Surreal & Bizarre - Terms and Talking Points in the Health Care 'Debate'

[debbierlus]

- Competition among/against insurance companies....

Insurance companies are leeches. They take money out of the health care system for profit. Every dollar that goes to insurance company profit is a dollar that does not go to health care.

Insurance companies do not need competition. They need to be either SEVERELY regulated so they can't turn a profit and only are paid for the necessary services of payment processing. It should be ILLEGAL to profit off human sickness, just like it should be illegal to profit off of war.

If the government is not going to regulate the insurance companies, they should put them out of business & expand Medicare to cover everyone. If people are stupid enough to say they don't want government in their health care, just tell them that government won't be in their healthcare as the government does not run the private health care sector, it merely distributes the payments and can do so much cheaper since they don't have to pay the shareholders and CEOs of health insurance companies.

Health insurance companies do not provide any health care services. Simple counter to a lot of spin. Both political sides spin talk about health insurance companies as important entities for the American health care consumer. They provide nothing. We do not need them. If they were taken out of the picture, we could reduce up to a third of health care costs right off the top without cutting services or programs for ANYONE.

Next one....

Fair & level playing field.

This one makes me want to toss my cookies every single time I hear it. Fair & level playing field. The term is downright insulting. First, our health is not a game. Our sickness should not be subject to the rules of capitalism. Fair & level mean that the insurance companies should be able to remain competitive for profit and they all get a fair shot at the money. That is just GROSS. This term came out during the initial push for a public option which should have caused HUGE RED FLAGS every time any politician let these words spew out his or her lips. Anytime you talk about creating policy around healthcare with the goal of maintaining profitability for companies that provide no health care services, it is crystal clear who stands to benefit the most from the proposed policy (that would be the health insurance companies).

Public Option

This one is my absolute favorite because no one knows exactly what it means. Some think it means Medicare for All (it most certainly doesn't). Some think it means a government run insurance program to provide competition to the private insurance companies(which is what it would mean if there were ANY bills that set down the fundementals for creating a EFFECTIVE government run option such as requiring universal access, rapid accessibility, & rates tied to Medicare - none of the current bills set these fundamentalss, so none of them would create a public option that could feasibly compete). Some think it means complete government run health care (that would be the right wing lunatics).

Never has a term been such a focal point of debate and been so ill-defined. Never has the liberal community rallied around a talking point instead of a policy before...

Demand a public option. How can you demand something that doesn't have a fixed definition? How can you demand something that could be so easily manipulated to mean nothing?

Enough already. We need to stop this insanity and rally around HR676.

http://hr676.org /

Go and fight for actual legislation that will fix healthcare instead of demanding a ill-defined term.

[debbierlus]

1. And,here they come. The unrecommends. Was it the health insurance companies are leeches?

Or, the fact that no real public option exists in any of the bill currently written?

[demwing]

2. I cant speak for the unrecs

If I dont agree, I don't rec. I have to fing a thread pretty foul, or severely redundant, to unrec

But I can say that I'm tired of the all or nothing proponents of single payer pretending that the public option has been sold out, when there isn'tt eve a damn bill on the table.

[area51]

3. k&r (n/t)