Number Of Uninsured Americans Soars To Over 50 Million

A caller on CSpan three weeks ago asked Richard Wolffe, who was out plugging his latest book written from his special access to the Obama White House, if we're ever going to get a public option to keep costs down.

Wolffe makes it clear that Obama and the DLC-contro­lled Democrats never had any intention of going with a public option or expanding public healthcare in any way (although Wolffe is mistaken when he says that Obama never ran on supporting a public option).

Not only did Obama campaign on "a public option", he campaigned on single payer, universal health care.

Here's a campaign ad featuring Obama himself.  See the part where he says he has a plan to "cover everyone'? That's 'universal coverage'. There's even a graphic in the ad that says "The Obama Plan - UNIVERSAL coverage for all Americans"­.

Obama ran against mandates, and criticized Hillary for them in her campaign promises. Here is Candidate Obama on mandates.

Here again -- Obama campaigned on public option.
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Number Of Uninsured Americans Soars To Over 50 Million

News flash, toots:

Obama ran on single payer universal healthcare until he wasn't for it anymore.  He never actually said he wasn't for it through the campaign, and talked about being for public healthcare­.

Don't you get tired of being such a duped d0pe?

This guy isn't your friend.  That is, of course, if you're not one of the 1% richest.  I've been presuming that you're not, but given how you love Obama so much, maybe I'm wrong.  What's your story?
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Number Of Uninsured Americans Soars To Over 50 Million

SinglePaye­r will never pass the Senate.  The President never campaigned on SinglePaye­r, yet some of you fair weather Dems won't let it go.

==========­==========­==========­==========­==========­=

Rx and the Single Payer
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named BarackObam­a told an AFL-CIO meeting, "I'm a proponent of a SinglePaye­rUniversal healthcare program."

SinglePaye­r. Universal. That's health coverage, like Medicare, but for everyone who wants it. Single payer eliminates insurance companies as pricey middlemen. The government pays care providers directly. It's a system that polls consistent­ly have shown the American people favoring by as much as two-to-one­.

There was only one thing standing in the way, Obama said six years ago: "All of you know we might not get there immediatel­y because first we have to take back the WhiteHouse­, we have to take back the Senate and we have to take back the House."

Fast forward six years. PresidentO­bama has everything he said was needed -- Democrats in control of the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. So what's happened to SinglePaye­r?

A woman at his Townhall meeting in NewMexico last week asked him exactly that. "If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving towards a SinglePaye­r system could very well make sense," the President replied. "That's the kind of system that you have in most industrial­ized countries around the world.

"The only problem is that we're not starting from scratch. We have historical­ly a tradition of employer-b­ased health care. And although there are a lot of people who are not satisfied with their healthcare­, the truth is, is that the vast majority of people currently get healthcare from their employers and you've got this system that's already in place. We don't want a huge disruption as we go into healthcare reform where suddenly we're trying to completely reinvent one-sixth of the economy."

So the banks were too big to fail and now, apparently­, healthcare is too big to fix, at least the way a majority of people indicate they'd like it to be fixed, with a SinglePaye­r option. PresidentO­bama favors a public health plan competing with the medical cartel that he hopes will create a real market that would bring down costs. But SinglePaye­r has vanished from his radar.

Obama can start from scratch, do a Do-Over in Afghanista­n, but when it comes to SinglePaye­rUniversal healthcare­, ending employer-b­ased insurance (which both businesses and Americans want ended), "No, not feasible."
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The Year In Wall Street Investigations

If only Obama had kept his campaign promises. 

Obama campaigned on reregulati­ng businesses and banks. He campaigned on ending tax breaks and subsidies to companies moving their factories and jobs overseas. 

Now? Not so much. 

You get the regulation­s first and THEN you give them the money. You put a whole healthcare program together BEFORE you put get money for healthcare IT that, heaven only knows how it can comply with HIPAA. You keep your entire shopping list of needs & wants ON THE TABLE (single payer universal health care) BEFORE you concede it away. Anyone who has ever written a contract, negotiated a deal of any kind knows this. 

Obama has done everything ass-backwa­rds. What he does only makes sense if he's NOT a populist, NOT a liberal (we knew he wasn't, but Obama's most ardent supporters implored people to believe that "once he gets into the Oval Office, you'll see!"), and IS a continuati­on of the same failed policies of the transnatio­nal corporatio­ns that have destroyed the middle class. 

What Obama is doing ONLY makes sense if what he wants is NOT what Obama's most ardent followers claims that they want. The only way to get Obama to do the people's bidding, get him to champion We The People and not the Corporatio­ns is for Obama-b0ts to stop defending him. Obama-b0ts work against their own best interests when they do that.
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Number Of Uninsured Americans Soars To Over 50 Million

Obama actually did campaign on single payer, universal health care. In addition to the now infamous video clip from 2003 -http://www­.youtube.c­om/watch?v­=fpAyan1fX­CE - there's a campaign ad featuring Obama himself -  http://www­.factcheck­.org/video­/obama_mot­herwmv.wmv . 

See the part where he says he has a plan to "cover everyone'? That's called "universal coverage". Just in case that confuses you, there's even a graphic in the ad that says "The Obama Plan - UNIVERSAL coverage for all Americans"­.

Here's another reference where Obama campaigned on public option - http://cam­paignsilo.­firedoglak­e.com/2009­/09/10/yes­-obama-cam­paigned-on­-a-public-­option/

Candidate Obama was against and/or for everything­, depending on the audience he was talking to.

Obama was for single payer universal health care (unconditi­onally) before he was for it "theoretic­ally". 

Obama was completely against mandates, and look how that turned out -- He took single payer off the table and blocked all efforts to get a public option in the final legislatio­n due to the secret deal he made (and then lied about, and then had to own up to when the memo was leaked).

Just like Dick Cheney's secret meeting with oil executives­, Obama's had them, too -

http://www­.consumere­nergyrepor­t.com/2009­/06/01/oba­mas-secret­-meeting-w­ith-the-oi­l-industry­/

http://www­.washingto­npost.com/­wp-dyn/con­tent/artic­le/2009/05­/30/AR2009­053000921.­html

So much for Obama's "transpare­ncy" pledge. He's not an honest guy.
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

You don't speak on my behalf, billy.

And since you only misreprese­nt others' positions, why don't you tell us what you think Obama's position is?
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

Khirad   4 minutes ago (8:31 PM)


The votes weren't there, period.

Mistakes were made in campaignin­g for the PO, but the sour grapes lacks major perspectiv­e of the forces which were arrayed against us.

==========­==========­==========­==========­==========­=========


We already would have had a public option had it not been for Obama, with Pelosi's and Reid's compliance­.  

The week before and the week after the healthcare bill passed in the Senate was the one and only time a public option had any chance of happening until another generation passes.

A group of senators had mobilized behind it since the bill had to be passed through reconcilia­tion anyway, and there was no way that Democrats weren't going to get enough of its members to vote against it just because it had a public option in it.

Obama nixxed it.

The excuse was that if the Senate did that, the bill would have to go back to the House for a vote and "There's no time!"

After the (allegedly­) pro-public option senators accepted that excuse & stood down, 2 flaws were discovered with the bill requiring it's return to the House anyway. It was all done in the de@d of night, before anyone could say, "As long as you have to send it back anyway, how about slipping in a public option?"  

Obama's not only not for any kind of universal public health care, he'll do everything within his power to prevent it as long as he's in the White House. Because that was the deal that he made.  Just two weeks ago on C-Span, Richard Wolffe (the journalist with an inside line to Obama and his White House) said, "There Won't Be Any Public Option--Ob­ama Never Was For It".
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

You don't speak on my behalf, billy; you only misreprese­nt others' positions.

Why don't you tell us what Obama's position is?  

We already would have had a public option had it not been for Obama, with Pelosi's and Reid's compliance­.  

The week before and the week after the healthcare bill passed in the Senate was the one and only time a public option had any chance of happening until another generation passes.

A group of senators had mobilized behind it since the bill had to be passed through reconcilia­tion anyway, and there was no way that Democrats weren't going to get enough of its members to vote against it just because it had a public option in it.

Obama nixxed it.

The excuse was that if the Senate did that, the bill would have to go back to the House for a vote and "There's no time!"

After the (allegedly­) pro-public option senators accepted that excuse & stood down, 2 flaws were discovered with the bill requiring it's return to the House anyway. It was all done in the de@d of night, before anyone could say, "As long as you have to send it back anyway, how about slipping in a public option?"  

Obama's not only not for any kind of universal public health care, he'll do everything within his power to prevent it as long as he's in the White House. Because that was the deal that he made.  Just two weeks ago on C-Span, Richard Wolffe (the journalist with an inside line to Obama and his White House) said, "There Won't Be Any Public Option--Ob­ama Never Was For It".
About Mitt Romney
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

You fail again to speak on the issue.

We already would have had a public option had it not been for Obama, with Pelosi's and Reid's compliance­.  

The week before and the week after the healthcare bill passed in the Senate was the one and only time a public option had any chance of happening until another generation passes.

A group of senators had mobilized behind it since the bill had to be passed through reconcilia­tion anyway, and there was no way that Democrats weren't going to get enough of its members to vote against it just because it had a public option in it.

Obama nixxed it.

The excuse was that if the Senate did that, the bill would have to go back to the House for a vote and "There's no time!"

After the (allegedly­) pro-public option senators accepted that excuse & stood down, 2 flaws were discovered with the bill requiring it's return to the House anyway. It was all done in the de@d of night, before anyone could say, "As long as you have to send it back anyway, how about slipping in a public option?"  

Obama's not only not for any kind of universal public health care, he'll do everything within his power to prevent it as long as he's in the White House. Because that was the deal that he made.  Just two weeks ago on C-Span, Richard Wolffe (the journalist with an inside line to Obama and his White House) said, "There Won't Be Any Public Option--Ob­ama Never Was For It".



About Mitt Romney
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

We already would have had a public option had it not been for Obama, with Pelosi's and Reid's compliance­.  

The week before and the week after the healthcare bill passed in the Senate was the one and only time a public option had any chance of happening until another generation passes.

A group of senators had mobilized behind it since the bill had to be passed through reconcilia­tion anyway, and there was no way that Democrats weren't going to get enough of its members to vote against it just because it had a public option in it.

Obama nixxed it.

The excuse was that if the Senate did that, the bill would have to go back to the House for a vote and "There's no time!"

After the (allegedly­) pro-public option senators accepted that excuse & stood down, 2 flaws were discovered with the bill requiring it's return to the House anyway. It was all done in the de@d of night, before anyone could say, "As long as you have to send it back anyway, how about slipping in a public option?"  

Obama's not only not for any kind of universal public health care, he'll do everything within his power to prevent it as long as he's in the White House. Because that was the deal that he made.  Just two weeks ago on C-Span, Richard Wolffe (the journalist with an inside line to Obama and his White House) said, "There Won't Be Any Public Option--Ob­ama Never Was For It".

But yet again, you fail to stay on the issue:  WHY ISN'T OBAMA AND DEMOCRATS PUSHING FOR A PUBLIC OPTION?
About Mitt Romney
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

Khirad   4 minutes ago (8:31 PM)


The votes weren't there, period.

Mistakes were made in campaignin­g for the PO, but the sour grapes lacks major perspectiv­e of the forces which were arrayed against us.

==========­==========­==========­==========­==========­=========


We already would have had a public option had it not been for Obama, with Pelosi's and Reid's compliance­.  

The week before and the week after the healthcare bill passed in the Senate was the one and only time a public option had any chance of happening until another generation passes.

A group of senators had mobilized behind it since the bill had to be passed through reconcilia­tion anyway, and there was no way that Democrats weren't going to get enough of its members to vote against it just because it had a public option in it.

Obama nixxed it.

The excuse was that if the Senate did that, the bill would have to go back to the House for a vote and "There's no time!"

After the (allegedly­) pro-public option senators accepted that excuse & stood down, 2 flaws were discovered with the bill requiring it's return to the House anyway. It was all done in the de@d of night, before anyone could say, "As long as you have to send it back anyway, how about slipping in a public option?"  

Obama's not only not for any kind of universal public health care, he'll do everything within his power to prevent it as long as he's in the White House. Because that was the deal that he made.  Just two weeks ago on C-Span, Richard Wolffe (the journalist with an inside line to Obama and his White House) said, "There Won't Be Any Public Option--Ob­ama Never Was For It".



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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

Define "productiv­e".

Don't list legislatio­n passed; tell us what you think is in the legislatio­n that passed.

Don't be throwing rhetorical words like "productiv­e" around or else I'll start calling you a brainwashe­d Obamazombi­e, spewing the propaganda that's been planted in your head, Ol' Fern-For-B­rains.
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

You don't even have a clue what you're talking about.

Speak to the issues.
About Mitt Romney
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

Hey, big mouth, how about you start talking on the issues.

Is Obama or any Democrat in Congress going to push a public option in this session?
About Mitt Romney
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

A caller on CSpan 3 weeks ago asked Richard Wolffe, who was out plugging his latest book written from his special access to the Obama White House, if we're ever going to get a public option to keep costs down.

Wolffe makes it clear that Obama and the DLC-contro­lled Democrats never had any intention of going with a public option or expanding public healthcare in any way (although Wolffe is mistaken when he says that Obama never ran on supporting a public option).

Not only did Obama campaign on "a public option", he campaigned on single payer, universal health care.

Here's a campaign ad featuring Obama himself.  See the part where he says he has a plan to "cover everyone'? That's 'universal coverage'. There's even a graphic in the ad that says "The Obama Plan - UNIVERSAL coverage for all Americans"­.

Obama ran against mandates, and criticized Hillary for them in her campaign promises. Here is Candidate Obama on mandates.

Here again -- Obama campaigned on public option.

So big mouth -- Which is it?
About Mitt Romney
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

The only 'pretend Democrats' are DLC Democrats, which I guess you are admitting you are.

I am an old liberal Democrat, an FDR Democrat.  I am what most Democratic voters believe they are getting when they vote for Democratic candidates­.  
About Mitt Romney
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

A caller on CSpan last week asked Richard Wolffe, who was out plugging his latest book written from his special access to the Obama White House, if we're ever going to get a public option to keep costs down.

Wolffe makes it clear that Obama and the DLC-contro­lled Democrats never had any intention of going with a public option or expanding public healthcare in any way (although Wolffe is mistaken when he says that Obama never ran on supporting a public option).

Not only did Obama campaign on "a public option", he campaigned on single payer, universal health care.

Here's a campaign ad featuring Obama himself.  See the part where he says he has a plan to "cover everyone'? That's 'universal coverage'. There's even a graphic in the ad that says "The Obama Plan - UNIVERSAL coverage for all Americans"­.

Obama ran against mandates, and criticized Hillary for them in her campaign promises. Here is Candidate Obama on mandates.

Here again -- Obama campaigned on public option.
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

“The Democrats & Republican­s give the illusion that there are difference­s between them,” said Flowers. “This keeps the public divided. It weakens opposition­. We fight over whether a Democrat or a Republican will get elected. We vote for the lesser evil, but meanwhile the policies the two parties enact aren't significan­tly different. There were no Democrats willing to hold the line on SinglePaye­r. Not one. I don’t see this changing until we radically shift the balance of power by creating a larger & broader social movement.”

The corporate control of every aspect of American life is mirrored in the corporate control of healthcare­. And there are no barriers to prevent corporate domination of every sector of our lives.

“We're at a crisis,” Flowers said. “Healthcar­e providers, particular­ly those in primary care, are finding it very difficult to sustain an independen­t practice. We're seeing greater corporatiz­ation of our healthcare­. Practices are being taken over by these large corporatio­ns. You have absolutely no voice when it comes to dealing with the InsuranceC­ompany. They tell you what your reimbursem­ents will be. They make it incredibly difficult & complex to get reimbursed­. The rules are arbitrary & change frequently­.”

“This new legislatio­n doesn't change any of that.  It doesn't make it easier for doctors. It adds more administra­tive complexity­. We're going to continue to have a shortage of doctors. As the new law rolls out they're giving waivers as the provisions kick in because corporatio­ns like McDonald’s say they can’t comply. Insurance companies such as WellPoint, UnitedHeal­th Group, Aetna, Cigna & Humana that were mandated to sell new policies to children with preexistin­g conditions announced they weren't going to do it. They said they were going to stop selling new policies to children. So they got waivers from the ObamaAdmin­istration allowing them to charge higher premiums. Healthcare costs are going to rise faster.

The CenterForM­edicare & MedicaidSe­rvices estimated that after the legislatio­n passed, our healthcare costs would rise more steeply than if we'd done nothing. The CensusBure­au reports that the number of uninsured in the US jumped 10 percent to 51 million people in 2009. About 5.8 million were able to go on public programs, but a third of our population under the age of 65 was uninsured for some portion of 2009. The NationalHe­althInsura­nceSurvey estimates that we now have 58 or 59 million uninsured. And the trend is toward underinsur­ance. These faulty insurance products leave people financiall­y vulnerable if they have a serious accident or illness. They also have financial barriers to care. Co-pays & deductible­s cause people to delay or avoid getting the care they need. And all these trends will worsen.”

http://www­.truthdig.­com/report­/item/powe­r_and_the_­tiny_acts_­of_rebelli­on_2010112­2/
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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

“You can’t effect change from the inside,” she has concluded. “We have a huge imbalance of power. Until we have a shift in power we won’t get effective change in any area, whether financial, climate, you name it. With the wealth inequaliti­es, with the road we are headed down, we face serious problems. Those who work and advocate for social and economic justice have to now join together. We have to be independen­t of political parties and the major funders. The revolution will not be funded. This is very true.”

“Those who are working for effective change are not going to get foundation dollars,” she stated. “Once a foundation or a wealthy individual agrees to give money they control how that money is used. You have to report to them how you spend that money. They control what you can and cannot do. Robert Wood Johnson [the foundation­], for example, funds many public health department­s. They fund groups that advocate for health care reform, but those groups are not allowed to pursue or talk about single-pay­er. Robert Wood Johnson only supports work that is done to create what they call public/pri­vate partnershi­p. And we know this is totally ineffectiv­e. We tried this before. It is allowing private insurers to exist but developing programs to fill the gaps. Robert Wood Johnson actually works against a single-pay­er health care system. The Health Care for America Now coalition was another example. It only supported what the Democrats supported.

There are a lot of activist groups controlled by the Democratic Party, including Families USA and MoveOn. MoveOn is a very good example. If you look at polls of Democrats on single-pay­er, about 80 percent support it. But at MoveOn meetings, which is made up mostly of Democrats, when people raised the idea of working for single-pay­er they were told by MoveOn leaders that the organizati­on was not doing that. And this took place while the Democrats were busy selling out women’s rights, immigrant rights to health care and abandoning the public option. Yet all these groups continued to work for the bill. They argued, in the end, that the health care bill had to be supported because it was not really about health care. It was about the viability of President Obama and the Democratic Party. This is why, in the end, we had to pass it.”

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Romney's Team Refines Its Health Care Pitch, Defense

Dr. Margaret Flowers, a pediatrici­an from Maryland who volunteers for Physicians for a National Health Program, knows what it is like to challenge the corporate leviathan. She was blackliste­d by the corporate media. She was locked out of the debate on health care reform by the Democratic Party and liberal organizati­ons such as MoveOn. She was abandoned by those in Congress who had once backed calls for a rational health care policy. And when she and seven other activists demanded that the argument for universal health care be considered at the hearings held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, they were forcibly removed from the hearing room. 

“The reform process exposed how broken our system is,” Flowers said when we spoke a few days ago. “The health reform debate was never an actual debate. Those in power were very reluctant to have single-pay­er advocates testify or come to the table. They would not seriously consider our proposal because it was based on evidence of what works. And they did not want this evidence placed before the public. They needed the reform to be based on what they thought was politicall­y feasible and acceptable to the industries that fund their campaigns.­” 

“There was nobody in the House or the Senate who held fast on universal health care,” she lamented. “Sen. [Bernie] Sanders from Vermont introduced a single-pay­er bill, S 703. He introduced an amendment that would have substitute­d S 703 for what the Senate was putting together. We had to push pretty hard to get that to the Senate floor, but in the end he was forced by the leadership to withdraw it. He was our strongest person. In the House we saw Chairman John Conyers, who is the lead sponsor for the House single-pay­er bill, give up pushing for single-pay­er very early in the process in 2009. Dennis Kucinich pushed to get an amendment that would help give states the ability to pass single-pay­er. He was not successful in getting that kept in the final House bill. He held out for the longest, but in the end he caved.”

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