In just about every comment I make, I include links to resources that support my opinions. Whenever you see colored text, those are hyperlinks. You're obviously free to differ, and also free to provide citations to support why you disagree.
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.
Don't believe me? Don't want to take my word for it? You don't have to. Go call Wendell Potter and Lawrence O'Donnell Iiars:
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.
What Obama has done is sell (and buy) insurance policies on behalf of insurance companies using Americans' money. Over-priced, lousy insurance policies, at that. That's a pretty neat trick, btw, to sell and buy. It's like playing chess with yourself.
Having insurance doesn't mean getting healthcare. BIG DIFFERENCE.
There are no cost controls in Obama's legislation, much less mechanisms for lowering the costs of medical care. No controls over co-pays, no controls on deductibles. The only "first step" this is is toward ending all public health programs. This goes in the wrong direction. It institutionalizes, sets in concrete, the privatization of healthcare and the insurance industry as the gatekeeper to who can access affordable quality medical treatment. If you think otherwise, then explain how, step-by-step, you see getting to affordable, quality medical care for everyone from ACA. Lay it out how you think that's going to happen.
With the nation going bankrupt, this is a first step toward ENDING all public healthcare programs. What we're going to see first is a state-by-state curtailment of Medicaid services.
If you think a Republican president would work to repeal Obama's healthcare legislation, then you need to ask yourself why Obama couldn't/wouldn't work to get the real healthcare reform that voters put him and Democrats into office to get.
FWIW, Obama's healthcare was designed by the rightwing's Heritage Foundation. If Republicans were to repeal it, they would get pass it again under their own name, with a new title, and neither you nor Republican voters would know the true origin -- Republican voters would love it because it had an 'R' on it, and you would hate it because of that 'R' on it.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Obama and the DLC-controlled Democratic Party got the healthcare legislation through that the insurance industry and PhRma wanted. ACA originated in the rightwing think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
From Amy Goodman's interview with whistleblower Wendell Potter, former CIGNA executive:
AMY GOODMAN: But don’t the insurance companies like this legislation?
WENDELL POTTER: They do. And that’s why this will not be repealed. They like a lot about it. This legislation, we call it "healthcare reform," but it doesn’t really reform the system. There are a lot of good things in there that does make some of the practices of the insurance industry illegal, things that should have been made illegal a long time ago, so that—
AMY GOODMAN: Like?
WENDELL POTTER:—for that matter, there are good things here. But it doesn’t reform the system. It is built around our health insurance system, as the President said. And they want to keep it in place, because it also guarantees that they will have a lot of new members and billions of dollars in new revenue in the years to come.
AMY GOODMAN: How does it ensure that?
WENDELL POTTER: One of the—the core component of this—and it’s kind of ironic, but the one thing that the Republicans and conservatives are saying they want to repeal is the provision that we all have to buy coverage from private insurance companies.
AMY GOODMAN: Like we do for auto insurance.
WENDELL POTTER: Exactly, right. And they’re citing or they’re saying that that’s unconstitutional. That’s also all for show, because it is just an effort to try to, in a sense, turn people away from the idea of reform. It sounds complicated, but it’s part of the insurance companies’ strategy.
The only "start" that ACA is is the institutionalization of insurance companies as the gatekeepers to medical care. Insurance companies add nothing to the relationship between someone who is sick and someone who can provide treatment. Insurance companies exist to make profits off of DENYING care.
I've never been impressed with the analogy of car insurance to health insurance, because for one thing people don't have to drive.
Perhaps a more equivalent comparison with healthcare in this democracy where everyone needs medical treatment throughout their lifetime might be other necessities for survival, such as food, water, and shelter (protection from the elements). We subsidize food costs, heating oil expenses, housing, because it's necessary for human survival.
There are resources that should be nationalized, such as water and oil and land. They belong to all of us, as our birthright, to share, and not for the 1% to take and sell them for profit, for their own private gain.
There are services which we recognize are necessary, like fire-fighting and policing, that are non-profit. Or used to be. We chipped in through our taxes to pay for these services, in order to get these services for a reasonable price.
The same should be true for medical treatment. When Americans say, "Don't touch my Medicare", that is what they are saying that they want.
Obama took single payer (Medicare For All) off the table, because if the goal is to get affordable quality medical care for all then everything else pales in comparison. He's preserving an anachronistic and failed insurance industry and employer-provided system for medical care. It's government-sanctioned racketeering.
Insurance adds NOTHING to the medical model. The insurance industry is the 'Don Fanucci' (Godfather, Part II -- "I don't want a lot...Just enough to wet my beak") of medical care, letting you get medical care only if you pay them a gratuity up front.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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.
As one who has enjoyed a "brief inside view of Dem party politics" as you claim, you know that you do not rise within either political party unless you have run the gauntlet and proven you're one of the team. You have to buy into the group think, and that group think accepts the status quo that they are beholden to transnational corporations.
Howard Dean isn't any prize. He talks a good populist game, but he's as much a corporate Democrat when push comes to shove as any DLCer. Dean wants desperately to be in with the DLC insiders, to play with the big boys so badly, but they don't want him.
Most voters judge politicians by their personalities and mistakenly assume politicians' ideological positions for their own when they've decided they personally like the politician. That's certainly true of Howard Dean.
Howard Dean's a nice guy, but he's not a liberal and definitely not 'married' to what I would say are sacrosanct Democratic Party positions, like pro-choice and public health care. He's a politician, just like all the rest of them (the Ickes, the Shrums, the Davises). And even Dean, with his slightly leftward bent as evidenced by the 50-state strategy, was kicked to the curb by Obama and Rahm Emanuel after it successfully put Obama, the candidate perceived to be a liberal by voters in 2008, into power.
Anyone in the Democratic Party establishment has drunk the Kool-Ade.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
The DemocraticParty is trying to move the party even farther to the right of the right-of-center (from where the DLC has moved the party to) in order to attract into the DemocraticParty the moderate Republicans (the politicians and their supporters) who have been disenfranchised from the RepublicanParty since the Chrlstian right took over control of the party in the 1980s. In order to make the DemocraticParty the one true 'Corporate Party' of the US, thereby marginalizing both the far rightwing and the left (the base of the DemocraticParty).
The first Democratic president to actually sign onto privatizing and deregulation was JimmyCarter, and it's been a collaboration between Democrats and Republicans ever since. Democrats go for the "go slower" approach than Republicans in order to cloak the fact that they're just as committed to a corporatocracy as Republicans -- That's the only way to have the illusion of two parties with different ideologies. But it's the same end that both parties are working towards.
While Democrats and Republicans have different party platforms (written documents, that state clearly what the party stands for, with an agenda and list of goals), Democratic politicians gave up long ago following its party platform's planks.
For example, the DemocraticParty's platform is crystal clear on reproductive rights and abortion; Democrats"unequivocally support Ree v. Wade and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right".
ProChoice doesn't mean you can be anti-abortion. It doesn't mean you can be anti-abortion as long as you keep your mouth shut. You can't have anti-choice politicians in the DemocraticParty, receiving money and support from the DemocraticParty's members and the party's machinery. Yet just about all professional Democratic politicians want to make the DemocraticParty hospitable to anti-choice people (and all 'other siders' of the DemocraticParty's different special interest groups) , as noted in this article from 12/04.
The only way to do that is for the party to not take a stance on abortion, to remove any reference to 'choice'. That's certainly true of HowardDean. During HowardDean's tenure as chairman of the DNC, he indicated in several interviews that the intent was to move the DemocraticParty from referring to abortion at all in its platform. Here's one of those interviews, from 11/1/05: Video | Transcript
January 14, 2005 - Dems May Waver on Choice, Repro Rights
KEEP READING
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
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