PUBLIC OPTION PLEASE!
The Stupak Amendment is a catastrophe, but frankly its inclusion in the House bill only serves to highlight that this entire process has moved into a dangerous twilight zone which I fear won't be good for the American people.
Read what Hunter just wrote. Every word is accurate.
That said, we need to hold our noses, fight and push back harder than ever. Then we need to get rid of lots of Corporate Democrats. Maybe a ton of them will be defeated next year when the American people see their premiums continue to skyrocket for all the angst and anxiety the reform is causing those we elect to do our business.
Could you please make some calls today and tomorrow, we need to get a reading on where House progressives stand vis a vis the opt-out and triggers as we end into the end game.
So right now our political goal is to turn a turd lemon into lemonade. And right now my own personal goal is to figure out which high deductible and very expensive junk insurance policy is least bad. I got hit with a 32% rate increase, and I'm one of the lucky ones, it could have been the 100% increase the insurance industry is sucker punching many Americans with.
And it's only going to get worse.The insurance industry is going to hit us with everything they have, and the reality is, bewildered Americans will take it out on the Dems. in 2010. I'm so naive that I thought when President Obama was sworn in, one of his first acts would be to issue some sort of executive order, giving the American people just minimal protections from this predatory industry. Stupid me.
The subsidies which are being proposed won't be sufficient to make purchasing junk insurance affordable for those Americans most in need of these subsidies. Proposing that a family earning 400% of the FPL or around $88,000 pay 12% of their income for private insurance, just doesn't make sense. Ask Jose Luis Vara, the recipient of a living donor kidney who I wrote about yesterday.
There's an article in Politico worth reading which describes where costs are headed. You may consider Politico a rag, but this piece is accurate, and Ron Wyden is correct. This doesn't look good for Democrats. But why should we be surprised that they're for the most part clueless given the bubble they occupy.
I never thought I'd agree with Ron Wyden, but boy is he correct.
For small businesses and individuals who purchase their own plans, economists remain sharply divided over the impact on premiums.
"This town continues to miss what is going to be the real issue," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said. "The real lodestar, the thing people are focusing on at home, is all premiums, premiums, premiums. All you have right now is what the insurance industry has said."
At a recent Senate health committee hearing, two health care rivals – Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, and Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor whose work is cited often by the White House – agreed comprehensive, objective evidence wasn’t available for small and large businesses.
"It’s insane," Holtz-Eakin said.
If we don't get lower premiums, insurance industry regulation and we remove the specter of financial ruin from the front windshield of every American family that faces illness or injury, then what exactly are we being sold?
We were told during the campaign that families would see their premiums decrease on average $2500 per year, we're not even hearing that any longer and this, dear friends, is a very bad omen.
Obama was the one who raised expectations of lower premiums. From one city to the next, and during the presidential debates, Obama made the pledge almost as often as he vowed to remove troops from Iraq: "We estimate we can cut the average family’s premium by about $2,500 per year."
He has barely uttered it since taking office. The last recorded mention by Obama was in May, when he announced that six health industry groups agreed to lower the growth rate in health care spending by $2 trillion over 10 years, resulting in a savings of $2,500 per family "in the coming years."
And here's the grim take home message.
If premiums are the benchmark by which reform is judged, "we are setting ourselves up to fail," Gruber said. "Premiums will still go up, but they will go up less than they would" without the overhaul.
We only solve our national catstrophe with a single payer system, this is as obvious as the nose on my face. But it's not to be, and what we are witnessing the the impossibility of fitting a round peg into a square hole. It can't be done.
The precondition of building reform on an infrastructure of private health plans has resulted in a fixation of trying to make premiums and out-of-pocket expenses affordable when it is an impossibility under this model.
http://www.pnhp.org/...
So, sit back as your premiums continue to skyrocket and maybe after a Democratic drubbing in 2010, wiser minds will prevail.
But right now, please keep fighting and calling.
Could you please make some calls today and tomorrow, we need to get a reading on where progressives stand as we end into the end game.
PUBLIC OPTION PLEASE!