Category: health care Page 29 of 35

Jane’s right on this:

The White House is telling people that if they don’t pass this bill, it will be a disaster for Democrats in the fall. That’s abject nonsense — their “fallback plan” for health care doesn’t have the toxic mandate that makes the IRS the collection agency for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, or any of the abortion issues that inflame both pro- and anti-choice groups.  It’s a better bill on the merits anyway, and most of the country wouldn’t know the difference over a bill that doesn’t kick in until 2014 anyway.

Kill the health care bill, pass the fixes that can be put through, minus the mandate and abortion restrictions.  Sounds like a win to me.

So, there’s a push on for a vote, now that Massa has been forced out and the kneecappers have made clear what happens to progressives who won’t play ball on HCR.

The bottom line is that health care reform is a giveaway to special interests, funded by cuts from Medicare and forcing people to buy insurance or pay or a fine.  There’s some decent stuff in it, but less than folks think (for example, old folks can be charged multiple times what young folks are).

I’m still opposed.  I don’t think the good outweighs the bad.  This is not a case of “we can get better if it fails”, this is a case of “this is worse than nothing.”

Is that Americans (and Westerners as a group) eat crappy food and don’t get enough exercise.

The author is entirely right that real healthcare reform would tackle these problems. Frankly, if it was up to me, I’d subsidize healthy food (so it’s cheaper than junk food) and heavily tax unhealthy food.  Exercise would be mandatory in all schools, and it would be real exercise, meaning every kid who could handle it would be getting a minimum of half an hour of cardio  3 days a week, and would learn how to use weights as well as being exposed to some form of skilled movement exercise, whether that be climbing, dance, yoga, tai-chi or something else along those lines.  Every kid, when graduating, would be able to put together an exercise program on their own, so that if they needed to in the future, they could.

No mortgage would be considered to be “conforming” for federal mortgage guarantees if the neighbourhood it was in did not have sidewalks, city centers would be off-limit to all cars, with only emergency vehicles allowed in during the day, and commercial vehicles delivering at night.

Etc…  Yes, this might infringe on the holy right of Westerners to be lazy, fat and sick, but so be it.

While I’m enjoying seeing some Progressives come out against the Senate bill, noting that it’s worse than nothing, the fact of the matter is that the House Bill wasn’t that much better.  The public option in the House bill was so weak that insurance provided by it was expected to have higher premiums than private plans, and while the subsidies were more generous they weren’t so high that they wouldn’t have driven many folks into bankruptcy.

I am heartened that there was a red line that some would not cross, especially my ex-colleagues at FDL, but I am mystified because the fundamental arguments that are being used apply almost as much to the House plan as the Senate plan with a few exceptions.

At this point I don’t suppose it matters.  The Senate plan is what’s going to pass, any changes to it will be minor, since Nelson and Lieberman will walk if anything major is changed and there isn’t a block of progressive Representatives with enough guts to threaten to do the same and mean it.

But I wonder if there’d been a firestorm earlier, from the left, pushing for a better House bill, if the envelope might not have been moved left enough to get a better bill.  This last minute firestorm, while welcome, seems unlikely to change anything.  Perhaps complaining earlier wouldn’t have either.  I guess we’ll never know.