Category: health care Page 32 of 35

Well, now Matt Taibbi is saying it, maybe progressives will listen:

In the end, the Blue Dogs won. When the House commerce committee passed its bill, the public option no longer paid Medicare-plus-five-percent. Instead, it required the government to negotiate rates with providers, ensuring that costs would be dramatically higher. According to one Democratic aide, the concession would bump the price of the public option by $1,800 a year for the average family of four.

In one fell swoop, the public plan went from being significantly cheaper than private insurance to costing, well, “about the same as what we have now,” as one Senate aide puts it. This was the worst of both worlds, the kind of take-the-fork-in-the-road nonsolution that has been the peculiar specialty of Democrats ever since Bill Clinton invented a new way to smoke weed. The party could now sell voters on the idea that it was offering a “public option” without technically lying, while at the same time reassuring health care providers that the public option it was passing would not imperil the industry’s market share.

The public option, isn’t.  As I noted quite some time ago.  It will not reduce costs, it is questionable that it is even viable.  And yet progressives are going balls-to-the-wall for a non-viable public option which won’t even reduce costs rather than, at the least, fighting for a real public option?

Folks, you are being sold a bill of goods.  The people shilling for this version of the public option, whether politicians or others, are shilling for something that won’t work (not that even a nominal public option is likely to be in the final bill).

The best thing that can happen, at this point, is for nothing to be passed.  Because right now it looks most likely you are either going to be forced to buy insurance without an option to buy a government plan, or you’re going to be forced to buy insurance with the possibility of buying government insurance that’s no cheaper than private insurance, and which may not even be able to stay in business (it does have to succeed without any subsidies.)

Badtux says it best when it comes to what should have happened, what still should happen, but what won’t happen:

Or Obama can lead. He can say “Enough. You tried, you failed. We will expand Medicare to all.” Then the Republicans have to run against Medicare, and if they do that, they’ve lost. Medicare is the most popular government program aside from Social Security, and anybody running against Medicare is taking on old folks as well as taking on something that’s already a known quantity. You can’t say Medicare has “death panels” because it doesn’t. You can’t say Medicare rations care, because it doesn’t — it won’t pay for everything, but you can always buy Medi-Gap coverage from private insurers for the things it won’t pay for. And the bill would be literally 5 pages long, most of which would be boilerplate around the three paragraph payload, one paragraph expanding Medicare to everybody, the second one which raises the Medicare payroll tax to 4/4%, the third which adds a 5% Medicare surcharge to the income tax for everybody who makes over $500K/year. I’ve worked the numbers and that would pay for every dime that’s currently being paid through private insurance, and leave enough to cover the current uninsured. Three paragraphs. That’s all it would take.

But yeah, that’s not happening.  So… get ready to pay out for insurance you can’t afford, with co-pays so high you can’t afford to use it even after you’ve been forced to cough up for it.

Plus ca change

A friend asked for the case against a plan with no public option, a mandate, and regulations.

I assume he means a plan where companies may not rescind policies and they must accept everyone no matter what the pre-existing conditions they have.  No effective cost controls are put in place, subsidies exist, but cut out at a relatively low level 3* poverty level or less.  Without effective cost controls, costs will be expected to rise faster than inflation or wages.  Assume premiums of about 10K/year, with a deductible of about 5K.

Here’s the case, put as simply as possible.

Forcing people to pay money they don’t have for high deductible insurance they can’t afford to use is not moral.

Seriously, “grandma’s going to be killed by Obama’s healthcare plan” (whatever his plan is, even I don’t know) wouldn’t work on “we’re just going to give medicare to everyone”.

Just sayin’.

The whole “you can’t sell single payer” is turning out to be, well, rather questionable.  Because the way things are going it’s fairly clear you can’t sell some godawful hodgepodge either and all the screaming about “you’re going to take away my Medicare” indicates that a lot of the people who oppose Obamacare, love Medicare.

When you’re trying to explain something, you do so by metaphor in almost all cases.  Everyone knows what Medicare is.  The majority of people with Medicare are happy with it and even people without Medicare know people (usually their parents or grandparents) who have it, and whom it’s working for.

Ruling out “single payer” from the very start was an act of mind-bending incompetence on the level of disbanding Iraq’s army during the occupation of Iraq.  From a policy point of view “Medicare for all” provides massive savings, and we know it works because the equivalent policies have worked for every other nation in the world who ever implemented then.  From a sales point of view it’s much harder to demonize Medicare and much easier to explain it.  From a negotiation point of view pre-compromising is so stupid that anyone who has spent 5 minutes in a third world bazaar or taken even a single negotiating class knows better.

The current health reform “bills” are turning into a clusterfuck of epic proportions.  Scrap them, introduce Medicare for all, target  Senators who won’t vote for it with bone-crushing ads which ask why they want 22,000 American to die every year who could be saved for less money than the Iraq war cost; explain with nice simple pictures how much money they receive from the insurance industry and note that they are willing to let Americans die in exchange for blood money from the medical industry.

I know it’s difficult for Democrats to play hardball since they’d have to grow a spine, but perhaps, just perhaps, it’s worth it to save lives, end 70% of all bankruptcies and make sure people who are sick get the care they need?

(Oh, and to save Obama’s presidency. )

Let’s spell this out.  You can’t have health care reform which increases the deficit because the borrowed money was all given away to corporations and rich people.  The 15 trillion of bailouts are the case in point, but the lousy Cap and Trade bill is also to blame.  If it was auctioning all of the permits instead of 15% that would have raised 582 billion dollars more than the current bill.

Spending money is a matter of priorities.  Congress and Obama’s first priority is not health care, if it was, they’d be willing to spend money on it.  They aren’t, so it isn’t.  Period.

If find this especially odd given that “protecting Americans”, aka “saving American lives” is supposedly the job #1 in Washington. 22,000 Americans die every year due to not having health care and many more due to inadequate care,, but apparently “saving American lives” is only job #1 when it means you get to spend money on the military, kill foreigners and put American troops in body bags; or when it means you get spy on Americans and torture people.

Al-Q’aeda would need to commit 11 9/11’s a year to kill as many Americans as die due to not having health care.

So, what’s more important than American lives, as measured by willingness to actually add to the deficit for it?

• Killing Iraqis
• Tax Cuts
• Killing Afghanis
• Sending American soldiers to die in foreign countries to “save American lives”
• Bailing out large corporations like Citigroup, AIG and  Goldman Sachs
• Giving money to the IMF to bail out other countries banking systems

What else is more important than saving American lives?  Add to the list in comments.

First it was the AMA supporting health reform, now Pharma. Pharma has spent 4 million on Harry and Louise ads in support, and are considering spending 120 million during the August recess in support.

If both Pharma and the American Medical Association are for something, well, let’s just say that any liberal with sense should be thinking not just twice, but thrice.

Robert Reich noted a while back what Pharma will probably get in exchange for their support:

• Not allowing drug reimportation from Canada
• Not allowing the government to negotiate drug prices

Add to that forced enrollment of Americans into a insurance plans, and I’d lay long odds that Pharma has calculated that they’re going to make a bundle off of the new medical system, much more than the 80 billion they’ve promised to give up (a promise that isn’t worth much in the first place.)

At this point in time the strategy to get through a reform bill appears to be to bribe every powerful interest opposed to one enough to get rid of their objections.  If the goal of this is to significantly reduce costs, every major participant deciding that they’ll make more money under the new legislation rather than less is not a good sign.

The method is simple enough.

Use the Senate conservatives and blue dogs.  Obama may have the ability to move much of this under reconciliation, but it’s clear than neither he nor Reid want to do so.  The Senate HELP bill is weaker than the House bill, and the “bipartisan compromise” coming out of the Justice bill is going to be even weaker (it most likely won’t even have a public option, but instead co-ops, which are too weak to work).

Blue dogs, in my opinion, are the lesser threat.  I believe Pelosi when she says she can move a bill through the House.  I could be wrong on that, but so far Pelosi has proved very good at winning crunch votes.

The only way a good public option will happen is if progressive in the House are willing to buck Pelosi, Rahm and Obama and spike a bill.  There are more progressives than Blue Dogs in the House, more than enough to kill the bill.

The reason conservatives get a much larger voice in legislation is because they are willing to vote it down. Rahm and Obama whip progressives far harder than they whip Blue Dogs.  If progressive representatives actually want a good public option enough to fight for it, they need to make Rahm and the White House whip the Blue Dogs.  If Democrats are unpopular in 2010 because of a failed legislative agenda, it’s not progressives who are going to lose their seats, it’s conservatives in swing districts.  And White House threats to turn off money, staff and volunteers are much more effective against people who run in swing districts.

I know the idea of actually whipping conservative democrats the way progressives are whipped is crazy-talk in modern Washington and to Obama and Rahm, but maybe it’s just crazy enough to work.

Or maybe we’ll just get a lousy health care “reform” bill with no public option or one that’s completely crippled.