Stop HR 3200

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 truth is that Barack Obama campaigned as the candidate of change, and a health care system that covers everybody from day one with no exceptions is what people imagined they voted for when they swept him and an overwhelming number of Democrats into office.

A single payer Medicare-For-All system will eliminate 500,000 insurance company jobs and replace them with 3.2 million new jobs in health care for a net gain of 2.6 million new jobs according to a study by the National Nurses Organization. That’s as many jobs as the US economy lost in all of 2007. Single payer will create hundreds of billions in annual wages and local and state tax revenues for cash strapped cities and towns. It will lift the shadow of bankruptcy for medical reasons from two thirds of a million American families yearly. It’s what we deserve.

It’s what we voted for, and we won’t stop demanding it.

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Copy and paste the above Ten Reasons into an email to all your friends and family (Be sure to include Bruce Dixon’s byline — he put a lot of work into developing that list and deserves credit). Remind them that obama is silencing critics ON HIS LEFT more strenuously than he is fighting the corporate interests who want the broken health care system to remain exactly as it is so they can keep the gravy train flowing.

Liberals in Congress appear to finally be joining in the fray and realizing what Pumas, and people like Violet Sox, have been saying for eighteen months:

“My problem with Obama is that he’s not liberal enough. If anybody’s a crypto-Republican, it’s him. The Obama movement combines all the worst elements of Republicanism into one juggernaut package: Rovian cheating, Reaganesque marketing, Bushian pseudo-religious fervor, wingnut propaganda, mindless worship of authority, hatred of women, contempt for the disadvantaged, and of course GOP political positions on everything from FISA to the environment.”

– Violet Sox

Part II — Contact your representatives in Congress by clicking HERE and send them an email saying:

STOP HR 3200.
It is a junk bill which no one has read or understood and is chock-full of loopholes and give-aways to special interests.

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 HR 3200 is a dangerous bill. Of all the mega-bills obama has proposed in the last six months, each of which provided its own special component of middle class attack, THIS one has the potential to do the most serious and painful damage to the middle and working class. Reread #4, #5, and #6. These objections are 100% valid — critics from the left, right, and center agree on all three.

Have you ever had “Junk Insurance”? It’s really, really bad — if you get sick and find out your insurance is junk (and no one ever knows they have crappy health insurance UNTIL they are already sick, not an excellent time to be confronted with the prospect of bankruptcy and a protracted paperwork battle with a billion-dollar corporation) there is pretty much NOTHING you can do about it. Humiliating and menacing calls and letters from collection agencies don’t take a break just because you’re recovering from surgery or resting after chemotherapy. They DO NOT CARE that you are facing devastating choices and realizations during an illness — THEY WANT THEIR MONEY dammnit, and to them you are no different than a spendthrift who ran up her credit card at the shopping mall: a deceitful, irresponsible, and failed consumer.

I live in Massachusetts, where we have a mandated health insurance plan that is the model for parts of  HR 3200. Not only is it failing poor people, it’s also infuriatingly ineffective at covering working people. Actually Mass is actively trying to avoid covering working and middle class people, because “just three years after mandating that residents get health insurance and requiring employers, insurers and taxpayers to chip in, Massachusetts has yet to control soaring costs that are eating up half its budget.”

What’s happening here in Massachusetts is what will happen if HR 3200 is passed. The bill has NO WAY to control costs, and so, just like is happening right under my nose, health care costs will continue to SOAR under HR 3200. Then the government will be forced to control how much it spends (not by limiting costs of course — THAT would be painful to the corporations) but by CUTTING PEOPLE OFF THE ROLLS. First they’ll make legal immigrants ineligible (for example the spouses of American citizens who are fully legal, tax-paying residents of their communities), and then they’ll start making it impossibly difficult for working class people to qualify so that those people will give up and buy (crappy) private insurance — anything to keep them off the rolls. Whatever mess of a “public option” makes it alive through the HR 3200 wrangle from hell, rest assured it will be much worse than the spectacularly bad plan we have here, which is not only failing, but taking the Ship of State down with it.


I am putting this in main because the Health care debate is going on right now.