I'll See You In Court

So that's that.

Decades of build up, years of campaigning, months of hard-slogging volunteer work, and who knows how much money spent by us regular people who can least afford it to counteract untold millions from health insurance companies (and where are they getting all this extra money, anyway? Isn't there some, oh, I don't know, health care they could be providing?), and when push comes to shove, the Democrats - with solid majorities in literally every area - completely drop the ball. Again.

You know, I expect this sort of crap from Republicans. With few exceptions, they don't even pretend to care about good policy any more, and honestly, I don't expect much from anybody who thinks that Noah's Ark was not only real but also included a couple of vegetarian Velociraptors.

But after working hard and donating money and calling representatives and going door-to-door dropping off political literature and writing letters and articles - all while working to pay the bills, and often without the health insurance that every other developed nation on the planet takes for granted - tens of millions of Americans had hoped for more from the "Party of Change."

Apparently, the change in question was just a switch from getting stabbed in the front to being stabbed in the back.

I'm told that the proposed Medicare Buy-In - which would allow Americans aged 55-64 to buy in to Medicare provided they didn't already have employee-offered insurance plans - is in some ways better than the public option that the House passed. Sure, provided you make it to 55 years old without health insurance. A great many people can tell you how hard that is.

A great many more can't, because they've been killed at the rate of tens of thousands a year.

So how do our sharpshooting and ever-so-compassionate leaders solve this problem? By mandating that all Americans buy health insurance. Now, we are at last going to have health insurance, which we will get to select from on of the options that already exist that we already can't afford. Thanks! I'm sure that'll do it.

This means we get to choose between one really expensive option that our employer might or might not offer, and one or two even more expensive options for individual health insurance, or becoming an outlaw. At long last, what has long been true in essence is now literally and legally true - it is illegal to be poor in America.

Here's a proposal - why don't we just hand the health insurance companies a big fat annual check and save ourselves a bunch of paperwork? It should be about as effective, and at least then we can dispense with all the lies and false hope.

So since Congress is in the mood to compromise yet again (where "compromise" means "give up without a fight and without getting any concessions from an opposing side"), I've got a compromise plan for our dear leaders. You go ahead and pass your individual mandate bill, with no public option and - if the Republicans and conservative Dems allow it, which given the track record here, I rather doubt - a medicare expansion for some, maybe, eventually, who manage to survive to 55 without going broke or dying. In exchange, I will:

- Pull out of my employer-based insurance coverage and cease making payments;
- Refuse to pay your penalties for not purchasing insurance from a private company;
- Happily go to court over it and have you show me precisely how a mandate to purchase insurance from private insurers is constitutional. It's not a tax; it's not interstate commerce; it's patently not providing for the general welfare; so where precisely are you getting this power?

I'm also done providing volunteer hours, campaign contributions, phone calls or even moral support for any Senator or Representative who votes for this garbage (any yes, this includes any President who signs it). No more support, in any way, at any time. Ever. You know that groundswell of youth support for the Democratic party, representing a "generational shift?" The funny thing about huge new progressive support is that you only get to keep it if you are actually progressive.

Lesson learned, guys - next time somebody comes along and tells us "Yes We Can," it would behoove us to ask who he means by "we."

*Updated* To be clear - either give me a public option with your mandate, or drop the public option AND the mandate. I will NOT sit here and allow a mandate to purchase private services become a condition of American citizenship.

 

Follow Tim Ellis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DJDynamicNC

Comments

[John Garner]

09:06 AM on 12/10/2009

Personally I want my money back that I donated to Obama, on the grounds that he took it under false pretenses. This isn't change I can believe in, it's more of the same old Reagan -Bush- Clinton Crap. Lets take care of our corporate masters and anyone else can have a few crumbs! Oops, sorry all the moneys gone, I guess you can't even have the crumbs. And that Harry Reid should be gone isn't even a question, the same goes for these so called" blue dog" dems. Thats an insult to canines everywhere­. Dogs are loyal. A better name for them might be deer tick dems.

[AKAGoldfish]

01:54 AM on 12/10/2009

The idea of an individual mandate was always suspect (and incidental­ly not supported by Obama during the primaries)­. The idea of having a mandate without a universal public health plan is perhaps the worst piece of legislatio­n to ever archive a serious chance of passing Congress and being signed into law. That is to say, the worst in the entire history of Congress.

Introducin­g legislatio­n to do away with the IRS and introduce a system of tax farming would scarcely be a more hideous abuse of Article 1 powers (and unlike this hideous scheme would actually be constituti­onal).

[Ellen Gill]

11:37 PM on 12/09/2009

The Medicare buy-in is going to be too expensive for the average person who needs it. PNHP isn't impressed because it will create another high-cost risk pool for the government to fund. It should lower premiums in private industry freed up from the 55 and up group, but since there is no real competitio­n in the industry, it won't happen. Welcome to reality Mr. Ellis. You now understand that we were played by our own party and the connected organizati­ons like OFA and HCAN whose primary purpose was not to fight for a cost-effec­tive and workable system as they claimed, but to keep the grassroots busy and supporting the Administra­tion and congressio­nal Democrats. They spent most of their time quieting single payer advocates. I learned my lesson this past spring when I was invited to speak at an HCAN house party and they cut me off after two seconds for explaining the Senate HELP bill when it first came out. They didn't want anyone to know about the mandates and subsidies. Then, OFA threatened to kick me off the site forever because I wrote in my house party invitation that choice of insurance plan was a red herring issue and that people really only wanted to preserve their choice of doctor. They actually called me and threatened me to take down my post or they'd kick me off. I fought with them and won. It wasn't pretty, but at least I got the picture early on.

[RFS78]

11:24 PM on 12/09/2009

I can't help but feeling that the Democrats have sold out their supporters to pass anything, just to check it off their list.

They jettisoned any form of price control in favor of securing the over-55 vote that will keep them in power. That seems to be the core of their compromise­. If we can keep the largest voting block happy, we can afford to piss off and disregard the young.

Spineless cowards, the whole freaking lot of them. I'm done supporting them in any meaningful way, as it has been shown that all it takes is one or two blue dogs and a weak and ineffectiv­e majority leader to make the results of an election meaningles­s.

Good luck in 2010.

[DA12]

09:27 PM on 12/09/2009

A bill with no public option is political suicide. But it's the kind of self-infli­cted mortal wound that Rahm Emanuel and other conservati­ves in the Democratic Party already made under Clinton. The only consolatio­n for this travesty will be watching Democrats go down in flames in 2010--so many of them will utterly deserve it.

[khanti]

08:35 PM on 12/09/2009

Between the Rep. and Democrats there isn't any choice. It is just out of the frying pan into the fire. Just lesser of the two evils.

[AKAGoldfish]

01:56 AM on 12/10/2009

I'm not really seeing how a massive transfer of wealth from the pockets of the poorest Americans upwards to a few rich investors and CEOs is the lesser of two evils.

[DaveVentura]

08:06 PM on 12/09/2009

"To be clear - either give me a public option with your mandate, or drop the public option AND the mandate. I will NOT sit here and allow a mandate to purchase private services become a condition of American citizenshi­p."

That's how I feel and even them I'm uneasy about the individual mandate. I have serious reservatio­ns about the federal government mandating people buy any sort of product produced by a private business.

[AKAGoldfish]

01:57 AM on 12/10/2009

Obama campaigned against the individual mandate when Hillary was the one peddling it. It stank than and it stinks now, but for some reason Obama seems to have convenient­ly forgotten his past opposition­.

[nellyb stl]

06:05 PM on 12/09/2009

My comments can't be spoken. We'll see what the final bill contains. We'll see why ALL AMERICANS can't be covered like all Congress with health care, dental care, eye care. We'll see what happens in the next election. We'll see if it's WITHIN THE BUDGET; like we did TARP and the SURGE. We'll See!!