Anybody Else Longing For Single Payer?
Ok, now I am more than totally befuddled about our so called health care reform. Today the President announced that if you liked your piece of shit so called catastrophic health policy that covers practically nothing and leads you to bankruptcy court, you can keep it. If only the insurance companies will willingly volunteer to restore their pieces of shit policies. In the name of good citizenship.
Of course, there’s no certainty that the insurance companies can turn around on a dime and rescind cancellation notices they’ve sent out and reinstate these policies in about a 30 day window. Have you ever seen an insurance company pay any settlements in 30 days (excepting Medicare which turns around reimbursements on a dime)? Let alone retool suspended policies, write and mail out letters to policy holders explaining that the policy you thought they cancelled was in fact a piece of shit and compare the piece of shit option to a real policy you might, just might be able to buy on the Obamacare Exchange, if you’re lucky, persistent and unbusy enough to get into the site. Yea, I know, that last sentence needs some punctuation.
Yup. I caved and gave up on pushing my Party to give us a public option or a Medicare For all program and accepted the reality that wall street pushed and bribed our party of the people to subsidize the insurance industry to do the right thing and give us things like no preexisting condition, not cancel us when we really needed the insurance for illness or accident and so on and so forth. I caved with no illusions held by some in my Party that the Republicans would show love for our supporting one of the worst and ethics free sectors of our capitalist economy, the health insurance industry. I kinda knew they’d figure out a way to game us and sure enough, we’re here.
So, here we are stuck with this Rube Goldberg machine of a payer system. Let’s just hope the gears are well oiled and don’t further freeze up on us. At least until America comes to its senses and we replace all this claptrap with Single Payer.
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Wow! This was such a brilliant, well written argument for the single payer system. Please keep writing things JUST LIKE THIS!
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“Today the President announced that if you liked your piece of shit so called catastrophic health policy that covers practically nothing and leads you to bankruptcy court, you can keep it.”
Um, he’s actually been announcing it from the onset of this debacle.
Now he claims HE is going to allow people to keep their policies for a year despite what the law says, which would be right after next years elections. How convenient.
Can he even do that legally? I thought Congress was supposed to make or change the laws.
I’m not sure. But I do know that it needs to be fixed. Pining for single payer ain’t gonna cut it. Ted Cruz is already going into overdrive trying to turn this mid-term into a repeat of 2010. Under Obamacare, the blacks and illegal aliens are literally killing the decent, hard working white folks now (according the the most recent GOP talking points).
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/its-killing-real-americans-already.html
Under Obamacare, the blacks and illegal aliens are literally killing the decent, hard working white folks now (according the the most recent GOP talking points).
Conservatives tend to be short term thinkers in their policies. This mindset has entered their campaign policy. How many future voters will they lose in a growingly diverse country? They seem happy to lose the future for some short term gain.
PP asked:
Well, this isn’t health insurance — which we normally don’t see anyway — but when a Nationwide customer decided to pull out right in front of the Mustang, and sent said Mustang to an early grave, Nationwide was prompt, courteous, and I received our settlement check (for a lot more than I thought the car was worth) in less than a week after I had completed the paperwork.
PP wrote:
Actually, I’ve said all along that the gears were meant to seize up; this plan was never meant to work, but simply to pass, to establish the principle that the federal government is ultimately responsible for your health care coverage. Then, when it fails, the Democrats will say, “See? We tried it the ‘conservative’ way, using the private health insurance companies, and it didn’t work, so single-payer is all that’s left.” The idea of going back to 2008, before the principle was established, will be off the table.
My guess is that we will get some form of single payer. It will cover everybody, sure enough, but it won’t provide anywhere close to the medical care we get now. Almost every democratic government is experiencing financial troubles, and governments are having to cut costs; medical care costs will not be exempt from that.
“Almost every democratic government is experiencing financial troubles, and governments are having to cut costs”
No, governments will have to stand up to corporations and raise taxes.
I always hear these stories where people thought their house or car or health care was covered for some particular damage or incident only to find out after the fact that the particular plan they have, doesn’t cover these things.
The next time a guy tries to sell me insurance for anything, and starts going on about how much coverage I will get, I’m going to insist that the person gives equal time to what coverage I’m not going to get.
Good plan. In my experience most insurance is a scam designed to enrich insurance company CEOs.
This was where he should have gone in the first place instead of this smelly Repuk Plan, but then during his first term he had no balls
I’ve never understood why Democrats don’t see the merit in allowing Republicans to be on the losing side of popular initiatives. Single payer, corporate tax reform, real banking reform, minimum wage, entitlement reform that collects taxes more fairly?
They are all big winners with the public, but since Bill Clinton, Dems like John Carney have the idea that they need to be on the side of the 1%ers.
Mr Geezer wrote:
And who will actually pay those taxes? Why, you will!
Corporations don’t pay taxes; they simply collect taxes from the end users of their products, all the way down the chain, until the product stops moving economically. When you buy a gallon of milk, you are paying the corporate taxes, the Social Security taxes, the excise taxes, the fuel taxes, the property taxes and every other tax imposed on the dairy which owned and milked the cow, the trucker who took the raw milk to the dairy processor / bottler, the dairy processor / bottler, the trucking company which took the bottled milk to the grocery store, and the grocery store itself. You then turn the milk into something which cannot be sold, and then pay taxes for disposing of the waste byproducts from digesting the milk. And people wonder why stuff costs so much.
Corporate taxes are the dirty little secret of our politicians, Republican and Democrat alike: they would much rather raise taxes that you won’t see, but you wind up paying them anyway.
Except “his going there” wasn’t, remotely, a possibility. Keep it real, TT.
As someone who has actually suffered through individual health insurance that started out cheap, but got super expensive every year – finally ending up more than my monthly mortgage payment – and handled benefits for one of those small businesses conservatives claim to love only to see how insurance companies dump all over (and drop) these “beloved” small businesses as soon as someone gets sick may I suggest that people learn a little more about the health insurance scam.
Go on and keep your crappy insurance. Anyone with a functioning brain cell knows they’re crap. The reason people don’t know they’re crap is due to luck – they’ve never had to use them.
If you’re interested in what really goes on read my post from 2008, and then get back to me.
There is no proof to support Dana’s assertion that increases in corporate taxes are borne by consumers. In fact, there is some proof on the other side of the question. Also – if higher taxes increased costs to consumers, it would stand to reason that lower taxes would reduce costs to consumers. There is no such relationship.
The assumption is righwing folklore. It is part of that zero-sum mania that seems to consume all actual thought on the right. In Dana we have a near perfect specimen of a simple minded dolt who is easy prey for those out to exploit the middle class. I’m going to keep the experiment going for a little while, but I have to say it is getting too predicable.
Well, Mr 330, are you saying that corporate taxes somehow don’t come out of the prices they charge for their products? If corporations don’t pay the taxes out of the revenues they earn, from where does that money come?
Even if you argue that corporate taxes actually reduce profits rather than simply increase prices, the money paid in taxes by corporations still has to come from the revenue they earn.
Of course, why you’d want to reduce profits for corporations remains a mystery, since the vast majority of working Americans work for private businesses. If you make profits more difficult to earn, you reduce the incentives for businesses to take risks to expand and hire more workers.
Well, Mr 330, are you saying that corporate taxes somehow don’t come out of the prices they charge for their products?
Yes.
Mr 330 wrote:
OK, if the taxes that corporations pay do not come from the revenues, from the prices that they charge for their products, from where does the money come?
Ooh! From their worker bees!
The Dem’s had the house Senate and the White House got this piece of crap passed without Repuk Help screwed around with Grassley for months made changes to suit that asshole who voted no anyway this was the chance to get single payer instead we ended up with a Repuk plan just goes to show you that the Dem’s don’t know how to use power when they have it.So now we are stuck with Mittens crap
again, to me this all comes down to messaging. And because the piece of shit democrats are just as in bed with their Healthcare Overlords as the Republicans are, they won’t blast and speak ill of them and their preying upon the stoopid.
there inability to blast the corporations taking advantage of millions of Americans is nauseating. God forbid they don’t get fundraising money for the next election cycle. They wouldn’t be able to keep serving and protecting the citizens of this great nation
i hate them all
ok,so don’t tax corporations. Maybe it’s true about all the business benefits that would accrue. But then balance it with a tax hiike an individual taxes on the top 20%, who are after all the ones who will be scooping up all the loot. And take a little extra for single payer health care.
t
Truth Teller didn’t exactly tell the truth:
The facts are pretty obvious: every Democratic candidate in the 2008 primaries ran on some form of universal health care coverage, but only two — Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich — ran on single-payer, and they got next to no support in the primaries. The “big three” of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards all had plans fairly similar to what was passed, utilizing the existing private health insurance network.
Single-payer was never (seriously) offered as an alternative in Congress, and would never have passed if it had been: so many deals and bargains and what not had to be offered to get the last few Democratic Senators to vote for what did pass, and you’d never have gotten Ben Nelson or Mary Landrieu or Claire MacKaskill on board for single-payer, because their constituents just wouldn’t have it.
And you can add to that the “blue dog” Democrats from the South who wouldn’t have voted for single-payer in the House.
It’s really a shame that single-payer wasn’t the plan that was offered . . . because it would have been defeated.