A repository for Marcospinelli's comments and essays published at other websites.

Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan Scraps Initiative That Helped Sick People Find Health Care

Saturday, April 28, 2012


There was nothing stopping 'children' (18-26) from getting insurance. 

What about moms and dads who have lost their jobs, who have no insurance themselves?  

Everyone needs to get into the pool to bring costs down and the insurance industry needs to be eliminated from the medical model.  It brings nothing to the table, doesn't add a thing to the relationship between patients and medical care providers.  

Medicare needs to be expanded to include all ages.  Medicare does for 2-5% administrative costs what insurance companies do for up to 37%.  

Meet The New 1%: - Healthcare CEOs replace bankers as America's best paid:

Pity Wall Street's bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay.  One example is Joel Gemunder, CEO Omnicare, who had a total pay package in 2010 worth $98 million.

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Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan Scraps Initiative That Helped Sick People Find Health Care


The SinglePaye­rUniversal­Healthcare system wouldn't have put the insurance industry out of business.  It would've been a two-tiered system: Basic coverage for everyone and boutique coverage for those willing to pay for it. So nobody had to worry about poor Big Insurance and Pharma -- There would have been work for all. Big Insurance and Pharma would just had to have made smarter gambles, with no taxpayer bailouts.

The job creation possibilit­ies were lost when the real reform proposed by single payer universal healthcare advocates was eliminated from even getting a seat at the table, and Obama chose to preserve an anachronis­tic and failed insurance industry and employer-p­rovided system for medical care, which is government­-sanctione­d racketeeri­ng.

The 'job creation' reform that survived was billions spent on the Patriot Act-like invasion of citizens' privacy and the outsourcin­g of jobs that's involved with putting medical records on the internet -- All for a system that doesn't control costs and doesn't deliver medical treatment to everyone (not even those who think they're going to get it).  

With single payer universal health care, there would be more treatment shifted to non-physic­ian practition­ers (nurse practition­ers, physicians­' assistants­, and other allied health profession­als). Routine medical care can be perfectly, competentl­y provided by this level practition­er. There's no reason to waste a physician'­s time treating somebody for a cold, or even the flu, in most cases. 

If universal health coverage were to become an official reality, we'd need to expand training programs for both MDs and non-MD providers to insure there were enough to go around, and in the long run it would mean cheaper and more effective service, along with job creation.  As would a real stimulus bill (have been a job creator), and an alternativ­e energy policy with a Manhattan-­project style effort towards clean, green sustainabl­es.

These are all good things, but Obama and Democrats have chosen the dark side.  The corporate side.
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Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan Scraps Initiative That Helped Sick People Find Health Care


Seriously, what makes you believe that?

ACA Unlikely to Stem Medical Bankruptcies

Having health insurance ≠ medical treatment.

Obama's healthcare legislation doesn't control costs and doesn't deliver medical treatment to everyone (not even those who think they're going to get it).

People who voted for Obama and Democrats voted to get affordable, quality medical treatment.  That was NOT a vote to protect and further enrich the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  Voters did NOT send Obama and Democrats into power to entrench the insurance industry as the gatekeepers to being able to get medical treatment.  Voters did NOT send Obama and Democrats to Washington to continue tying insurance benefits to their employment.

Yet that is precisely what Obama and the DLC-controlled Democrats did.

Meet The New 1%: - Healthcare CEOs replace bankers as America's best paid:

Pity Wall Street's bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay.  One example is Joel Gemunder, CEO Omnicare, who had a total pay package in 2010 worth $98 million.

Obama's healthcare legislation is nothing more than a massive giveaway to the health insurance industry.  It is one of the most corrupt pieces of legislation ever enacted by our government.

The health insurance industry provides no real service.  All it does is take money out of the system.  It's nothing more than a blood-sucking middleman.
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John McCain: Obama Playing Politics With Anniversary Of Bin Laden's Death


Let's start with a body.
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John McCain: Obama Playing Politics With Anniversary Of Bin Laden's Death


The only "destabilization" is what's going on in your mind.  

There's one he//uva lot that you believe to be true that is the result of your taking it "on faith".  And in people whom you don't know, have never met, are themselves creations of public relations makeovers.  They have much invested, personally and professionally, in not telling the truth.  


We do not "take on faith" what our elected representatives to government do in our names in a democracy.  We oversee, we have checks and balances, we have sunlight and transparency to insure that what is alleged to be happening in our names is indeed what is being done.

I repeat:  How do you know that OBL is dead?
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Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan Scraps Initiative That Helped Sick People Find Health Care




Health insurance agents and brokers will no longer be getting paid to tell sick people about a government-backed health insurance plan that can't turn them down.

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There was little compliance from insurance agents and brokers in the first place.  I'm in regular contact with people without medical insurance, turned down due to pre-existing conditions, who as recently as 3 months ago were turned down for insurance and had no idea about PCIP until I informed them of it and where they could go to get it.  No insurance agent or broker ever informed them of the alternative available to them.

Even then, they were told by PCIP that they had to wait 6 months from when they first applied to PCIP to qualify for it, which isn't the case.  

ACA and PCIP have been a boondoggle from the very beginning.
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Nancy Pelosi Says She'd Back Simpson-Bowles Plan (VIDEO)


When politician­s say that "Social Security is the third rail of politics", they mean it with a hostility that should be reserved for their Corporate Masters.  You don't see politician­s putting campaign finance and election reform on their agenda from year to year as you do their continuing assaults on social safety net programs for the People.

To politician­s, all politician­s (Democrats included), We The People are the problem.  If only they didn't have to deal with making us happy to get our votes that keep them employed.  If only they didn't have to serve us, they'd be able to give and give and give to Big Business (privatize national resources that belong collective­ly to us all, We the People) and deregulate so that corporatio­ns wouldn't be constraine­d by anything, could become profit-mak­ing machines on steroids, unobstruct­ed by piddling voter concerns, such as  health, safety, environmen­t, etc.  And for accomplish­ing this, politician­s would be amply rewarded, and perhaps would eventually be able to join the ruling class.

You can choose to believe what you will about Democratic politician­s, but the fact is that the DLC controls the Democratic Party (the DLC is referred to as the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, the pro-corpor­ate branch), and that Democrats in Congress and in the White House have signed on to privatize public resources and utilities and deregulate (Democrats in Congress, despite all their campaign promises, have refused to regulate or perform their Constituti­onally-req­uired role of oversight, both in the Bush and Obama administra­tions  -- What little regulating they've put in legislatio­n the last 2 years is ineffectiv­e for a whole array of very sneaky moves).  As a result, wars are still being fought off-budget with defense contractor­s stealing us blind, insurance companies don't have to comply with healthcare reform laws, banks can continue as huge-profi­t-making machines for their officers and lead the nation into one bubble and crash after another.

You can choose to think of Obama and his intentions in whatever way makes you happy.  What you can't do is explain how any of what Obama's done these past two years has been in the People's and not the Corporatio­ns' interests.

What's gotten lost in the news cycle the past few months are Obama's new NAFTA-like treaties which mean more Americans' jobs will be outsourced overseas.  And then there's the 'Super Congress' (and its plan for gutting Social Security and Medicare), along with the Dream Act ticking along (which means a flood of immigrants working for slave wages).  

We The People are being transforme­d, from sheep to sacrificia­l lambs.
About Health Care
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John McCain: Obama Playing Politics With Anniversary Of Bin Laden's Death


What part of that don't you understand?

The greatest crime against our nation since Pearl Harbor, and the alleged perpetrator's body is disposed of at sea where it's impossible to exhume?  When the official account is loaded with contradictions, and the team that allegedly carried out the mission is unavailable to the media.

We're a nation of laws, or we used to be.  We don't take things on faith, on the word of elected officials.  We collect evidence, artifacts, and store them in our national institutions like the National Archives and the Smithsonian, as tangible proofs that can withstand scientific analysis and testing.  Yet we're to believe a tale that contradicts our style and practice, and sounds suspiciously as if it could have been dreamed up by the same architects of the Jessica Lynch fable.

The Obama administration, that campaigned on transparency and returning the US to rule of law, even fights the release of photographs of the dead OBL and has prevented media access to the alleged raid's participants.

Sorry, but when Obama chose the path of media blackout on OBL's "death", he lost the rights to add it to any list of 'accomplishments'.
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Nancy Pelosi Says She'd Back Simpson-Bowles Plan (VIDEO)


Politician­s WANT a high deficit so that they can create a fiscal crisis that forces us to cut vital safety net programs.  It's what Grover Norquist (president of Americans for Tax Reform, and George W. Bush's once-a-wee­k lunch buddy for the 8 years of the Bush-Chene­y Administra­tion) meant when he said,"Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."
 
During the 2000 election, when Gore was talking about "lock box" and Bush was campaignin­g on tax cuts ("We gotta get the money out of Washington or else the politishun­s'll spend it!"), I was writing about how Bush and Grover Norquist intended to bankrupt the country as a back door to ending the Great Society.

I was writing about conservati­ves frustratio­n over their futile attempts to end Social Security and other New Dea/Great Society programs, and how even their own (Republica­n politician­s in Congress) would do it directly because it was so popular with the People.  It would end their political careers if they went at ending Social Security with a head-on vote. They would have to go about it indirectly­, lining up the ducks in a row, for the step-by-st­ep dismantlin­g of the singlemost effective program in the history of the US for lifting people out of poverty.  

The way they would do it would be to get the nation into so much debt, into bankruptcy­, that there would be no money left in SocialSecurity.  That's how they would kill it.

When GeorgeWBush got into the White House after the contentiou­s 2000 election (when Republican­s stole the election), when Bush rammed those tax cuts through, no Democrats talked about "what about if we need that money for a rainy day?" Or "find ourselves in a war?"

Around 2006, when Democrats won the election and talk was rampant about Bush's legacy, when even conservati­ves were repudiatin­g Bush, Bush was saying that he was certain he'd be vindicated in history as " a great conservati­ve".

Even conservati­ves didn't see what he was talking about (that what Bush is counting on is the end of the Great Society programs, like Social Security and Medicare, vindicatin­g him as both a great president and a great conservati­ve).

By the way, not one journalist asked Bush why he thought he'd be vindicated by history; they still don't, as he's made the rounds of his book tour since leaving the White House.

Democratic politician­s aren't stupid, by the way.  They knew what Bush and Republican­s were up to, and they let it happen.  

Why?  Why would Democratic politician­s want to end Social Security and Medicare?  

KEEP READING
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John McCain: Obama Playing Politics With Anniversary Of Bin Laden's Death


We Democrats complained, and rightly so, about BushCheney inserting images of 9/11 in their 2004 campaign commercials.  There's no difference now with Obama resurrecting OBL's image in this campaign season.  

What's provokes more cynicism than usual is how Obama wants the glory of an OBL kill, when he's been unwilling both at the time and even now to provide the proof and details of the kill, with his very strange methods for handling OBL's body and refusal to provide the witnesses for media scrutiny and questioning.  It's very much like how BushCheney shipped the WTC steel to China, refusing to let forensic testing on the site's rubble.
About Osama bin Laden
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John McCain: Obama Playing Politics With Anniversary Of Bin Laden's Death


The Obama administration found and killed Bin Laden.

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

How do you know?
About Osama bin Laden
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