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Single Payer: Not Cash Cows, but Good Neighbors
I've never been good at believing conspiracy theories. Most of them presume conspirators who are supernaturally smart, know things they couldn't possibly know, and are inhumanly successful in organizing and carrying out devious plots and grand schemes.
Yet in the current rococo debate about overhauling our health care system I find myself drawn to the argument that the health-insurers are trying to maintain a system that extracts profits from the misfortunes of sick people and poor people. I invoke the notion of moral hazard: a policy that tempts entities to do morally questionable things.
Example: In 2003, when I had chest pains, I was whisked through tens of thousands of dollars worth of tests and a hundred thousand dollars in triple-bypass surgery. It probably prolonged my life, though less expensive treatments might have done just as well. Who knows?
Of course, I was a temptation to health providers they could hardly resist: an otherwise healthy non-smoker, non-drinker, non-obese person who mowed my own lawn and bicycled all over town. Even better, I had federal employees health insurance that would pay for anything and everything a doctor ordered. It made me wonder if those of us who are insured, reasonably affluent and/or homeowners aren't viewed as cash-cows by the insurance, medical and pharmaceutical sectors.
... I dashed off those four paragraphs Memorial Day morning. Then, vaguely remembering that I had written about moral hazard before, I searched my computer files and found that I had - ten years ago ("No easy remedy for curing health care woes" Record-Courier 2/21/99) Here are some excerpts:
"In policymaking there is an oft-cited notion of ‘moral hazard' - the argument that something intended to reduce or encourage certain behaviors will tempt people in the opposite direction. For example, laws requiring seat-belts may encourage people to drive faster and take more chances; Social Security discourages people from saving for their old age; guaranteeing bank deposits spurs banks to make riskier loans. ...
"One of the biggest pots of money available in the U.S. today is from the premiums for health insurance. The moral hazard is real here, and proved. Private health insurers do, as far as possible, avoid the poorest, sickest, and more costly elderly clients, and ‘cherry-pick' the healthy, affluent, younger ones. They also spend liberally for advertising to compete for desirable clients. ...
"The present system [1999] is bad enough, but now a plan has been proposed for the government to offer a subsidy (like a voucher) with which people could buy their own health insurance. Such a plan would be likely to tempt the insurance industry to price health insurance just as much above the subsidy as the traffic would bear - the amount that the largest number of people would be willing or able to pay above the subsidy. Insurers would compete, not to provide the best care to the largest number of people for the least price, but to provide the least care to the best clients for the biggest increment over the subsidy....
"If we are serious about supplying health care to everyone regardless of their ability to pay, the most effective and least costly solution would be a single payer system, in which the government directly pays medical personnel and hospitals for all health care services."
In 2009 little has changed. In ten years we still haven't addressed the moral hazards of paying for health care , or indeed the fundamental moral standards we need as a society.
Our highest moral values include caring for our neighbors, helping them in adversity, treating them as we would be treated, not harming them, and being fair in sharing the riches, risks and hardships of life on this small planet. This is not socialism, but community, and finally no society can long survive without such basic values.
We must all be touched by the stories of medical crises of some of the 70 million uninsured and under-insured people in our nation. But until the 230 million of us who have health insurance stop mooing about socialized medicine and the greedy undeserving poor while we are being milked by the insurance industry, nothing is going to change.
As it was ten years ago, our system presents a moral hazard - not to ordinary people trying to get decent medical care but to the private sector trying to make money for shareholders. This needs to be fixed, if only because we should feel humanly, morally obligated to provide every human being with access to medical care as needed.
The universal health insurance option recently proposed by Sen. Sherrod Brown is designed to keep the health insurance industry alive in a few giant corporation, from which each of us would have to choose one and pay its premiums and take whatever benefits it offers. It is intended to persuade us cows that our milk is buying our care and protecting our freedoms to shop for "good deals" in bypass surgery or colonoscopies.
The only option that removes profit-taking from our health care system - single payer - is not being heard from the White House, has been suppressed on Capitol Hill, and is widely ignored by the mainstream media - except for ads opposing it.
Single-payer would take private insurance companies out of the system entirely. Every person would pay some federal tax to create a pool of money large enough to cover the medical needs of everyone. That pool of money would pay providers from the private sector - doctors, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, etc. - like Medicare does now for people over age 65.
If we don't want to be treated like cows, we have to stop acting like cows. We need to assert our moral imperatives: health care is a matter of the common good - for our neighbors, our communities, our nation, and for the world.
The only human, moral option for universal health care is single payer.
67 Comments so far
Show Allanother CD article touting middle class anxieties about health insurance.
YAWN.
waking up the conscience (if there is one) of this country will not happen by focusing on health care. ("health" and "health care" aren't the same thing, anyway.)
how many million children are practically starving in this country?
how many families are food insecure?
how many of us are on the verge of being kicked out of our homes? how many are already homeless?
don't get me wrong. universal free health care would be great, i'm all for it.
but our societal problems are much, much bigger than that, and "national health care" as an issue is not nearly radical enough to inform, much less motivate, a social movement in this country.
rushlimbaugh's taint:
It seems that you believe that there is a hierarchy of moral imperatives that dictates which issue should be tackled first, which second, which third, and so on. I hope that you will type up your neatly stacked totem pole of issues so that we will all know which ones we should ignore and which ones we should act on this week.
Notwithstanding your strenuously affected tone of hauteur and omniscience, you seem to be badly acquainted with some basic facts. Nearly 20,000 Americans DIE each year for lack of medical insurance. That's DIE, as in "cease to live" or "begin to decompose bodily." Does the plight of those 20,000 elicit nothing but a YAWN from your carefully curled lip? And that could happen at any time to any of the 50 MILLION Americans who lack any kind of health insurance--don't qualify for Medicaid, too young for Medicare, but can't afford private insurance.
Medical expenses are the leading cause of personal/family bankruptcy in this country. Bankruptcy as in "insolvency," "poverty," and "flat broke" for hundreds of thousands.
But you seem to that widespread death and poverty from lack of medical insurance are mere bagatelles, that there are much "bigger" problems that we have to tackle.
So please do oblige us with your list of problems that are so much "bigger" than mass loss of life and penury.
Among the many urgent problems facing this country, health care is the one being actively debated and considered in Washington RIGHT NOW. It's an issue that has mobilized tens of thousands of activists--ordinary citizens, doctors, nurses, lawyers, etc.--in a wedge formation against the massed forces of corporate rapacity that seek to profit from human illness and misfortune. The majority of citizens and physicians favor single payer. This is a winnable fight.
People with a heart and a conscience, who recognize that the collapsing health-care system in this country is a human/economic emergency of historic proportions, can go to the following Web sites to find out what you can do to help avert illness, death, and/or poverty for the hundreds of thousands whose desperate plight elicits nothing but a "YAWN" from "rush limbaughs taint" (a know-it-all who doesn't even know how to punctuate the possessive he uses in his handle):
www.singlepayeraction.org
www.pnhp.org
http://www.1payer.net/
http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/
http://guaranteedhealthcare4all.org/
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/free_single_payer_health_care
au contraire mon frere, but thanks for trying.
i think you are just pissed for me pointing out the obvious:
YOUR OBSESSION W/ "HEALTHCARE" IS A JOKE.
but yeah, sure, i'll read up on "guaranteed healthcare."
oh, and the health care of how many (auto) workers has the obama admin destroyed in the last 6 weeks?
uh huh, i'll keep obsessing about "health care."
(single payer? i'm for it. but waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down on the list of moral imperatives. how many children did the US gov't kill today, in pakistan or whereever? but yeah, i pump my fist for "healthcare.")
omg, i feel so guilty. for pointing out that obsession w/"health care", at this moment, is a total waste of time.
You seem to think that by re-labeling a legitimate concern as an "obsession," you have somehow mustered a rational argument, when all you have done is engage in a cheap rhetorical ploy that you cannot support with facts or logic. I guess you failed your basic composition class in seventh grade--if you got that far.
I presented you with some hard FACTS: that around 20,000 people die each year from lack of health-care coverage, and hundreds of thousands go into medically induced bankruptcy.
Your response to this ongoing catastrophe? Another round of vicious, childish sarcasm--not a fact or wisp of logic in site--just a big bellyful of attitude, and callous and snarling attitude at that. Yes, it's horrible that Pakistani children have died in that horrible war. Yes, the restructuring of the auto industry is corporate flim-flam. But those two issues absolve you ethically from caring about the 20,000 Americans who die each year from lack of health insurance? You just spit on those lives as insignificant? You feel no need to try to remedy that situation? You imagine that progressives cannot fight on several fronts simultaneously? You don't think progressives can s**t and chew gum at the same time? I seem to recall, for example, that in the sixties people marched for civil rights, for economic justice, AND against the Vietnam War! Imagine that!
You seem to think you are some kind of "progressive." Any progressive who is indifferent to the health--the very lives--and economic well-being of hundreds of thousands of Americans is about as progressive as your evident role model, Rush Limbaugh.
Your posts are one-note studies in negativity--all sneering style, no substance. I note, for example, that you STILL fail to offer a single constructive suggestion about what progressives SHOULD be doing--on any issue. You heap cheap invective on people who are actually DOING something about single payer, even though you are obviously illiterate in the field of health care and have no clue about the magnitude of the crisis. You're just another posturing know-nothing.
But prove me wrong. Tell me what we should be doing. Explain rationally why progressives should not care about those 20,000 annual deaths and hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies from zero or inadequate health insurance.
Or . . . you can just snarl and posture again--I'm betting that's about all you've got.
i'm all for single payer. 100%.
but your gov't (assuming you are one of God's favorites here in the US) will be dismantling medicare and SS before single payer gets a hearing. under obama.
20,000 people die from lack of healthcare? interesting, and probably true. but, after yourself, the person most likely to kill you is...your doctor (or other medical caregiver, thru negligence, mistakes, etc.)
my point is real simple: if we want basic changes in the system, focusing on healthcare is not the way to go.
there are more fundamental failures in our system. they rarely get the kind of attention that single payer does at CD. like homelessness, hunger, etc. obvs i am aware that health care, hunger, etc., are interrelated issues. but almost every day CD has an article on single payer.
i stick by my term obsession. the focus on health care reveals the social strata that CD appeals to. clearly that comment pushed your buttons. no apologies for that.
I have no idea what you're talking about. You care about suffering and loss of life if it's due to war or poverty, but not if it's due to lack of health insurance? The innocent lives lost because of this country's criminal scam of a health-care system mean less to you than lives lost elsewhere for other reasons?
This is completely arbitrary and irrational--and obscenely callous.
A majority of American citizens and physicians favor a single-payer solution of the kind that has been in place in the rest of the industrialized world for half a century now. This is an issue that is now front and center on Capitol Hill and in the White House. It is a winnable fight. That's why there's a lot of attention to it right now.
That doesn't mean that people are not attentive to other issues, or that they are not important.
ALL LIVES LOST TO ALL INJUSTICES ARE EQUALLY IMPORTANT, EQUALLY TRAGIC.
It's critical that we move to save those that can be saved.
If some lives are arbitrarily more important to you than others, and if you want to sit on the sidelines and carp and snarl instead of acting to save those lives when the political opportunity is there, fine. Just don't call yourself a progressive or even a decent human being.
Oh Snap!
I could not have said it better myself.
2k of victims is like having seven 9/11s every damn year.
When you look at the money and effort being marshaled to prevent another attack it makes you wonder why we can't get behind solving our health care problems. It is not as though we are the only ones who have ever been in this position, but virtually every industrialized nation (except South Africa I believe) has solved this conundrum by making the public welfare part of the governments job and instituting some kind of nationalized health care.
I think this problem (and many others) stem from the deference we give corporate entities in our legal system. With most of the rights of a citizen and few of the responsibilities we have created a monster with one goal: to make a profit at all costs. The methods for achieving that goal are unlimited by moral or ethical standards. Buying political influence, intimidating union organizers, bribing regulators, shipping jobs overseas, making puppet headquarters in foreign countries to avoid taxes, dragging legal fights against citizens until their opponent runs out of cash, these are all common corporate strategies, yet if a person did them they would regarded as a sociopath.
Somehow we need to renegotiate the corporate contract to limit the size and power of corporations and make the penalties for antisocial behavior and breaking the law more punitive. No more piddling fines, three major infractions and the government takes over the company and breaks it up into smaller ones (gradually so as not to punish blameless employees).
We also need to get serious about the real meaning of free speech. Giving rich people a louder voice than poor ones (and giving corporations a voice at all) insures that our system will always be skewed to the advantage of the powerful and ruthless. We need public financing of elections now, and we need to make private communications between lobbyists and politicians illegal. Make the influence peddling visible and it will dissolve in the sunlight.
Sioux Rose
MA: Good post.
And next up at the podium NEWT who GINGS for the RICH, and after him RUSH out on a LIMB-o, and then the Armey's DICK, and then David meant to OBEY, and then Henry with something to HYDE, and then Neil KASHKARI best at taking the money and running, and then Grover No-QUEST. You're onto something with who gets the microphone and media print as per "free" speech.
sorry, one more thought:
are you saying there is NOT a hierarchy of moral imperatives?
to take one example: the plundering of domestic resources (a la trillion dollar bailouts, the DOD budget, etc.) and the plundering of foreign resources (a la iraq) are related, two sides of the same coin (we probably agree on that.)
but their immediate impacts are so disparate (negligence vs. murder) that if you do not recognize some hierarchy in the moral urgency of these two issues....
Of course there's a hierarchy of moral imperatives. You have not made yours clear. To the extent that you have, it's brutally callous.
If you don't mind, as Sioux Rose pointed out, we need both single payer healthcare and a better societal lifestyle. That is the perfect answer to all your questions. We cannot do without one or the other. The health insurance corporations are nothing but fraud. How can you see that as not important? Wake up !
Sioux Rose
CARLA: You are very kind to acknowledge me. Thank you for the affirmative words.
Sioux Rose, glad to acknowledge other people's ideas and once again, thank you for raising the awareness of mutual cooperation. I cannot stand it when even otherwise progressive minds such as "rushlimbaughstaint" and "armybrat" try to tell us that healthcare is not an important issue. Neither a healthy democracy nor a healthy economy will flourish without good healthcare and more people waking up to and feeling proud to lead a healthy life style.
P.S.: I forgot to ask you one question on that other reply post on healthy lifestyle. Have you tried hemp and flax cereals? They don't taste so bad and yet they're very healthy. I get them at either Whole Foods or at a local organic store called MOM's (My Organic Market). I was told that most local organic stores sell these cereals. If not, there usually Whole Foods although I have heard mixed reactions about that store.
Sioux Rose
CARLA: I have a book somewhere written about a super sage-mystic type and he offers a dietary suggestion in that book, a miracle food he terms it which does involve flax seed. I bake with a flax seed grain concoction, and I have some sitting in my cabinet... sometimes I don't use the things around me. I should! When I see teens with facial acne I feel so badly for them. There they are buying cheeseburgers and french fries not realizing that all that grease clogs up their intestines and their bodies try to release the toxic build-up through their skin. Sure, one person due to their genetic heritage is more susceptible to this particular set of symptoms than another, but the bottom line is, we need to really eat raw food to clear our bodies of debris.
Armybrat has had some major disappointments with the medical field. She's a good soul, very intelligent, and much identified with the power of thought. I enjoy encouraging her to open her heart and soul a bit more to things the mind can neither explain, nor necessarily recognize. And I hope her medical injuries do heal or improve.
As if to illustrate the point: "But until the 230 million of us who have health insurance stop mooing about socialized medicine and the greedy undeserving poor while we are being milked by the insurance industry, nothing is going to change." see comment above.
Single Payer is the goal. Unfortunately, there is a huge obstacle.
The HealthCare business is one sixth of our economy, it hires over one million people, what's the plan for them? Unemployment?
And where do we get the billions of dollars to deal with the restraint of trade lawsuits that these thousands of currently profitable legal businesses will all file if their industry is outlawed?
Support Public Option to pick up the uninsured and grow it into Single Payer.
The "public-option" plan being pushed by you and a phalanx of corporate liberals (HCAN, AFL-CIO, Obama/Baucus/Pelosi/Stark) is among the most insidious frauds being perpetrated by the Beltway Democrats. This proposal, although it purports to offer an appealing "public plan" as an alternative to the private insurers, is simply more of the same. Here's why:
The advantage of single-payer is in risk pooling--everyone is in the same pool: well, sick, young, old, sick, and poor, thus averaging out the risks and costs of guaranteeing coverage to everyone. In the "public-option plan," everyone is NOT in the same risk pool, as they would be in single payer. In a "pub-op" plan, the oldest, sickest, and poorest would end up in the public plan--the youngest and healthiest cohort would aggressively marketed by the private HMOs, because that's where the profits are. Hence the whole advantage of single-payer risk pooling would be lost: the whole point is to combine EVERYONE's resources (through taxation rather than private premiums) so that the healthy 80 percent subsidize the unhealthy 20 percent and thus achieve overall cost efficiencies not obtainable if these two groups are in separate pools. In a pub-op plan, the public sector, saddled with the sickest and oldest 20 percent, will incur unmanageable per capita costs and will be made to look unworkable. Moreover, it will have to charge premiums and impose deductibles, just like the private plans. It would be just more of the same, notwithstanding the "public" branding.
This is the sham in the making that is the Stark-Hacker-Obama pub-op plan: game the system so that the public sector founders, thus discrediting the idea of publicly funded health care for another generation. Pub-op is a Trojan Horse for the HMOs--a wolf in sheep's clothing, lipstick on a pig--chose your cliche, but that's what it is. What it is NOT is the real reform the public needs--it's just another scam to keep the private insurers in business--the HMOs Plan B to gull the public into believing that it is getting some kind of "reform."
A publicly funded plan can achieve real cost efficiencies ONLY through true risk pooling--that means EVERYONE IN--everyone in the same pool. That means single-payer Medicare for all. Pub-op is not a step toward single-payer--it's a sham, a step into the abyss.
(For supplemental material on the untenability of the "pub-op" plan, see the following:
http://www.onecarenow.org/materials/healthcarereformriskpools.htm)
Sioux Rose
VANMUGO: I appreciate your breaking the matter down in easy-to-understand terms. It IS about sharing the pool, of course, and just as Obama gave the money to the bankers' club, he intends to give it to the insurance clubs. This guy is a smooth talker who's there to do profitable business of, for, and by the corporations. He's got a glib capacity to make his words SOUND like he is doing what he's doing for America and the benefit of citizens. It's kind of like a benign (not) bank robbery where everyone is inside the bank (that's been robbed) being told it's all OKay, just as we were told the "good news" about Iraq, and now the "time table/surge dance" with Afghanistan. EACH of these is a delay tactic that also makes use of the magician's capacity to get viewers to pay attention to one thing, while something else entirely is underway. By the time the viewers all realize they've been pickpocketed, the circus act has left town and their forwarding address is outside of the USA. Then the "new boss" reminds it is not pragmatic to chase them down, we have enough to deal with right now. But no laws are changed to hold the criminals accountable or take back what was ill-begotten. It's a charade with upper class criminals all protecting each other as they dance over the bodies of so many senselessly fallen.
Sioux Rose--
That's some nice imagery.
It's a blessing to have you popping up in these threads. You seem like a generous, spiritually centered soul, a model of the evolution of consciousness that the rest of this troubled world needs.
Sioux Rose
VANMUGO: Thank you kindly. Everything you said about me seems true of you, so you held up the mirror and saw a positive reflection. I thank you for caring about your fellow man, kind of reminds me of that old song, "And if I could reach you, how to give a damn about your fellow man..." (I can't remember who sang it, but it was one of those 60's numbers that had my generation INFUSED with ideals of a better world. And the same neocons who aimed the guns at the Kent State students seized the reins and have nearly gutted every decent thing in their quest for money, power, and death. If this doesn't summon the life force into a quickened awakening, I know not what can.) I appreciate sharing this forum with you.
Seems to be a heck of a lot of hard-edged trolls lately, Sioux Rose. The growing membership of Common Dreams, with the more soft-edged views, must be getting to them.
A few bucks more of payroll deductions and we'd have ourselves a single-payer health care progam, administered by a single governmental agency, which could employ the clerks, and typists and medical records keepers, and the whole nine yards of the nuts and bolts of a national health care system.
Since I have been a Social Security recipient with a check deposited in my account every month based on the monies I put in during my active, in-the-marketplace working years, I have been astounded by the accuracy and efficiency of this System since I first was eligible to draw a check.
Medical doctors and other medical personnel, in countries that have single payer/universal health care, seem to be very content with the system. Every program I've listened to or seen with these people providing their input has indicated satisfaction.
Unfortunately for us, our new president seems to be totally in thrall to corporate might, and that is sad. I truly thought he had more substance, and yet when I read his book, "Dreams of My Father," I made a comment on CD which included my assessment that the words are artful and well-written, but what I picked up was a cerebral man observing carefully, but without the deeper feelings that I expected and would have indicated a strong heart-mind connect. That connection was just not there.
And so once again, we are dealing with either a Faustian character or someone who just doesn't, as his wife says, get all worked up about anything. That's truly too bad ... for all of us and also for too many people across the world who are reaping the bloody harvest of what comes from a cool and collected mind absent true heartfulness, except for those in his own current "backyard" ... up in the living quarters of The White House.
I think we are f**ked, big time. Well, just a few more years and we'll find out what the transitions will bring--a plunge into total hell and a shift and transformation toward higher consciousness and better times or simply a plunge into total hell, panic, knee-jerk reactions of the worst kind ... and a long, long silence before a bird ever chirps again.
Life is sure interesting, isn't it?
peace, cm
Sioux Rose
CEE: Yes, I think there's been something of a troll convention in our midst, yet minds and words like yours (and many others) keep me coming back.
Your observation of the rather cool hearted demeanor of Obama is interesting since he is a Leo.That is the sign "ruled" by the heart, although he has the power-oriented, mysterious sign of Scorpio rising. I have truly not analyzed his chart, nor read his auto-bio, but almost all of his policy decisions, (if they are even his to make) have mortified me; and I am fairly certain anyone who sees what's being done, apart from the feel-good rhetoric around it, would have to feel likewise.
The Transition HAS begun, but it does escalate starting this autumn... there are definitely some tough astrological alignments in mid-September, and a big one at the end of October into November, and then another paradigm-shifting event in May that leads to a lot of MARS activity (War? Citizen unrest? Civil disobedience? Hornet's nest TOO stirred on the Afghan-Pakistan-India borders? Other?) in June, 2010. We definitely live in exciting times, and I read somewhere that this gigantic population of 6 billion and counting are all the souls through time who have come back to view or participate in the big whammola... that's today's characterization of the Transformation, or transition of Ages underway. Fasten your seat belt! Warp speed is ahead.
CV writes:
"The HealthCare business is one sixth of our economy, it hires over one million people, what's the plan for them? Unemployment?"
First of all, medical expenditures AS A WHOLE are one-sixth of the economy. Some 60 percent of those expenditures already come from the public sector. Moreover, in the private-sector of health care there are also labs, pharmaceutical firms, hospitals, private groups practices, etc. So the HMOs do NOT constitute anywhere near one-sixth of the economy.
Second, as for what will happen to the employees of the HMOs under a single-payer system? I quote from Physicians for a National Health Plan (www.pnhp.org):
"The new system will still need some people to administer claims. Administration will shrink, however, eliminating the need for many insurance workers, as well as administrative staff in hospitals, clinics and nursing homes. More health care providers, especially in the fields of long-term care, home health care, and public health, will be needed, and many insurance clerks can be retrained to enter these fields. Many people now working in the insurance industry are, in fact, already health professionals (e.g. nurses) who will be able to find work in the health care field again. But many insurance and health administrative workers will need a job retraining and placement program. We anticipate that such a program would cost about $20 billion, a small fraction of the administrative savings from the transition to national health insurance."
This is worth a minute of your time.
On Sunday morning, following Meet The Press, NBC television is planning to air a 30 minute "documentary" infomercial paid for by Rick Scott (a man with a long history of deceit) filled with distortions on publicly funded healthcare.
Please zip on over to the URL below. Fill out the form and tell NBC not to run the error filled piece.
Thanks!
http://action.seiu.org/page/s/StopScott
Even Sherrod Brown quit being a big government spender and realized that single payer healthcare is just not feasible. The insurance and drug industries have to make a living you know and when there are too many irresponsible losers who can't pull themselves up on their own and quit causing their own health care troubles, why should the government take my tax dollars and give it to them? From mercenary to management at an insurance company to entrepreneur, I knew how to pull myself up all my life and quit begging the government for money. Society should stop eating junk food and stop falling for all that organics bs and learn to exercise and socialize more often. Single payer costs too much and will produce more irresponsible people. Obama knows that and I am proud that I voted for a leader promoting more personal responsibility.
Actually, the irresponsible losers who can't pull themselves up on their own, like children and the elderly, are already covered by Medicaid and Medicare.
It's those dumb fucks working at Wal-mart for 39 and a half hours a week and those idiots who have insurance but decided to go ahead and develop a catastrophic illness and run out their quota of care that will be covered by single payer.
If EncinoM really cared for personal responsibility, he would be fighting for single payer healthcare instead of parroting Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz.
When Walmart can lobby for repealing the Estate Tax for well-to-dos such as Paris Hilton, they can sure as hell be lobbying for single payer. Walmart doesn't like to give benefits and yet for all their complaining about employees begging them, they sure don't want to be helpful to itself or its employees or they'd be protesting for single payer already.
encinom is just a health-insurance troll. He's just here to obfuscate.
Toss him in the same garbage dump with NebraskanNathan, rushlimbaughstaint, and the other mindless numbnuts.
q
You have no business preaching personal responsibility. Single payer doesn't cost much and can in fact cut down healthcare costs all the way. War spending and corporate bailouts are the biggest costs for government which will be passed on to the taxpayers in the form of tax increases and cuts to critical public services we paid our taxes for. You already admitted to working for the health insurance industry and yet even you should have learned your lessons and had a heart but I see you don't.
Sioux Rose
CARLA WATERS: Well-said. Thank you.
Yes well put, this person has shown very clearly where he stands on the issues, unfortunately he seems to have gleaned his information from watching television.
I get my news from CNBC, Fox News, New York Times, etc ... I'm just getting a few laughs reading this site, Huffpost, Alternet, Mother Jones, and Daily Kos.
No wonder your brain is in complete disrepair. Since you love to laugh at intelligent discussions here, there doesn't seem to be any reforming you.
"Believin all the lies that they're tellin' ya
Buyin all the products that they're sellin' ya
When Fox News says "Jump"! You say "how high?"
You're brain-dead, ya got propaganda in your head"
How naive of you to trust the corporate media. Talk about having a laugh
duderonimous, you need to do some more research into your figures. a couple of questions:
how much $$ do private insurers spend to *prevent* payment on claims? to weed out the undesirable?
how much $$ do drug co's spend on advertisement alone? how much on lobbying congress/FDA to keep patents which have expired?
if money is your primary consideration, then single-payer is by far more efficient and cost-effective.
christ, do some research. look at OECD figures for health care expenditures vs. health care outcomes. (and then: why is this shit never reported in the US? and then, etc., etc. why do you have to practically have a Phd in internetology to find out what the fuck is going on on this planet?)
US DEAD LAST. most money spent, least (or almost least) results-wise.
but yeah, those insurance people and medicine men drug doofuses (doofi?) got a make a livin'.....
"The insurance and drug industries have to make a living you know and when there are too many irresponsible losers who can't pull themselves up on their own and quit causing their own health care troubles, why should the government take my tax dollars and give it to them?"
Sixty percent of healthcare spending is paid by the government. In other words, the insurance and drug industries that need to "make a living" (or killing) are making that living not off the "free market" but off of government. This is also why they dedicate a small portion of those profits to get congress to write legislation for them that will expand their profits. And, Encino, I'll guess that you are young and fit. I hope you don't get hit by a bus or in any other way become dependent on the care and kindness of others.
Nope, I'm in my early 60s and doing great as a self-employed entrepreneur. Insurance companies get money from customers. Government may lend money to establish the company just like any company but like all other corporations, they don't depend on the government. Government can't keep its debts down so where are they going to get the money to fund their single payer for us? I'll stick to the insurance companies and personal responsibility.
Insurance companies get money from customers? Really? So you DON'T support Obama's plan to expand the subsidies to them by $600B, a down payment of over $1T to be spent to add the young and the poor to the insurance rolls. Nor would you want Obama to pay two-thirds of the COBRA payments for those unemployed who are losing employer paid insurance. You want insurance companies to get by without any subsidies or increased payment. That sounds like the free market, do nothing, "personal responsibility". Okay. We'll have single payer care in no time if we go that route. Obama just wants to do another bailout to keep business as usual. And insurance companies are no more independent of government bailouts than the banks.
Congrats, watch out for that bus.
Oh my........ok EncinoM, go here and take a gander...www.corporatewatch.org
"I'll stick to the insurance companies and personal responsibility"
So you prefer predatory capitalism over human solidarity. It's a compromise that we on the far left refuse.
In predatory capitalism we have to compromise integrity and solidarity. We're forced into dog-eat-dog relationships and fake veneers of well-being. Personal responsibility really means loyalty to a fascist establishment that oppresses us while dispensing material opiates.
In human solidarity we compromise the freedom to indulge in luxury/convenience at someone else's expense, and gain fulfillment practicing the golden rule. Personal responsibility is to serve our own better interests, which are universal.
We can each choose human solidarity over predatory capitalism by shifting our individual exchange/association away from the fascist establishment and toward our local communities, and everywhere solidarity lives, to help build the new society.
EncinoM--
You're such a strapping, independent fellow, a man of high principle. If you REALLY want to be true to your principles, though, you need to stop doing the following:
1. NEVER walk in a public sidewalk. Perhaps you can buy a jet-propulsion backpack so that you can fly over those commie, publicly funded sidewalks.
2. NEVER drive on a government funded road or highway. This might prove to be a problem if you don't own a large estate or farm, because it would pretty much confine you to driving only on your driveway. I hope it's a big driveway!
3. NEVER use the fire department. These government-funded commies are eating away at the fiber of our civilization. Look at all the sniveling weaklings out there--don't they know that a fire-extinguisher and a box of baking soda is all you need to fight a five-alarm fire?
4. NEVER call the police or dial 911 if you are facing a personal emergency. These government-funded police forces are just another encroachment of creeping communism. Just carry a gun and blow away anyone who looks at you the wrong way, just as a precaution. And if you end up in a car wreck an need an ambulance and help getting extricating yourself from a ton of mangled steel . . . TOUGH--be more careful next time, you pansy!
5. NEVER post on the Internet again. This is a technology that was developed at the government-funded Pentagon with public money. So every time you post here you are weakening your character and compromising your individual spirit.
If you religiously follow all the foregoing principles of rabid, tough-guy individualism, no one need ever hear from you again. Hey . . . that works out great for everyone!
Elite-sponsored individualism is not only incredibly dependent on the socialist infrastructure but highly dependent on the elite establishment to do most of the mental work and make most of the important decisions for the "individual". Elite-sponsored individualism really means individual freedom from social responsibility, and individual enslavement to the elite establishment.
Wowie encinom you're really the epitome of....of.....well, what can I say? Perfection without humility?!
Encinom is an admitted War criminal who will kill people in return for a paycheque. Do people really thing his perspective worth anything?
It like debating morality with a member of the Einsatzgruppen.
The inaccurately named US "Health Care Industry" will do anything and everything to prevent the words, single payer, from ever entering any serious conversation. They would even loath a mixed public / private system (such as in Switzerland & the Netherlands), as those methods deny them the potential gold mine that the current "proposal" (legal requirement that all purchase private insurance) beckons.
They do everything, they hire trolls to constantly visit and post negative comments against single payer articles such as this one. Just read through the comments here and look for the trolls sucking up to their pay master.
The Health Care Industry is a complete oxymoron. There is an industry, but it has nothing to do with caring or with health. They are in the business of profiting off of sickness and death, of exploiting human suffering. Other societies ban such barbarism. I'd like for us to at least accurately name it.
Thank you. I agree whole heartedly with this post. Healthcare is NOT, I REPEAT, N-O-T an INDUSTRY. Health care has to do with our physical and mental well-being. The word INDUSTY is (and has been) applied to nearly every area of our lives in the past few decades hasn't it? We don't even wince anymore when it is used to describe something as personal, and universal as health! I suppose we can thank the corporate beast for "helping us" understand who owns not only "healthcare" access, but the terminology that describes it.
Thank you for pointing out this insight.
This is what fascism looks like - if you don't like it, change it. But please quit harping about peripheral issues, such as 'healthcare' or 'poverty' or 'homelessness' or any of the other inevitable results of fascism.
If you don't mind, these issues are important and not peripheral. Fascism results when we ignore these issues. Healthcare, poverty, and homelessness are serious issues and if we are going to resolve these issues, we had better discuss and learn from one another. If you want to call that complaining, be my guest but knowledge is power. Even in democratic nations such as India, there is plenty of homelessness, poverty, and nowadays a growing healthcare crisis thanks to our bloody western influence corrupting that country. I do not support fascism in any manner whatsoever but the topic here to discuss is healthcare and as I told another, this issue cannot be taken lightly.