Colleen O’Connor: Why health care ‘reform’ is in trouble

[toymachines]

Colleen O’Connor: Why health care ‘reform’ is in trouble
SDNN

Emily Dickinson, the poet, once wrote: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

The current health care bills are dropping pillow cases — full of feathers — from windswept mountaintops. But, nobody is catching them.

As Dickinson understood, hope is frail, fleeting, and prone to fly away with each new gust of wind.

And the current winds are reaching gale force.

“Hope,” in the health care debate, is going the way that “trust” did during the Iraq War. It is being blown away.

Put simply, “hope” in a massive overhaul of our current health care system, cannot be explained in a 30 second television commercial, a 10 second sound bite, a short blog, a tweet, or a “tweeople” (the newest California debate forum), to people who currently distrust both their Congress and their press.

Fear and mistrust

Americans have endured more nonsense from politicians than common sense.

They have also been lied to repeatedly. Why would anyone expect the baby boomer generation (with the most at stake in this fight) who lived through the My Lai massacre, the Vietnam War, Watergate, political assassinations, cover-ups, riots, the Iraq War, Gitmo abuse, the first and second bailouts of Wall Street and their bankers, more scandals than acts of courage, and the almost unprecedented loss of home and jobs, to trust anyone in authority?

As the “sandwich generation,” caring for their aged parents, and often their own grandchildren, this block of highly-educated, understandably-distrustful voters, suspects that what they are promised is not what they will get. Hence, their reluctance to embrace health care changes... Read more

http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-08-10/news/politics-city-county-government/colleen-oconnor-why-health-care-reform-is-in-trouble#ixzz0Nnx3xWkY

[sui generis]

1. what health care changes?

All that was ever discussed was health insurance changes. And we just don't get it.

UNTIL Obama deals with big pharma, guarantees a level premium, and genuinely changes HEALTHCARE it ain't what he says and he's already proven to the gay community that "trust me" is exactly what not to do. Details up front - especially the really big ones, like, is a stage 4 chemo person going to have a higher premium than a perfectly healthy person? What do annual out of pockets look like in either case? What is he going to do to reduce the BILLED cost of healthcare (the chicken game that doctors play with the insurance companies to jack over R&C (reasonable and customary) costs and still make a profit.

These are HUGE questions to leave up to people who don't know the answer, don't want to know the answer, or else don't want anyone else to know the answer.

We could make it worse in the long term for everyone.

Now about that reform - I'm 100% behind it. Get private healthcare insurers out of the primary healthcare insurance business, even if it means the fuckers go out of business.