Know Your Obama Outsourcing Claims:
It's the free trade treaties (with Colombia, Panama and S. Korea, in addition to the new and super-secretive Trans-Pacific treaty on the horizon) we're talking about - http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3907:new-free-trade-agreements-threaten-to-kill-jobs-and-labor-rights
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
And when Obama does want Blue Dogs' votes, he buys them. When Obama needed Nelson re: Stupak Amendment, he 'bought' his support.
Obama could've done that for Nelson's or Lincoln's or Lieberman's vote at any time. But he didn't because he didn't want it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
“Leiberman can totally be trusted. He's proven it.”
I think Obama's "led" brilliantly; just not on the people's behalf. He's managed to deliver to his Corporate Masters while convincing his 'most ardent supporters' that he's either too nice, inept, or that his failures are because of Republicans, [pick your excuse].
Talk of Democratic politicians having no spines are greatly exaggerated, just like Obama's timidity is myth: He's plenty tough when it comes to standing up to the Democratic base.
Democratic voters have mistakenly believed that Obama and Democrats want what they want. The DLC-controlled DemocraticParty gives lip service to all populist issues (like jobs, civil rights protections, restoring habeas corpus, ending the wars, public healthcare, WallStreet reform, environmental and energy issues, etc.).
If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your sales pitch and tactics. It's not that Bush and Rove were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush and Rove were just more ruthless in doing what politicians and the parties had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans -- If you keep at it, escalate your attacks, don't take 'no' for an answer, never back away, you'll wear the opposition down.
Obama didn't get to be the first black president, vanquish Clinton's machine (to get the nomination) and the oldest, most experienced politicians in US history (including the RoveMachine) by not having mastered these skills. Nor do Democratic politicians (more incumbents than ever, in office longer) not know how to do it. How do you think Democrats managed to keep impeaching BushCheney off the table, have us still reelecting them, not marching on Washington with torches and pitchforks?
Obama and Democrats know how to do it -- They don't want to do it.
The trick for them has been to keep the many different populist groups believing that they really do support our issues, but they're merely inept. And to get us to keep voting for them despite their failure to achieve our alleged shared objectives.
Getting Democratic voters (and Obama's 'most ardent supporters') to understand that Democratic politicians have been taking us all for suckers and patsies is the most immediate problem and the challenge.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Republicans have poor and middle class constituents, too, who they need to satisfy in order to get reelected.
Republicans cave when Democrats hold their feet to the fire. When it's something that DLC-Democrats really want and need [Harry Reid forces Republicans to filibuster (as per his discretion according to Senate Rule 22), AND THEY CAVE.]
What John Boehner said not long ago:
'U.S. House Republican Leader John Boehner said he would vote for middle-class tax cuts sought by the Democratic Obama administration even if it means eliminating reductions for wealthier Americans'.
How serious do you think that was?
Do the math. Olympia Snowe would not 60 make. That was kabuki theater, and not even good theater.
Everything about Obama and the DLC-controlled Democrats is kabuki theater, aimed at those constituents most desperate for real Democratic political champions. The desperate, with the most to lose, are the most trusting -- They believe because they think they have to, because they feel they have no where else to turn.
They don't realize that they hold all the cards, all the power (their votes), and if and when they do realize their power, they will be a force to reckon with. But not by giving it away to Obama and these current Democrats. Not for nothing.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
The American taxpayer has been subsidizing pharmaceutical companies for decades with the promise that the R&D we were paying for would result in lower prices and breakthrough cures. Instead, we've been stuck with higher prices (twice as much as other industrialized countries) while the pharmaceutical companies try to snag new markets overseas with what were to be our discounts.
Not only did Obama break his campaign pledge (of the government, PhRma biggest customer, negotiating for lower priced drugs, and reimporting pharmaceuticals), he gave PhRma a huge gift. The deal that Obama made with PhRma wasn't for PhRma to go up against Big Insurance; it was for PhRma to help sell a plan that makes more profits for Big Insurance.
PhRma paid chump change ($80 billion over 10 years, plus $150 million for ads to support a plan that had NO public option) so that they could keep massive profits and k!II public healthcare. Obama (who had dropped the public option and the universal requirement) let the pharmaceutical industry continue to make obscene profits, and gave the insurance industry a clear field and new customers, all paid for with taxpayers' money.
Oh, and by the way, $80 billion over 10 years is less than 1% of the profits PhRma makes a year.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
ACA, an invention of the Heritage Foundation, is Part 2 of Bush's Medicare Reform Act of 2003.
If Republicans succeed in repealing it, the reason is so that they can reintroduce it with a few minor changes to throw off the dumber of their constituents and collect their share of booty from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
If you don't want to believe that the parties work in tandem, build upon each other's 'successes' (on behalf of corporations), just look at Bush's 2003MedicareReformAct and RomneyCare, both of which mirror ACA, and keep the problem in place (insurance companies as the gatekeepers to Americans getting medical treatment and employment-provided insurance, both of which EVERYBODY wanted ended, skyrocketing costs of medical care, no cost controls and not universal)?
Fercrissakes, look at the donut hole!
The 'donut-hole' that never should have existed in the first place, and that the DLC-controlled Democrats created as a "compromise" for Bush's Medicare Reform Act of 2003 (another massive corporate giveaway package).
The whole of Medicare Part D was a scam and a scheme by both pro-corporate parties, a "first step" (as Obama's 'most ardent supporters' like to say) towards privatizing public healthcare.
In 2003, PhRMA lobbied hard and got Congress to insert language into the bill that created a Medicare drug benefit that prohibits Medicare from using its market clout to negotiate with manufacturers for lower drug prices and making sure the drug benefit was only available through private insurance plans.
The result was that Medicare members can only get drug coverage by joining a private insurance plan. People who have both Medicare and Medicaid (dual-eligibles) were switched from Medicaid prescription drug coverage to a private Medicare drug plan. Prescription drugs for this population cost 30% more under the new private Medicare drug plans than they did under Medicaid, increasing pharmaceutical companies' profits by at least $3.7 billion dollars in just the first two years of the program. For example, Bristol Myers earned a windfall of almost $400 million, thanks to higher prices for the stroke medication Plavix.
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
For instance, the cheapest (and most commonly purchased) coverage available to a 56-year-old Bostonian through the state’s health insurance exchange costs $5,616. Yet, if you’re sick the policy doesn’t start paying bills until you’ve paid a $2,000 deductible. And even after that you’re responsible for 20 percent of the next $15,000 in medical expenses.
Little wonder that many insured families hit by illness are pushed over the edge financially by the double whammy of lost income and medical bills; 89% of Massachusetts families who suffered medical bankruptcy had coverage.
The insurance required under the federal ACA's no better than Massachusetts’ barebones plans. And as employers emulate this inadequate coverage, the race to the bottom leaves an increasing number of Americans UNDER-insured. Public workers are just the latest group to see their coverage downsized. What used to be called “health insurance” is now labeled “Cadillac coverage” – and reserved for those who drive Mercedes.
Because the ACA left private insurers in charge, it can’t offer Americans real protection against financial disaster due to illness. Too much is squandered on insurers’ overhead and the bloated bureaucracy they impose on patients, doctors and hospitals. Hence, even if reform works as planned, millions of families will continue to purchase private insurance in good faith, only to discover, too late, that it’s a defective product – an umbrella that melts in a downpour.
And the administration's weakening the modest consumer protections the bill imposed on private plans. It’s waived the minimum coverage standards for 1,040 plans covering 2.6 million Americans, including thousands of McDonald’s workers whose insurance covers only $2,000 in medical expenses annually. (The worker pays a premium of $728 for this faux coverage.) Meanwhile, insurers in Maine have already been exempted from the ACA’s paltry requirement that they spend at least 80% of premiums on medical care, with eight more states in line for similar exemptions.
While the ACA can’t live up to its “affordable care” moniker, a single-payer reform could save $400 billion annually on administrative costs, enough to offer every American first-dollar, comprehensive coverage. While US insurers fight tooth and nail against the 20% limit on overhead, Canada’s single-payer program runs for 1%. (US Medicare’s overhead is 3%.) Bureaucratic savings are a key reason why Canada can cover everyone and provide care at least as good as that received by insured Americans, while spending half as much per capita as we do.
We’ve lectured at seminars attended by hundreds of US bankruptcy judges, where our medical bankruptcy findings are greeted by nods of recognition and an avalanche of heart-wrenching anecdotes confirming our statistical findings. The reaction was quite different at a bankruptcy seminar in Toronto early this year. Canadian judges couldn't recall a single case.
Obama Health Law Unlikely to Stem Medical Bankruptcies
When President Obama kicked off his health reform push, he highlighted our research finding that 2 million Americans suffer medical bankruptcy each year, promising to end this disgrace. Our latest figures warn that his reform won’t stanch the flow of medical debtors.KEEP READING
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed by Congress in March 2010 was modeled after Massachusetts’ 2006 health reform plan – a plan that’s now been up and running for more than three years. So Massachusetts offers a preview of what to expect when the ACA is fully implemented in 2014.
Unfortunately, medical bankruptcies haven’t dropped much – if at all – in Massachusetts. When we surveyed bankruptcy filers there in August 2009, 53 percent cited illness or medical bills as a cause of their bankruptcy, a percentage that’s statistically indistinguishable from the 59 percent figure we found in early 2007. Indeed, because the total number of bankruptcies soared in 2009, the actual number of medical bankruptcies increased from 7,504 in 2007 to 10,093 in 2009.
Why are so many people still suffering medical bankruptcies despite Massachusetts’ health reform? While only 4 percent of the state’s residents remain uninsured, much of the new coverage is so skimpy that serious illness leaves families with crushing medical bills.
Unaffordable co-pays and deductibles, death by a million cuts for insured Americans
Cancer's Growing Burden; The High Cost of Care, Even With Insurance:
Patti Tyree was afraid that cancer would steal her future. Instead, the cost of treating it has.
She had hoped to buy a small farm with money inherited from her mother. But copayments for just one $18,000 round of breast chemotherapy and one shot of a nearly $15,000 blood-boosting drug cost her $2,000.
Bills for other treatments are still coming, and almost half of her $25,000 inheritance is gone.
"I supposedly have pretty good insurance," said Tyree, 57, a recently retired federal worker who lives near Roanoke, Va. "How can anybody afford this?"
Forty years after the National Cancer Act launched the "war on cancer," the battle is not just finding cures and better treatments but also being able to afford them.
New drugs often cost $100,000 or more a year. Patients are being put on them sooner in the course of their illness and for a longer time — sometimes for the rest of their lives. The latest trend is to use these drugs in combination, guided by genetic tests that allow more personalized treatment but also add to its expense.
It's not just drugs: Radiation treatment is becoming more high-tech, and each leap in technology has brought a quantum leap in expense. Proton therapy is one example — it costs twice as much as conventional radiation and is attracting prostate cancer patients despite a lack of evidence that it is any better.
The financial strain is showing: Some programs that help people pay their bills have seen a rise in requests, and medical bills are a leading cause of bankruptcies.
"Patients have to pay more for their premiums, more for their copayments, more for their deductibles. It's become harder to afford what we have, and what we have is becoming not only more costly but also complex," said Dr. Michael Hassett, a cancer specialist and policy researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Sorry but private corporations have always been the gate keeper to medical treatment. Insurance companies have always had control over who was insured and what medical treatment the insured would receive. Now with the ACA they at least have regulation stipulating minimum standards.================================
Obama didn't court or pressure anybody. He didn't need to - He passed ACA through reconciliation. What he could have done was pressure Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu (he does buy them when he wants their votes badly enough), but Obama didn't do that for real healthcare reform legislation.
During the healthcare legislation debacle, Obama (and his 'most ardent admirers') excused his failure to lead the fight for single payer/public option with, "Writing the legislation is Congress's job -- I'm staying out of it".
We learned later that Obama had been undercutting the congressional committees working on the legislation by crafting secret deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries that Congress would be locked into.
Obama's job in this and all issues, any president's job, is to ratchet up support/opposition to pressure members of Congress into doing the president's bidding. It's to shape opinion in the public, intercede directly with the American people, to get them to bring pressure to bear on their elected representatives in Congress. What Obama did was disband the grassroots, had them stand down. Read Sam Graham-Felsen's oped in WaPo: Why is Obama leaving the grass roots on the sidelines?
Obama didn't use that power to achieve on behalf of them that brung 'im: The Democratic base.
If the objective is to get affordable, quality medical treatment for everyone, everything pales next to single payer. And Obama had to get that off the table, at the very beginning, to make sure that the next best method (a public option) wasn't going to be a "compromise" position.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
When tea-partiers yell, "Get government out of healthcare" and in the same breath, "Don't touch my Medicare!", then education is the solution.
There's rarely a majority in Congress to pass anything until a campaign's been mounted to sell it, but this wasn't a hard sell -- Americans, with few exceptions, love Medicare. Obama has a clear pattern of mounting campaigns to sell his Republican-like policies and legislation AFTER it's all a done deal, after he's worked in secret to undermine progressives in Congress, to ram his 'lousy for the people'-legislation through and into law. It's what he did in the healthcare legislation, in extending Bush's tax cuts, in burying the CIA's criminal torture, the Great Bank Heist, and so much more -- Look at what he did last week on the DREAM Act, no longer implementing deportation of undocumented aliens.
Ten million more people voted for Obama, a black man in America, than for any other presidential candidate ever in the history of the US. They did it because of his ability to persuade. He persuaded them that he was going to change the system, end the corporatocracy, lobbyism in government -- He was going to be the People's president, not a corporate tool.
When a president and his political party are swept into power to deliver affordable, quality medical treatment for all as Obama and Democrats were in 2008, and the one method that can accomplish it (and also happens to solve other unique problems facing us at the time, i.e., a crashing economy, joblessness, etc.) that president not only doesn't use his bully pulpit to sell, but unilaterally takes off the table, removes from even discussing, then the fix is in and that president is corrupt to the core.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
'Medical loss ratio' is what you're talking about.
And the insurance industry has already figured out the way around it.
On Countdown with Keith Olbermann, whistleblower Wendell Potter talks with Lawrence O'Donnell about where the con game (medical loss ratio, the amount of money insurers must spend on health care) is in the legislation, and how it will enable insurance companies to continue to price gauge and keep obscene profits instead of delivering affordable and quality medical care to policy-holders.
The bill was written by the insurance industry. The regulations were created by the insurance industry and the regulations and legislation is being implemented and overseen by the insurance industry. Obama put the foxes in charge of this chicken coop (former WellPoint executives Liz Fowler and Steve Larsen) to write both the legislation and the regulations, and enforce the regulations.
Fowler's most notable actions to date has been issuing waivers to businesses that don't want to have to provide insurance to their employees. So much for Candidate Obama's pledge on restricting lobbyists from writing our laws.
Why put the insurance industry into the equation of Americans' medical treatment at all? Insurance adds NOTHING to the medical model. The way that the insurance industry makes its profits is by taking a cut of money that can be spent on medical care. And in reality the insurance industry profits like Wall Street and all other corporations that have crashed our economy have profited: By denying claims and preventing treatment (Wall Street and corporations do it by offshoring manufacturing, outsourcing jobs, eliminating jobs in spite of record profits for short term windfalls to shareholders and bonuses for CEOs, etc.).
The insurance industry is the 'Don Fanucci' (Godfather, Part II) of medical care; the insurance industry is "wetting its beak", letting you get medical care (maybe, if you can afford the deductibles, the co-pays, and if your illness is covered by your policy, but) only if you pay them a gratuity up front.
The controlling meme that has been operational for the past 40 years, the sales pitch for privatizing government services and resources, is that "private industry can do it cheaper". While Republicans (Nixon) began it, Democrats joined in (Jimmy Carter). But it's just not true that private industry does it cheaper. Or even better.
What the insurance industry has charged anywhere from 12-39 percent for, the US government (Medicare) does spectacularly well for 4 percent.
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
$50,000 for a broken leg.
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). ACA Unlikely to Stem Medical Bankruptcies
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 said before and after the 2010 midterms that even if Democrats remained in the majority, he was going to do the same thing that he's been doing -- More caving to Republicans:
Aides say that the president's been spending "a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0," brainstorming with administration officials about the best way to revamp the strategies & goals of the WhiteHouse.
And despite the predictions that Democrats may relinquish a large degree of legislating power, including perhaps control of the House & even Senate, Obama isn't thinking of the next two years as a period that'll be marked with the same obstructive nature from the GOP.
"It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, [Republicans] feel more responsible, either because they didn't do as well as they anticipated, & so the strategy of just saying no to everything & sitting on the sidelines & throwing bombs didn't work for them," Obama says. "Or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals & work with me in a serious way."
DickDurbin says Obama's post-election agenda "will have to be limited & focused on the things that are achievable & high priorities for the American people." TomDaschle says Obama has to reach out more: "The keyword is inclusion. He's got to find ways to be inclusive."
What one says ("advocating") and what one does (putting the mechanisms into place for outsourcing) are two different things.
Whether it's Obama's failing to fulfill campaign pledges to end tax incentives to companies that offshore, or surrounding himself with advisers throughout his administration whose expertise is in outsourcing, or negotiating free trade treaties that effectively outsource jobs, Obama is as bad on the outsourcing issue as Romney, if not worse than Romney.
About Barack Obama
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
What is Obama running on? What are Democrats running on?
Best case scenario: Should Obama win, should Democrats retake the House and keep control of the Senate, what do you believe they will think they have a mandate to do?
On Bush's Obama's tax cuts - Will Obama let them all lapse or will he cut another deal? Will that deal include another payroll tax holiday (which is a Social Security killer)?
On budget cuts, will Obama adopt Simpson-Bowles?
On privatizing Social Security?
On selling off, privatizing, US resources?
Expanding the wars, new lands for drone attacks on civilians?
Continued deregulation of environment and workplace?
New tax laws with lowered corporate rates?
More job outsourcing free trade treaties that give foreign corporations intellectual and property rights over Americans'?
WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE OBAMA AND DEMOCRATS WILL THINK THEY HAVE A MANDATE TO DO?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Should Obama win reelection, what do you believe he'll say he got a mandate to do?
Please be specific.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
So does Obama and his campaign:
Obama Campaign Again Tries To Reclaim The Term ‘Obamacare’.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Bush duped all of us telling us Hussein was enriching uranium and had WMD's and working on nuclear weapons.=================================
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