President Obama bet the farm on health care reform, then did nearly nothing to help its passage, and got what he deserved. Of course, we deserve better. We deserved a decent health care bill in the Senate that wasn’t held hostage by Senator Nelson. We deserved something that improved the circumstances of a good chunk of 45 million Americans, just as many are put at risk because of lack of health care, thanks to 10% unemployment. Here’s a little math: 10% of 320 million people that live in the U.S. = 32 million people right there.
Shame on Democrats for not getting a bill through. Great shame on them.
Now we have nothing. If the situation remains as is, if we get nothing by the election, then no party is going to touch this issue with a 10 foot pole for our lifetimes. How good that must be for insurance companies! If we get nothing, our elected officials deserve less. I say THROW THE BUMS OUT, ALL OF THEM, Republicans AND Democrats.
Including President Obama.
« President Obama … did nearly nothing »
You could just stop it there.
Sigh.
Indeed: why on EARTH are the Republicans, to a Senator, against ANY health-insurance reform? This makes no sense. They have put “taking down the President’s plan” above “the good of the American people” (and well above “doing their jobs”).
Indeed: why on EARTH are the Democrats so terrified of opposition, of “filibuster”, that they are unwilling to attempt ANYthing unless everyone’s thumping their chests and saying how much they like it?
They need to make a pretty good plan that 51 Senators will vote for, and then get that passed with a 51-to-49 vote. If there’s a filibuster, they need to dig in and wait it out. Or else, yes, they all need to go the eff home.
[And I say “pretty good” because to get something truly “good”, we’d absolutely need a whole new set of legislators, who know what “single payer” means.]
It’s a good thing that the secret 1000-page bill wasn’t rammed through Congress. Just like the PATRIOT Act, another 1000-page bill written in secret and rammed through before even the Congress could read it, it’s undoubtedly full of ill-considered provisions that will just make US healthcare worse.
The best thing we could do for health care is to get the government out of it. But every idiot is convinced that the government will subsidize HIS health care while sucking the required resources(money) out of a bunch of other people. Like the unconstitutional theory that we can tax the NON-purchase of health care, so that healthy people who don’t want or need health insurance payments will be forced to subsidize sick people they’ve never met.
I just helped two friends with grave diseases; one died last week of stage-4 metastatic melanoma, the other started dialysis which he’ll have to do for the rest of his life. In both cases it was very hard to figure out in advance, or while in the hospital, what ANY of it would cost.
The melanoma patient had run up a $126,000 bill (at $6000/day just for a bed and occasional visits by nurses) because the hospital had assumed as an uninsured guy with weird hair, he’d qualify for Medi-Cal (medicaid) and thus they could stick the state with the whole bill. When they found out he had assets, and would be paying it himself, the bill came down by 60% (an $80K discount). This reminded me strongly of the last time I shopped for auto body repairs. The shops would quote me an outrageously high price in the thousands. Then I’d say, “What? I would never pay that much!” They’d respond, “Oh, you are paying the bill, not an insurance company? We’ll do it for $600.” The providers try to cheat the middlemen, the middlemen try to cheat those paying the bill (the employer or the government)l, and the most important person — the patient — has little or no influence or control, and gets lost in the shell game. If instead the patient was paying for their health care they would have serious reasons to (1) ask what it costs *before* getting the care, (2) shop around for somebody who won’t gouge them, and (3) avoid buying medical care that is just not cost-effective.
But the libbbberals just don’t trust consumers to make their own choices, they especially don’t trust poor people to wisely spend their few dollars, nor do they trust the market to provide good choices to consumers. Thus the ever-spiraling upward cost of everything that’s paid for via our insane indirect payment system, and the ever-spiraling upward tide of rules and regulations that can never control what a market naturally controls — costs and prices.
PS: I have no insurance. I get a lot of health care. Uninsured people DO have health care. They just don’t have health insurance. Many of us are happier for it. We pay nothing when not ill. We choose our own doctors, our own treatments, our own medicines, and we don’t fill out paperwork or have anybody second-guessing us. But Obama wants to ban all that freedom and choice, and make us all beg a bureacracy for our health care.