The looming defeat of a progressive health care bill is a much greater disaster than meets the eye. The right wing will learn, as they already surmised from previous skirmishes, that they can blow the Democrats out of the water. They will use the same smear tactics, emotional lies, and talk radio campaigns to defeat whatever other progressive moves of any significance are left on the diluted and impoverished Obama agenda. And they will further water down whatever laws have been passed, the weak cap and trade bill for instance. Moreover, the right wing will use the same tactics during the forthcoming mid-term elections as a dry run for 2012. By that time they will have convinced the masses that Obama was born on Mars, is a Soviet agent, and will take away the people's right to shoot each other.
The liberals in response have been lame beyond belief. They have set up web pages that clarify the facts and provide corrections to misinformation -- as if this was some kind of scholarly debate and the right and its followers will yield to the kind of corrections editors of scientific publications are prone to make. Liberals have called for a "stable, quality care" system, a phrase which has less appeal than last week's dish water. They favor "evidence based policies," a term that may excite a handful of policy wonks in a handful of think tanks. And they have been "negotiating": making grand concessions to the other side without getting anything in return, just to show how conciliatory, bipartisan, and reasonable liberals can be.
The time has come for liberals to take off their gloves. A good place to start is to conduct hearings (Henry Waxman, where are you when we need you?) and town hall meetings fully dedicated to the ill doings of the private, profit-making sector. Lets hear about the sick who were denied care by insurance companies using one technicality or another; about private hospitals and clinics that pay recruiters to bring in patients from across the country in order to subject them to surgeries they do not need; about the health care dollars that are pocked by high salaried executives, their mistresses and sons-in-law, and back room backers; about elders allowed to wallow in their own waste to increase profits at nursing homes, and about other senior citizens who were refused treatments in order to hasten their deaths after they paid the assisted living facility's high entrance fees. In short, liberals need to show that the private, profit-making sector is riddled with abuse, corruption, and malpractice. Only then will a public option shine.
If you feel at this point that such accusations are unfair, that one cannot generalize, that there are good people in the private sector, that public institutions also have some failings -- then you should look in the mirror and see one reason the right wing is winning. This is not a theoretical debate which can be settled by checking the decimal points. At issue are overarching conclusions and basic sensibilities: is the profit-making sector a more trustworthy provider of health care than the public one? Should it at least face some public competition? The debate has to focus on this level and employ a language most people can be affected by--or we may as well wave another white liberal flag and not bother to join the fight. And a fight it is, with much more than the future of health care at stake.
Amitai Etzioni is a University Professor at The George Washington University, and the author of The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics. He can be reached at icps@gwu.edu.
Could it be that capitalism is the freedom to compete for excessive wealth, and such a destruction of equality could only work by excessive deadly force?
Allowing people to die so we can have more excessive wealth, this is a quilt that must be shared all but the slow and careful thinking laboring class.
For though our politicians and media put a blackout on the term "laboring class," our ruling class asserting us all to be middleclass or poor, 40% of society is of a hard working laboring class that would feel insulted if you called them poor.
And so the real issue: Is healthcare wages due and owed to those who hard labor generate all our wealth?
HR676 (http://hr676.org) Single Payer system that is proven, pro-business and pro-people:
* Slashes at least 30% of costs off the top by removing private insurance overhead.
* Companies take health care expenses off their books. Stock value increases. Better able to compete internationally.
* Small companies could have access to higher skilled workers because previously they couldn't compete in the labor market by offering similar benefits.
* More entrepreneurial ventures will launch since they have more money and less unrelated risk.
* Dramatic drop in bankruptcies.
* Dramatic drop in lawsuits. Most of these lawsuits are simply to obtain money to cover health care if something interrupts their coverage.
* Reduced system complexity. Greater efficiency due to fewer regulations.
* Savings from employees not having to fight with their insurers during work hours.
* HSA and MSA dollars redirected back into the economy for goods and services.
* Additional money to spend from not having to carry "uninsured motorist coverage" on your auto policy.
* Contract employment is more viable for workers since they are guaranteed access to health care.
* People are covered when unemployed. No chance of being wiped out financially if you lose your job.
* Health care providers (doctors, hospitals, therapists...) see increase in business with much less administrative expense.
It is not a true test of mandate when the choice is between a Republican or a Democrat. The true test is if a third box existed for 'None of the Above"- or a vote of no confidence. I bet more and more people would have voted for 'None of the Above'. That is the reason for the rise of the Independents but without a place to 'call home' in terms of a political party.
1. I have past experience of how public funded Medicare / Medicaid will be the flooring reimbursed rate for healthcare providers and facilities that leads to a situation in which private sector patients and plans will be basically subsidiizing for the losses of Medicare / Medicaid patients. Typically, private insurers are able to charge 2 1/2 to 3 times floor rate of Medicare / Medicaid and then are able to obtain discounts through negotiations with the healthcare providers and facilities.
My question is: (1) how does Public Option affect that and where will the subsidy to cover the costs of Medicare / Medicaid Patients comes from except from the government. (2) Medicaire / Medicaid can be highly cost effective if it does not have to pay for at least the cost of the services provided. (3) What happens to the private insurers with more patients under a shift of coverage to the Public Option and does that create a cascade by which more funds are required to cover the lost private sector subsidy or will private insurers quit?
Private health insurerers already pay at Medicare rates.
The battle with the cost savings over the next 10 years is to come from a certain degree in terms of reimbursement for healthcare providers with rates for primary physicians going down.
I much prefer the Public Option Plan if it can be spelled out of how it will be structured and developed and how it will be run. Look at FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC-both of them collapsed because of political oversight stupidity (Republican or Democrat-who cares)...I do not want the same for the Public Option Plan as well.....
Why are some bringing dainty to a mud slinging contest? Why are some playing with feathers while rocks are thrown? Why are we appeasing the real losers of 08 and 06? The mandate was loud and clear. This is no time for dainty, for fierce urgency does not suggest tea and crumpets with an extended pinky. I love the president, I am for him one hundred percent. He is in a tough fight and he needs to step out of his indoctrination -- for that is what is hurting him. He needs not what he learned at Harvard but what average Americans learn in the school of hard knocks -- how to take down an antagonist who leaves you no choice, who attempts to bully and box in. He needs to go "street". Street in this case would be utilization of every communication medium to drive the message home of corruption, unsustainable cost trajectory, inefficiencies, and obscene profits running parallel to obscene levels of poor service. Personalize the message. Show pictures, show the dead bodies. Drive the point home. Unmask and undress the charlatans. Say openly and defiantly that the Republicans have lost their way, and until they find themselves as Americans, we will no longer be dealing with the Party of no. Use every procedural method to isolate and ignore the GOP. That would be where academic training comes to bear -- identification and utilization of process and procedure to close the mouths of zealots.
If the Bush years taught us nothing else, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid & relentless in your sales pitch & tactics. It's not that Bush&Rove were geniuses & knew something that nobody else knew; Bush&Rove were just more ruthless (clumsy & careless many political graybeards would say) in doing what politicians & the parties had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans.
Obama didn't get to be the first black president, vanquish the Clinton machine & the oldest, most experienced politicians in our nation's history (including the Rove machine) 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 the impeachment of Bush&Cheney off the table & have us still reelecting them, not marching on Washington with torches&pitchforks?
Obama&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 that they're merely inept. And to get us to keep voting for them in spite of their failure to deliver on any of our alleged shared objectives.
In addition to writing and calling our representatives, we all should be contacting news outlets demanding they cover the real issues at stake, a criminal, out-of-control industry in dire need of real reform.
The Democratic party has allowed the healthcare reform initiative to be hijacked due to their coziness and acceptance of hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the healthcare industry and big pharma. The Democrats have suckled at the teat of the healthcare industry, the insurance industry and big pharma all most as much as the members of the GOP have feasted.
It is past time for the progressives in the Democratic party to point out that while healthcare costs have skyrocketed that the health care industry, insurance companies and big pharma have raked in record profits -- this while over 3 million Americans have lost their jobs AND their health insurance over the past 24 months.
The Democrats need realize that there is a growing pool of Americans who are waking up everyday without health insurance and, these folks are counting on the Democrats and President Obama to deliver a public option.
The Democrats need to acknowledge that this fall when the pan-flu epidemic that has been hitting the lower hemisphere resurfaces in the US, there will be hundreds of thousands of Americans who will be at greater risk than in previous years due to the substantial amount of healthcare benefits that have been lost with lost jobs over the past 24 months and; these folks will remember that the Democratic politicians had an opportunity to change the status quo but failed to do so; instead they caved in to the healthcare, insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Yes we can.
Nothing said about the criminal acts that led to police response, the cop killing, the child molesting that the police responded to in force.
The GOP was very successful in painting the government as out of control and a danger to the people.
The GOP is doing the exact same thing today with health care. At least in 1995 the Dems, then in the minority, held seperate hearings attended by no republicans at which the victims got a chance to be heard.
Why aren't the Dems today hauling insurance execs before Congress demanding to know why they are killing Granny. Where are the people who voted for the pres. in 2008 NOW on this health care issue. Why isn't there a half million people marching on the Mall in DC over HC?
Who is Kathleen Sibelius, who just popped up yesterday. Is Harry Reid still breathing? Or is Baucus the majorrity leader, or Conrad?
Obama is using lawyer-speak, and is now trying to redefine "public option" as "coops".