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Edited on Tue Nov-17-09 06:14 PM by PHIMG
Like only Nixon could go to China, only a Democratic regime could get away with passing off a larded up piece of corporate welfare as a real health care reform bill.
This bill is extremely expensive, loaded to the gills with subsidies to the private insurance industry. And why wouldn't it be? The industry has been funding Democrats for decades. Max Baucus being the most egregious example.
This bill helps very little. It will help some people but the numbers are very small. It barely raises insurance coverage, does little to end medical bankruptcy. The public option will cover few people and has been pre-engineered to offer no threat to the monopolistic big health insurers.
I know we want to win and the Republicans to lose, but lets face it, this bill is mainly corporate pork. There is patheticly limited assistance for the many victim's of America's health care crisis. To deny this by hiding behind the "think about the people who it will help" counter attack, belies near sociopathic levels of partisanship.
This bill leaves millions behind and squanders a grand opportunity to pass real reform, and that is the biggest cost of the bill, beyond the billions in pork for the big insurers. It may or may not pass. I don't know. But I do know that healthcare reform was lost 15 years ago and the next 15 years can be about making a bad bill a little less bad or it can be about real reform.
I am a Single Payer Democrat because everyone should have access to what Grandma has - Medicare as a guaranteed universal automatic minimum level of health care. Private plans can remain, built upon the foundation of the Medicare minimum entitlement.
Dealing with a life and death issue such as healthcare in a piecemeal incrementalist fashion as the Democrat pursue is a crime against our country, and I will not abide by it. 27,000 die every year. If you enter the ER without insurance you are twice as likely to die as someone who has it. This is moral outrage, a crisis of leadership, a sad statement about the role of money in our politics, and even a national security matter.
Single Payer Democrats are going to work that the 2012 party platform is single payer and that there are more Democrats running on single payer in the 2012 primary.
The right wing attacks on Medicare for All are fact-free brain-dead fear mongering. Sadly conservative democrats have been too chickenshit to fight the right wing to win by beating back on it. Instead they moved to the right. Single Payer Democrats believing in fighting the right wing by standing up to discredited ideologies and demagoguery.
Medicare is a hybrid public-private partnership combining the affordability and reliability of public financing with the innovative world class medicine afforded by privately-delivered health care.
Grandma loves Medicare and her doctor has come around to the fact that Medicare is a lot easier and better to deal with than the sharks in the private insurance racket.
Like the Public Option, Medicare For All enjoys broad and deep support in the American public, but unlike the Public Option (or worse) Medicare For All is real reform, solves the healthcare crisis and does it at an affordable price.
The bill in Congress is full of ammunition for Republicans but little of value for the American people nor the members of the Democratic coalition.
Single Payer is affordable and the right thing to do. It's overdue but it's just around the corner.
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