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Senate Health Care Bill Built on Obama’s Broken Promises
Ezra Klein is trying to make the absurd claim that this Senate bill closely resembles Obama's campaign promises on health care reform:
U.S. President Barack Obama is pictured as he delivers remarks on regulatory reform in the East Room of the White House in Washington October 9, 2009. (REUTERS/Jason Reed) The health-care bill that looks likely
to clear the Senate this week is not very close to the health-care bill
most liberals want. But it is very close to the health-care bill that
Barack Obama promised.
This claim, I feel, is just not based in reality. The following is a list of all the promises broken:
Promise:
Under the plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year.
The CBO has concluded that premiums for employer-provided insurance will not drop by anything close to $2,500 per year. Without reforms like drug re-importation, direct government drug price negotiations, a robust public option, or a central provider reimbursement negotiator, I see no way this reduction can happen with the Senate bill.
The Senate bill also breaks the key promise that "you can keep the insurance you have." The excise tax in the Senate bill is designed to make your health insurance worse. It will force your employer to select plans with less coverage and higher co-pays. If you are one of the roughly 30 million Americans in 2016 who's insurance will be lessened because of the excise tax, your current health insurance will definitely change for the worse. Obama attacked John McCain throughout the campaign because his plan would tax your health insurance benefits. Now Obama is going back on his key distinction from John McCain by promoting a bill that does in fact tax your health insurance benefits.
Promise:
Barack Obama and Joe Biden's new National Health Insurance Exchange will also help increase competition by insurers.
The Senate bill will use state-based exchanges. This is not some minor technical distinction. By using state-based exchanges, it relies on state insurance commissioners to enforce the new regulations. State insurance commissioners do not have a good track record policing the insurance companies. They often lack the power, funding, or will to hold them accountable. Regulation without strong enforcement is meaningless.
Promise:
Allow consumers to import safe drugs from other countries. The second-fastest growing type of health expenses is prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies should profit when their research and development results in a groundbreaking new drug. But some companies are exploiting Americans by dramatically overcharging U.S. consumers. These companies are selling the exact same drugs in Europe and Canada but charging Americans a 67 percent premium. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will allow Americans to buy their medicines from other developed countries if the drugs are safe and prices are lower outside the U.S.
This is a pure broken promise. Obama traded it away to PhRMA as part of a secret backroom deal (which itself breaks another promise: to make all negotiations public on C-SPAN). He actively worked to kill drug re-importation when it had a real chance of being added to the bill.
Promise:
Allow Medicare to negotiate for cheaper drug prices. The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act bans the government from negotiating down the prices of prescription drugs, even though the Department of Veterans Affairs' negotiation of prescription drug prices with drug companies has garnered significant savings for taxpayers. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will repeal the ban on direct negotiation with drug companies and use the resulting savings, which could be as high as $30 billion, to further invest in improving health care coverage and quality.
Again, this is another broken promise that was part of Obama's secret sweetheart deal with PhRMA.
Promise:
Through the Exchange, any American will have the opportunity to enroll in the new public plan or an approved private plan... The Exchange will require that all the plans offered are at least as generous as the new public plan and meet the same standards for quality and efficiency.
There is no public option in the Senate bill. In the health care system that Obama promise the public option was not just some "small sliver." It was going to be the benchmark against which all private plans would need to be measured.
Promise:
Affordable premiums, co-pays and deductibles. Participants will be charged fair premiums and minimal co-pays for deductibles for preventive services.
I do not believe the subsidized premiums are affordable and the subsidies are only for the 70% actuarial plans. Plans with this low of an actuarial will likely have high co-pays and deductibles.
Promise:
EMPLOYER CONTRIBUTION. Large employers that do not offer meaningful coverage or make a meaningful contribution to the cost of quality health coverage for their employees will be required to contribute a percentage of payroll toward the costs of the national plan. Small businesses will be exempt from this requirement.
The Senate bill does not have a real employer mandate based on payroll. It only has a small "free rider" provision. Because of the lack of a real employer mandate, the amount of employer-provided coverage will drop by $5 million.
Other promises not part of the official campaign plan document:
During the 2008 primary campaign, Obama really pushed that a key distinction between Hillary Clinton and himself was that he promised not to include an individual mandate in his reform package. This bill has an individual mandate.
Obama attacked John McCain for planning to tax health insurance benefits. This bill taxes employer provide benefits.
Candidate Obama promised to make the negotiations public, and, clearly, that did not happen.
To recap: the Senate bill taxes benefits and will result in millions of Americans' insurance plans changing for the worse. It is not expected to bring down premiums by $2,500 a year. There is an individual mandate forcing you to buy private health insurance, but no real employer mandate. The subsidies will be insufficient to truly make insurance affordable. It does not create a national exchange or a public option. It does not allow for drug re-importation or direct drug price negotiations by Medicare. All the negotiations were conducted in secret, and clearly to the detriment of the American consumer. It is a massive rollback of women's reproductive rights, something Obama promised to defend vigorously. These are not minor changes. These are core promises of the Obama campaign.
This Senate health care reform bill is nothing like what Obama campaigned on. Obama's two biggest campaign promises about health care reform-that he repeated over and over again (no individual mandate and no taxes on employer-provided heath insurance)-were both completely broken. If Ezra Klein wants to argue this is still a good bill, he has that right, but he should not try to re-write history. I studied Obama's campaign promises closely during the campaign, and this is nothing like the health care reform he promised. He did almost everything he promised he would not do, and he kept almost nothing of his most progressive promises to stand up to the powerful industry lobbies.
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52 Comments so far
Show AllAnd he (Obama) continues to say the same line over and over as the Senate gets ready to vote on their bill. When will someone challenge this charlatan head on in the media?!?!
Add Obama's "reversals" (a euphemism for broken promises) on issues other than health care to those listed in the article and Obama has broken more campaign promises in his first year than any of his 43 predecessors did.
Anybody still supporting Obama must have never read or has forgotten the story of the Pied Piper, or perhaps they are in denial.
The comments to Chris Hedges' article about Ralph Nader's book are rife with commenters who don't "get" Nader's irony and the metaphoric essence of his book-- as I noted in a comment, these Nader-critics are the equivalent of yahoos and wingnuts who think that Stephen Colbert IS the reactionary Bill O'Reilly clone, and don't get that it's a satiric persona.
Likewise, perhaps Obama supporters didn't "get" the implications of the Pied Piper story-- or "The Emperor's New Clothes", for that matter.
It's hard to heed cautionary tales when the heart is full of hope!
· Yr Obd't Servant
Is there a promise he hasn't broken?
I never thought I'd see the President Of the United States say, "if you don't pass this bill the US will go bankrupt"
A willful lie. I expect Pelosi and Reid and the rest of this doggeral minded Congress to lie and cheat, but I was hoping the President weould refrain from it. Or at least lies that are so trasnsparent.
Hey, he promised transparency. I guess he meant BOLDER LIES.
Now that Obama has been sued for non-transparency he is implementing pseudo transparency.
There was an emporer with some new clothes who tried that one...
Add to that the broken promises to not be George Bush's third term and a corporate hack.
Since the healthcare reform bill is composed of nothing but broken promises, where is the liberal Democratic senator who will vote against it?
Correction, Pitch Fork, Obama didn't break ALL of his promises, he kept ALL of his promises to the insurance and drug industries and threw in a few sweeteners to maximize "campaign contributions" (euphemism for bribes) from those sources.
The insurance and drug industries compromised absolutely nothing for the bill whereas Obama and Congress compromised everything US taxpayers and health care consumers stood to gain in the bill.
If the Tobacco industry had been treated like the Health Insurance industry, non-smokers would have been forced to pay into a pool to subsidize the tobacco companies.
Of course it's ridiculous to compare Big Tobacco to Big Insurance. Over the long run tobacco can kill you, whereas denial or lack of coverage by health insurance companies can only.... Oh.
Lol...a mandated two packs a day!
There are worse things than voting Republican, although next year will be my first time.
The Repugs were solidly behind every dumb thing the Bush bunch did to ruin the country and even got a few Dems to go along. Now, however, they are solidly against every smart thing that is proposed to either kill it or wreck it. Let`s not put all of the blame on Obama, although he was foolish to think anyone could work with a Repug. Our country is totally controlled by big money and power and they intend to keep it that way. They even have poor people out demonstrating for them because of their propaganda.
The repugs got everything they wanted in the TARP bill and the health care bill while going on record voting against both bills...the best of both worlds, since they can now leverage voters angst by campaigning in the 2010 election against the Democrats' support of both bills.
Obama will be happy to see the repugs control Congress after the 2010 election... he will no longer be fibbing when he says the Repugs are stalling his agenda.
Bingo.
A great many big ol' crocodile tears will be shed on-camera by Repugs in the coming days and weeks as the Wealth Care bill gets pushed through, but it's a win-win for them.
They get a textbook piece of regressive legislation they could only have dreamed of ramming through while in power, AND they get to run against it in 2010 and 2012.
And as the poll numbers slide from Dem to Repug, so will the bulk of those juicy corporate donations.
Maybe this is what will turn the left en masse against Obama, where the wars and occupations and bailouts somehow have not. We can hope.
So, have Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein et al become "useful idiots" for the faux democratic centralist a.k.a. corporatists? Just wondering.
I am sick at heart and soul. The country's citizens have been raped by this bill; it is not health care reform but a travesty and the most bitter disappointment. At least with Bush, we knew in advance he was going to screw the citizenry in favor of the rich - but we have been lied to again by the man we fought so hard to elect, and I've been unable to control my grief today. This has been indescribably painful, and will wreak havoc on a country already reeling from appalling financial and military decisions. God help America now - please.
Ok, he lied about health care, but he told you that he would increase the military involvement in Afghanistan.
The fault is yours, not Obama's.
Grand lies are Obama's MO. Who is this guy anyway?
Emporer Nixxon XI.
As I said earlier about this betrayal, what is demonstrated here (as well as in the betrayals of Employee Free Choice and constitutional restoration) is both that "change we can believe in" was from its very inception a Big Lie and the terrible truth of wrenching change behind the Big Lie: the painful realization that -- for the vast majority of us who are not part of the obscenely wealthy ruling pornocracy -- the American Dream is dead beyond recovery.
Within that pornocracy -- the dictionary definition of which is "government by whores" -- the Democrats and Republicans represent nothing more than actors in a charade deliberately scripted to blind us to our true circumstances.
But now in the face of such betrayal -- the GOPorkers as obstructionists, the DemocRats as back-stabbers -- there is no denying we the people are as powerless and helpless as the peasants of Tsarist Russia and the serfs of pre-revolutionary France.
We are the subjects of a one-party despotism fanatically dedicated to a single purpose: the expansion and preservation of capitalism whatever the cost in human death and misery -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the ruling class, total subjugation and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us.
Any question the intensification of oppression was not Obama's intent from the very beginning is banished by the fact it was Obama himself who not only engineered the betrayals but positioned Lieberman as the death star of health care reform.
Congress -- like the Duma of Romanov Russia and the Estates-Generale of Antoinette France -- serves only the aristocracy. Just as -- like the tsars, kings and plantation-masters of old -- Obama answers only to the elite: the grand-dukes of Wall Street, the barons of Big Business, the sultans of the satrapies of sickness and their henchmen the prescription drug lords.
Thus we awaken to the unspeakable reality of our true circumstances: "change we can believe in" indeed, though not the change for which -- already sensing the depth and permanence of our enslavement -- we so desperately had hoped.
Thus too we realize that our input is irrelevant: our votes meaningless, our petitions and protests of no consequence. Further activism is pointless; it will only hasten the advent of intensified oppression.
And there are yet further ObamacRat betrayals Mr. Walker did not list, no doubt because one can only bear limited doses of the naming of such treacheries.
These betrayals include:
By denouncing union health benefits as "Cadillac" plans and taxing them accordingly, the DemocRats not only continue but expand the GOPorker practice of exempting the rich from paying taxes and shifting the entire tax burden onto working families.
More damning yet is the fact this is at the request of President Obama himself: yet another proof -- as if there were not already enough -- that "change we can believe in" was never more than a Big Lie, that (save for the GOP's rabidly racist objections to an African-American U.S. head-of-state), there are no substantive differences between GOPorker and DemocRat.
Note too how Obama's position expresses the anti-union bias typical of the identify-with-the-aristocracy DemocRat hot-tub bourgeoisie. Indeed by the "Cadillac" characterization, Obama deliberately agitates anti-union sentiment in general: again the Big Lie of "change we can believe in."
I cannot count the number of times I have said that mandatory health insurance without at least a public option to counter the obscene profiteering of the insurance cartel is literally a form of slavery -- all the more so since its enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service turns it to an unspeakably vicious be-a-slave-or-be-imprisoned reality that has no precedent in modern history.
For anyone interested in a broader view, this is the most recent development in an ongoing process of subjugating U.S. workers: first the re-imposition of indentured servitude -- "bankruptcy reform"; next the de facto enslavement of the eldery via the mandatory pay-or-be-fined Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Lord Benefit (which doubled my prescription drug costs when it went into effect and has since tripled them); and now true de facto enslavement.
There can now be no doubt the slavery imposed on elderly and disabled people by Part D was but a prelude to the wholesale enslavement of the entire working class under the methodical mastery -- irony of ironies -- of the first U.S. African-American president: the New Plantation of the United Estates.
Meanwhile the nullification of Roe v. Wade for all but the wealthiest women is a giant leap toward the imposition of the fanatical Christian theocracy by which the ruling class intends to ensure the newly enslaved workers remain opiated to submission.
(For those of you who don't know, industrial psychology long ago concluded that compulsory chastity elevates productivity: workers so oppressed sublimate their sexual frustrations into material acquisitiveness and therefore into hard work -- all the more so when workplace discipline gives them no other choice.)
Then there's the fact the expansion of Medicaid is in truth the expansion of welfare, with all the vicious subjugation for which the parasites of the welfare bureaucracy are deservedly infamous. When you're on welfare, you are literally a prisoner of the state, totally caged by regulations and regulatory malice even though you're neither shackled nor locked in a cell.
This expansion of welfare and the associated pandering to its tyrannical bureaucracy (a major DemocRat constituency) is why I opposed Kerry's "health reform" in 2004 and why I oppose the expansion of Medicaid now: the same malevolently self-serving bureaucracy that, between 1970 and 1990, padded its nest by increasing administrative costs (which includes salaries) by 5,390 percent (not a typo) even as it slashed stipends and services to the poor by 66 percent.
Welcome to Massa Obama's slave pens. So descends the darkness of oppression -- this time, given the omnipotence granted the Ruling Class by its mastery of technology, forever: until the anguish of Gaia herself brings the human epoch to its apocalyptic end.
Friends:
I'm VERY disappointed in B. Obama and our Congress for presenting such a watered-down, WORTHLESS Heath Care bill. And, I don't want to hear "we'll work on it and tinker with it later" BS. Congress WILL NOT revisit this issue. I urge of all of you to contact your federal representatives and TELL them to vote NO on this bill, unless it drops discrimination against women, and contains a STRONG public option.
The Federal Congress could have passed a much BETTER bill piecemeal, thru reconciliation, which only requires a 51 vote majority in the US Senate. (this is how the RePugs did it when they ran things in Congress, i.e. passing massive tax cuts for the wealthy). They chose NOT TO and instead are handing us this piece of garbage that infringes on Roe v Wade, and hands the corporatists in the health care industry a windfall of new clients. Trust me, this was a total set-up from the very beginning. The corruption in our federal government is rampant, and unfortunately, the Democrats are part of the problem, NOT the solution. (just look at the recent Copenhagen failure...shocking). And, don't even get me started on the RePugs. It's time for this country to either STAND-UP to these corrupt, corporatist-lackeys, or BREAK-UP.
What do people expect. The US public voted for a class not a change. Both parties are funded by the health care "industry". Industry being the key word. This is a billion dollar a year industry that is not going to hand over power or profit to anyone without a fight. Unless we the people get the right to sue these companies until they are broke if necessary to get our point across nothing will change. We need tort reform in the form of lifting caps on punitive damages and a judicial system that is willing to bankrupt a few of these companies. Then we will see change. We need to hit them where it hurts.
Hokum. Bill-puckey.
My house reprentative is Donna Edwards. We worked hard to get her elected. I called today and told her office they are our last hope. She has already voted against the Afghan war and because she is doing what her voters expected she has been promised no help from the Obama leadership. This is the second elected congress person I have heard threatened by both Obama and Emanuel. We are going to have to find a way to stop this insanity and take back our country. This bill takes women's rights back 50 years and will result in doctors refusing to treat Medicare patients. We are facing an internist shortage becaues no one wants to risk 12 years of education on a poor income. 30 Senators who signed a promise not to vote for anything that did not contain a public option have been strong-armed into having to explain the broken promise. They will either face tough re-election or choose to retire. We are going to see a major change in both houses and it is not going to be pretty.
LIAR!
My goodness, all this rhetorical energy that will have zero effect on our corporate controlled government. This "Letter to the Editor" mentality may be an effective way to get local town government to fix potholes on main street but we are dealing with a completely different animal. Think about this for a moment, make two columns on a piece of paper, left column shall include the names of the 10 or 15 most powerfull corporations, most powerfull first. Then in the right column list the most powerfull positions in government, again most powerfull first. See where I'm going with this? Unless the good people of this country can figure out how to become a corporate powerhouse we shall have little influence.
Our Senate has labored mightily and delivered a Colossus with feet of clay.
We shall be taxed but not cured.
Tired of your government being run by the rich (who run the corporations)?
Tired of voting for a party thinking that something will change (and never does)?
http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/
Yup, another religious crusade, that'll do it.
I suggest keeping an ear cocked toward Howard Dean. On Sunday he said the bill approved by the Senate needs to be modified to be more like the House bill. Then he could support it. He said the main problem so far is that we're going down the path of letting private insurance companies run the system:
"Now, there are two countries that have done this without a public option, Switzerland and the Netherlands, but they treat insurance companies as public utilities. That's what we would have to do. And I don't have an objection to that."
It's amazing that Switzerland is so seldom mentioned. T.R. Reid noted (http://bit.ly/Nv7ZA) the following about the fight to obtain universal coverage in Switzerland:
"In Switzerland it was very tough, because Switzerland is home to huge drug companies and giant international insurance companies. Until the 1990s, they were making a profit on health insurance. They copied the pre-existing conditions rule of American insurers and tried not to sell policies to anyone who might make a claim. They hired lots of underwriters to deny claims, like our guys do. And by 1994, Switzerland got to the point where 5 percent of people couldn't afford health insurance.
"For the Swiss, this was shocking. They had a national referendum on universal coverage, and most of the business community opposed it. The giant insurance companies opposed it, and the drug companies opposed it. But the reform passed and took effect on Jan. 1, 1996. The result was that insurers had to cover everybody and they couldn't make a profit on basic health insurance."
If a public option and Medicare expansion can't be passed now, at least we can follow the lead of the Swiss. Underlining the urgent need to act on this is the fact that fifteen times the number of deaths caused by the 9/11 attacks are caused annually by our present way of handling health care in America. If that isn't an emergency, what is?
Bill Walz
This person makes sense. The left needs to think strategically and not "radically".
To those who want to raise the ghost of SDS - what did it get us last time? That kind of radical one-ups-manship destroyed a legitimate progressive movement in the 60's and it will do it again.
Yes - let's hold the example of the Swiss before the American people. It will sell a whole lot better than Bolshevism.
Two key words in Manning's description of the Swiss health-care revolution:
National referendum.
Good luck getting that through in Oceania. (See Gravel, Mike)
Let’s use the Health Care bill as an Obama “teaching moment” --- not him ‘teaching us’ but us ‘teaching him’!
This 'Health Care' (sic) bill reminds me of the illogic of the Vietnam War:
"It became necessary to destroy the bill in order to save it"
And, in fact, the reason that this illogic applied then in the Vietnam War "abroad", and now in the corporatist tyranny over health care "at home" is precisely the same reason --- that a ruling-elite corporate/financial/militarist EMPIRE makes all decisions, and not the people of America.
As Hannah Arendt presciently warned from her direct experience with empires:
"Empire abroad (always) entails tyranny at home".
Let’s teach Obama a critical lesson that he needs to understand. The famous old phrase was, “What goes around, comes around”. But today, “What goes around, comes home to roost” as his own minister tried to teach him.
Let’s tell Obama:
“If you are only going to pose as another front-man for the ruling-elite Global corporate/financial/militarist EMPIRE that controls our country --- by hiding behind the façade of its two-party ‘Vichy’ sham of democracy --- then that’s not the ‘hope’ and ‘change’ that we voted for.
We’ve been fed that old “Okie Doke” (as you called it) since the Vietnam War, for forty years!
Now if you really believe that times they are a changing, and that you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowin, and that ‘Yes we can’ confront Empire, then why don’t you give us a chance, and help lead us in a second American Revolution for democracy against Empire --- cause if you’re not going to lead, then at least ‘get out of the way’.”
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Bill Walz
This raising the ghost of SDS will get the left exactly what it got us the last time - marginalized right out of American politics for the next thirty years. We have enough screaming coming from the right - let them alienate middle America this time while the left stays rational and does the hard political work of actually educating and moving the country in our direction.
Bill Walz
Plea to lefties: Obama got all he could get in this Senate bill. This is politics. We have real enemies. Obama is not one of them.
Yes, I am heartsick too - but it is with the system that has stacked the deck completely with the powers as they are, and against real reform. You feel betrayed that Obama hasn't turned the entire system around and given you what you want? What does he have to work with? This sick Senate! A media that is in the pocket of the corporations! Republicans who work lock-step to not only defeat his proposals but to destroy his presidency confidant that they can make up any lie and get the press to give it legitimacy and enough people to scream that they can drown out any real debate! A right-wing of his own party that is only an inch away from Republicans and a left wing that will abandon him as soon as they don't get everything they want!
What would you have Obama do? Get no health care reform? Because that's what would have happened if he hadn't struck all those back room deals giving away important elements of the reform the left wanted and the nation needs.
Republicans have the power to shape the argument as they want it because their argument is on cue-cards from the corporate powers - who own the media - and they can count on having enough sell-out Democrats to force their way with the outrageous Senate rules that require a super majority of 60 votes to pass anything.
Obama's great victory is that he has put a foot in the door of corporate hegemony. He got something. From something, more can grow. From nothing, grows nothing.
On health care, what has been won is not yet clear, but it is a win, if only a paltry one. Wait until the process is complete. Wait to see the final bill. It still will not be what is truly needed, which is a single-payer system, or what is next best, a robust public option, but it will be a lot more than what is in place now, and the ball will be rolling.
Mark my words. In ten years, there will be a public option - if - the left doesn't either quit or go radical in a way that pushes the country into reaction - like it did in the late 60's. If Obama has eight years, and Congress is not lost, and another progressive and realistic progressive can follow Obama into the White House.
For all that to happen, Democrats have to stay calm, confront the Republicans and turncoat Democrats - not Obama, and continue with steady pressure for the reforms that are needed. - not only health care, but even more important, election reform that gets the corporate money out of politics, the money that stood in the way of this health care reform being meaningful and complete.
Don't confront and undermine Obama. Go after those turncoat Blue Dog Democrats. Go after the damn Republicans. Go after the corporation monopolies. Work to change the rules that work against meaningful reform. Or lose everything.
Mark my words.
Obama may not be a direct "enemy" but he is no real ally to the liberal/progressive base...
Again, Obama is a master deceiver and double-talker and I mean masterful....He may not be an enemy be he is not the ally of the liberal/progressive/environmental/antiwar/social-economic justice/pro-choice Women of America/LGBT Base of the Democratic Party.
Sorry....this is REALITY Buster and you NEED to Deal with the REALITY of Obama!
Bill Walz. President Obama who is the leader of the Democratic Party should be the "Confronter-in-Chief. In reality he is the "Hider-in-Chief". I rest my case against your silly diatribe.
Just like everything Obama and Rahm Emmanuel has touched this past year, the health bill has clearly shown that working to compromise within the system, with conservative Democrats, Republicans, or obstructionists like Lieberman leads nowhere except hell. If Obama were truly a man of integrity, he would have fought from the very beginning for the best possible bill, and taken the fight to the people as opposed to waiting for Congress to corrupt it thoroughly.
This is all assuming that Obama wanted change at all. From where I'm sitting, he has played the perfect corporate Manchurian Candidate, and done far worse than Bush by carrying on the inherited neo-con policies and destroying the progressive opposition at the same time.
I have an expensive Blue Shield policy with a $5K deductible. BS can change anything about the policy at any time, including the premiums.
Other health insurance and HMO companies have repeatedly turned me down for coverage, due to the medications I take. Not tumors, HIV, renal failure, or even hospitalization -- just long-term medications. I'm stuck with whatever BS wants to do. So I was counting -- at the *very* least -- on the promise that insurance companies could not refuse anybody.
Look what the Obama folks wrote in their self-congratulatory email today:
---
"And while insurance companies will be prevented from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions once the exchanges are open, in the meantime there will be a high-risk pool where people with pre-existing conditions can purchase affordable coverage."
---
What does that mean, "when the exchanges are open"? Is that "when your ship comes in"? So they reneged on the most basic, most essential need for self-employed people.
First Obama threw Guantanamo and Bagram detainees under the bus; then gays in the military; then anyone who wasn't on Wall Street during the crash; then women concerned about reproductive rights.
Today it was my turn to get thrown under the bus, and it hurts. Hard.
In my 70 years of enduring Empire USA, never
has it been more vulnerable to a violent
overthrow by madding crowd America.
Sorry Mr. Walz, but Obama and all the blue dog and centerist democrats are as much the enemy as are the republicans. No excise tax on the health care industry, no excise tax on PhARMA, no excise tax on the oil companies, no excise tax on the large banks that we bailed out. But yes, an excise tax on the healthcare of working men and women. Obama isn't our enemy, yea, right!
Oh and by the way Mr. Walker, I don't know about you sir, but I am an American citizen, not an American consumer! Define yourself, or somebody else will define you!
Yes by all means an excise tax on oil companies and all giant corporations, but with the exception of the medical industry.
For taxes like any other operating expense for those in medicine are passed on to the sick and are most counter productive.
Taxes such as those on high-quality health insurance and the 2% penalty for those who refuse to buy illness insurance (which is in fact a tax), they only cause more misery.
Surely the only moral and honest thing to do is declare healthcare a basic human right, make it all non-profit and worry about the cost after it is in full force and effect.
Think about it: Obama made his secret deal, and then let us work our asses off FOR MONTHS, trying to achieve a goal he had destroyed behind our backs. The man is a party traitor.
PRI talk radio ---- my E-mail yesterday:
Diane Reams: This listener asks:
“Medical expenses in the U.S. are double those of other rich nations. What does this bill do to cap such excessive profits?”
Washington Times: Well, things are just more expensive here, doctors get paid more, drugs are twice as expensive in the U.S., hospital supplies and labor costs are much higher here.
Diane Reams: But studies show that we receive poorer care and less services then people in countries like England and Canada.
Brookings Institute: Several times in the past they tried to pass legislation to regulate the medical industry, but you can see how much control the medical lobby has on Congress.
By now Americans know--and after Copenhagen, the world knows--that Obama is one of the biggest liars in presidential history. He is beginning to make G.W. look like the other G.W. (the one who couldn't tell a lie). And that's just on the domestic front. On foreign policy, Obama is fast taking his place in line with other war criminals. Can we really say that Rahm Emanuel is pulling all the strings? No, Obama may be hanging out with trash, but he's doing it voluntarily--and trash attracts trash. Maybe this will be enough to convince Americans that a THIRD PARTY is a must in 2012.
What would we have Obama do, What would we have the Senate do? Quit telling us this your best effort. Senate change your rules so that the philibuster dies and a simple majority can rule. Obama-veto any bill without a real open public option or Medicare buy in. House put SinglePayer up for debate. There is much they could do if they had real conviction and not just an overwhelming desire to satisfy corporate insurance interests. They have shown us their true colors. We are fools to vote for them again.
Healthcare is irrelevent.
Without action on climate change, we are all dead anyways.
I have an expensive, high-deductible policy that the provider can change any time, however they want. I get declined when I apply elsewhere due to pre-existing conditions. So I pay for my medical expenses as well as my insurance.
Look what the Obama folks wrote in their self-congratulatory email:
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"And while insurance companies will be prevented from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions once the exchanges are open, in the meantime there will be a high-risk pool where people with pre-existing conditions can purchase affordable coverage."
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What does that mean, "when the exchanges are open"? Is that "when your ship comes in"? So they reneged on the most basic, most essential need for self-employed people.
First Obama threw Guantanamo and Bagram detainees under the bus; then gays in the military; then anyone who wasn't on Wall Street during the crash; then women concerned about reproductive rights. Now I've hit the pavement, too.