effect till two elections down the road doesn’t make sense in any kind of good way.

2. Their “public option” isn’t Medicare, won’t bring costs down and will only cover about 10 million people.
The “public option” was sold to the American people as Medicare-scale plan open to anybody who wants in that would compete with the private insurers and drive their costs downward. But in their haste not to bite the hands that feed them millions in campaign contributions each hear, the president and his party have scaled the public option back from a Medicare-sized 130 million to a maximum of 10 million, too small to put cost pressure in private insurers. Worse still, the president and his party are playing bait-and-witch, not telling the public they have reduced the public option, to nearly nothing.  

This remnant of a public option is not Medicare, as Howard Dean insists, and it will not lead to the sort of everybody-in-nobody-out health care system that most Americans, whenever they are surveyed say they want.

Some Senate and House Democrats want to ditch even the pretense of a “public option” in favor of something they’re calling a private insurance “co-op”, which as near as anybody can tell has the same relationship to an actual cooperative that clean coal has to actual coal.

3. The president and his party have already caved in to the drug companies on reimporting Canadian drugs, on negotiating drug prices downward and on generics.
This explains why Big Pharma, the same people who ran the devastating series of anti-reform “Harry and Louise” ads to spike the Clinton-era drive to fix health care are spending $100 million to run Obama ads using the president’s language about “bipartisan” solutions to health care reform.

4. The president and his party have received more money from private insurers and the for-profit health care industry than even Republicans, with the president alone taking $19 million in the 2008 election cycle alone, more than all his Repubican, Democratic and independent rivals combined.
Democratic senator Max Bacaus got $1.1 million in 2008. Democratic senators Harkin, Landreau and Rockerfeller each got over half a million, and Senator Durbin got just under half a million. Other Democratic senators got a little less. Four Democrats in the House, Rangel, Dinglell, Udall and Hoyer got over half a million apiece in 2008, with other Democrats not far behind.  

Is there any wonder that the insurance companies, like the drug companies are also running “bipartisan health care reform” commercials using the president’s exact language?

5. The president’s plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, will require families to purchase health insurance policies from private insurers.
This is something the policy wonks call an ‘ros-and-Cons-of-Individual-Mandate">individual mandate”, under which Individuals will be “mandated” to purchase affordable insurance, though companies would not be required to offer it. In Massachusetts, the prototype state for the Obama plan, a family with an income of $33,000 can be required to spend $9,000 in deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses before the insurance company is obligated to pay a dime. As in Massachusetts, public money is used to purchase private insurance for the very poorest citizens. With the revenues of insurance companies on the decline, individual mandate programs are a welcome bailout for the private insurance industry.

6. The president’s plan, and those of Republicans and Democratic blue dogs too, could force you to buy junk insurance.
Think about an insurance policy that costs a lot, but is full of loopholes, exceptions and steep deductibles and co-payments. That’s junk insurance, and for many it’s the only insurance companies offer. Even more pernicious is the widespread practice among insurance companies of “recission” in which claimants are routinely investigated and disqualified in the event that they finally make a claim. Insurance companies admit they do this to half of one percent of policies per year. That means if you hold a health insurance policy twenty years, you don;t have insurance – you have a ninety percent chance of having insurance.

7. The president’s plan, as well as those of Democratic “blue dogs” and Republicans, are to be funded in part with cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
Private insurance companies have always hated Medicare because it is far more efficient than they are. Medicare’s administrative expenses are under five percent, as compared with the one third of every health care dollar taken by the for-profit insurance companies for their advertising, bad investments, billing and denial machinery, executive salaries and bonuses. Private insurers have, over the years, purchased enough influence in Congress and previous White Houses to restrict Medicare’s payment rates and partially privatize it. But president Obama’s plan, perhaps the most friendly to Medicare and Medicaid, calls for over $300 billion in cuts to the programs that now provide medical care to those with the fewest options, while failing to guarantee that care will come from elsewhere. In Massachusetts right now, hospitals are turning away poor people they used to be able to provide care for because funding that used to go to those institutions is now plowed into the state’s “individual mandate” system.

8. The president, with the cooperation of corporate media and the Republicans is trying to make the argument about himself instead of a discussion on the merits of his policy.
The president and his critics are happy to talk about whether this will be “his Waterloo”, or his Dien Bien Phu, as if that matters more than the 22,000 Americans who die each year from lack of medical care, or the three quarter million who will go bankrupt because of unpayable medical bills. The concentration on whether the president looks good or bad takes up air, ink, and coverage time that might otherwise be spent explaining what is and isn’t in the various proposals, and why.  

If the president were not afraid of his own supporters publicly examining the merits and demerits of his proposals, he would mobilize those 13 million emails and phone numbers collected during the campaign. The reason he has not sone so already is that most of his own supporters favor a Medicare-For-All single payer health care system, HR 676.

9. The president and his party, and the corporate media have spent more time and energy silencing and excluded the advocates of single payer health care, mostly the president’s own supporters, than they have fighting blue dogs and Republicans.
But no matter how diligently the spokespeople for single payer are excluded from media coverage andinvitations to Obama’s policy forums and round tables, no matter how many times the White Housecuts their questions from transcripts and video of public events, the calls, emails and letters keep pouring into Congress and the White House demanding the creation of a publicly funded, everybody-in-nobody-out system, a Medicare-for-All kind of single payer health care plan.

10. Despite the president’s own admission that only a single payer health care system will deliver what Americans want, he and the leaders of his party insist that Medicare For All, HR 676, us utterly off the table.
Before he became a presidential candidate, Barack Obama identified himself as a proponent of a single payer health care system. All we had to do, he told us, was elect a Democratic congress and senate, and a different president. Now that this has been done, he insists that “change” is just not possible, and we have to settle for less. The president continues to admit that only a single payer health care system will cover everybody, but insists that America just can’t handle that much change.  "

The main thing I get from this is Section 1233, starting at page 424 the part that throws anyone 65 and older under the bus.

They would just as soon you croak at age 65 to save them money.

And I will be damned if I will go to one of their annual, "Advanced Care Planning Consultations".  They can kiss it.

I wonder what they are going to do when I don't show up, put me in jail?

Bipartisan Senate Health Talks Face Sept. 15 Deadline

Jon Selib, Baucus’ chief of staff, laid out Baucus’ strategy in a meeting this week with health care stakeholders.

According to sources who were in the room, Selib said some Republicans were “killing” the health care reform effort for political gain. Selib said the bipartisan talks have yielded agreement on 95 percent of the issues, and that only two or three sticking points remain. Selib made a subtle plea to attendees at the meeting, most of them members of the business community, to urge Republicans to accept the deal, suggesting that it was the best they could hope to get.

Selib also warned the group that pursuing the reconciliation procedural tool might be necessary to get health care enacted this year, and he blamed Republicans for forcing the Democrats to seriously consider using the maneuver. Reconciliation would allow Democrats to pass a health care overhaul with a simple, 51-vote majority.

The meeting occurred before Baucus announced Thursday evening that a health care markup would not occur next week.

Meanwhile, Grassley was still lobbying against setting deadlines for an agreement, saying in a Twitter post that a few extra weeks would not hurt the process. “Little disingenuous for pres obama to say ‘hurry up’ pass healthCare. Wk here wk there makes little differenc considerin startup is 2013,” Grassley tweeted on Friday.

Baucus’ Finance Committee spokesman declined comment.

See what else is on Senate Agenda at present