Surprisingly, when I've posted to try to convince people of the huge benefits to making healthcare affordable by moving to a single payer health care plan like those enjoyed by the people of Canada, France, the UK, and a host of other nations, they accuse me of being unrealistic. What bothers me, though is the reality, THEY are being unrealistic.
They are being extremely unrealistic. First, lets look at the economy. The government is fixated on the business community's interests, which makes a great deal of sense, its very expensive to get elected and the business community contributes to Senators and Congresspeople's re-election chests..
But, the vast community of people, most of whom are not huge campaign donors, also spend money, assuming they have it. What would be the ONLY way to ACTUALLY "insure" that the majority of Americans would still be able and willing to spend money at least decades into an uncertain future. America's middle class was for most of the last century the envy of the world's, providing the model for many other countries growth, but now we are heading towards a future of work and the workplace that may be much more demanding and competitive than that of the present day.
Look, I will be straight with you. The government is not going to solve the healthcare situation with anything "optional". They don't want to.
They also don't want to acknowledge that single payer healthcare would be the best stimulus package there could possibly be, because it removes a huge dark cloud that hovers over Americans and businesses, the predatory excesses of the health insurers and the skyrocketing, unchecked US health care costs.
Single payer is the acknowledged way to fix the mess, the one many other nations have used, successfully, and everybody admits it.
Why wont they act to make it happen? Because some feel that they can get away with not doing it. There are the same people who feel that ALL salaries and ALL benefits should be declining, because of supply and demand.
In a sick way, they have a point. Economists and scientists agree, there is a clock ticking. "If current trends continue" in just a few years, our middle class will be gone. They want to avoid what they see as a massive entitlement that won't go so much to keep a workforce healthy, as to keep nation partly composed of people who can no longer find jobs healthy. Its the same argument some right wing people are quietly making - They feel that "since we no longer need it" they want to end public funding of education. "Starve the Beast" they say.
They know that single payer would work, and that it would become hugely popular, like it has in Canada, France, the UK and in many other countries.
So, its my feeling that without a massive outpouring of support NOW for single payer. this is arguably our last chance, we probably wont get another shot at it in 15 years like we are getting now, 15 long years after 1993. "Public Option" was the same strategy used then.(it didn't even have to pass to be used to kill single payer first) The media was cooperative in confusing the issues involved. The same strategy is being employed now.
Supporting the vague "public option" is like supporting your own disenfranchisement, because public option was designed to stop single payer. It wont save any money, it wont offer any guarantees of affordability, and it wont give the middle class any more security than they have now that they wont be bankrupted by UNCOVERED health care costs. Why? because it is like a band aid on the shattering hull of a Titanic.
Shame on you, Senators Baucus, Schumer, and others for lying about the death spiral potential traps that could easily affect public option. Tell us the facts!
Only by changing the BASE STRUCTURE BY WHICH WE PAY FOR HEALTHCARE - matching the SUCCESSFUL structures in many of our neighbors, (and also giving Americans an easy way to compare their own situation and politicians to others) will we overcome the governments TERRIBLE TRACK RECORD of BROKEN PROMISES - Only by fundamentally changing the landscape, saving 31% - a HUGE amount of money, will we make healthcare affordable and overcome their broken promises and tendency to weasel out of every campaign promise like greased pigs..
Look at their track record on other, related issues. particularly those related to financial matters and the working people of America. They will NOT BE ABLE TO FIX THIS PROBLEM WITH ANYTHING ELSE.
"A universal public system would be financed in the following way: The public funds already funneled to Medicare and Medicaid would be retained. The difference, or the gap between current public funding and what we would need for a universal health care system, would be financed by a payroll tax on employers (about 7%) and an income tax on individuals (about 2%). The payroll tax would replace all other employer expenses for employees’ health care, which would be eliminated. The income tax would take the place of all current insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles, and other out-of-pocket payments. For the vast majority of people, a 2% income tax is less than what they now pay for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket payments such as co-pays and deductibles, particularly if a family member has a serious illness. It is also a fair and sustainable contribution."
Its interesting to see the history of public option as universal healthcare killer..
This is from Columbia Journalism Review, a magazine for journalists about journalism..
http://www.cjr.org/...
"Now comes New York Times columnist David Brooks damning Hillary Clinton with faint praise. In his Tuesday column, Brooks says he’s no "Hillary-hater" and even calls her an "outstanding senator." Then Brooks lets loose his canon fire, writing that, at certain moments, "her dark side emerges and threatens to undo the good she is trying to achieve." Her dark side surfaced, Brooks said, when she dismissed a health reform proposal put forth in 1993-94 by Jim Cooper, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee. Brooks, who portrays Cooper as a thoughtful, cordial guy, reports that when Cooper met with Clinton to discuss their differences, she rebuffed him—"the coldest reception of my life," Cooper called it. "I was excoriated."
David Brooks wrote that column during the primaries when Obama hired Jim Cooper, former GOP Democratic congressman from Tennesee, to be a consultant to his campaign on "health reform".
"I know columnists have license to be one-side and opinionated, but sometimes their less-than-objective reportage and opinions have a way of becoming eternal truth. If Hillary Clinton had a dark side, Jim Cooper’s efforts at health reform did, too, and that tale is worth remembering by the press as Clinton and Obama duke it out over similar issues. Cooper’s campaign to insert his brand of reform into the mix in 1994 is something that we at CJR know a lot about. In "The Selling of ‘Clinton Lite,’" published in March/April 1994, we chronicled his efforts to woo and wow the press to get them on board with his plan using the same kind of empty talk and sloganeering we hear today. Cooper dubbed his plan ‘Clinton Lite,’ which, unlike Clinton’s, did not anger employers with a mandate to cover their workers."
So, although most people wouldn't realize what a deal killer this would have been/will be, healthcare wonks would realize that adverse selection would make the plan unprofitable..and so if expectatins were primed otherwise, "the increased efficiency of managed competaition /public option?) unworkable if it actually DID depend on profits to keep it afloat. If it believed its own bullshit.. (the Schumer conditions in the modern version?)
" It did not require individuals to buy insurance, and it did not offer any serious way to address the high price of medical care other than market forces. (We know what’s happened to health care costs since then.) Cooper’s plan was a laissez-faire version of managed competition the Clintons were promoting, and was more acceptable to the health care providers and HMOs he needed to support his run for the Senate that year. For those who have forgotten, under managed competition buyers of health care would join large cooperatives that would purchase coverage for their members while managed care companies would compete to supply insurance at the lowest price."
Wow, again, kind of like Cooper's Obama's public option!
"Cooper crafted a clever marketing plan for an end run around the House subcommittees, which were controlled by single-payer advocates. His strategy called for a "preemptive compromise" in which a bill with a groundswell of support, or what he called a "supermajority," would be positioned as the ultimate agreement. CJR reported that his goal was to "control the debate" on health care by positioning his bill as a mainstream or centrist approach that would force the Clintons to negotiate. To cast his bill as the winner, he needed the press to show he had growing bipartisan support. In his column, Brooks says that Cooper eventually picked up fifty-eight co-sponsors in the House, both Democrats and Republicans. CJR pointed out that his bill had forty-eight co-sponsors when it was introduced and that sponsorship was not necessarily indicative of support. That year many members of Congress signed on to more than one plan.
The press cooperated and conveyed the impression that the Cooper bill was winning a popularity contest. U.S. News & World Report wrote that the proposal was "most likely to succeed" because it had "bipartisan middle-of-the-road support" and will cost less—the same points Cooper made in his press materials. The Washington Post quoted Cooper as saying his bill "is becoming so popular it’s scaring people to death down at the White House." Cooper told USA Today he had the most popular plan in America. "We’re the only bipartisan approach," he told Time.
"
Deja vu!
"Like the media so far in this year’s campaign, the press in 1994 didn’t explain how ordinary people would be affected. In fact, the press couldn’t even agree on how many people would be covered because Cooper himself gave conflicting numbers. The Palm Beach Post reported that Cooper predicted his plan would cover nearly as many of the uninsured as Clinton’s plan, which was 100 percent. The Washington Post quoted him as saying that 60 percent would be covered, and the Los Angeles Times said that by his own estimate 20 percent of the uninsured would not be covered—80 percent would be. Sounds sort of like Clinton and Obama sparring over whose plan is more universal, doesn’t it?
Finally, this year, according to Brooks, Cooper argues that Clinton’s more coercive approach to getting people covered will once again be a political death knell. Says Brooks, Cooper believes "it’s smarter to begin by offering people affordable access to coverage and evolve from there." Perhaps he means cheap policies that don’t cover much, like the one Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield sold in Ohio last fall. "
(Obama has also been a huge advocate of what he calles "choice" - which comes with a huge amount of risk, and not much "insurance". (Uncovered healthcare costs - often to those who started their illness with "health insurance" are the single largest cause of bankruptcies in the USA.)
"It came with deductibles ranging from $4000 to $20,000 and $8000 to $40,000 for families who use out-of-network doctors. The policy covered only two doctor visits a year. It’s those details we’d like to hear about as the campaign unfolds. But the lesson from "Clinton lite" could mean we won’t be getting many. If we forget the past, we may be condemned to repeating it."