...Is a disaster for the American people.
I understand that there are some good things in this bill, and I also understand the fear that killing this bill will kill any chance of reform for another generation.
Like I said, I get the fear. But to suggest that to kill this very bad bill that mandates insurance purchased from the very same private insurance companies we are attempting to reign in, will result in another 20 to 40 years without reform, is, well, spineless.
And while you mull that over, you better get your head around this inconvenient fact:
The ONLY reason mandated health insurance made any sense at all was because the PUBLIC OPTION would have been in place to hold down costs.
WITHOUT THE PUBLIC OPTION, MANDATED INSURANCE IS ONLY A GIFT TO THE INSURANCE COMPANIES.
We are about to accept - with apparent gratitude - only a part of the entire equation. And I do not understand how so many do not see this simple, basic truth.
And to suggest that there is NO HOPE of another attempt at health care reform for 20 to 40 years is patently ridiculous.
What - is there a time limit? Are we only allowed to discuss major problems once every other generation? Do we get penalized if we try again with a better bill? WHO EXACTLY creates this limitation? We the People? Congress? Lobbyists? WHO?
So go ahead and give up the good fight. Settle, as many certainly will, for the worst half of the equation, for the part of the math that only benefits the already obscenely wealthy.
Because that was not how Mr. Obama explained it to us when he sold us on the idea of mandated insurance. He sold us mandated insurance hand-in-hand with the public option. To accept only the mandate, is to defeat ourselves.
So we all buy mandated insurance, and then what? We live happily ever after?????
UPDATE: Found this at Raw Story:
A Raw Story analysis, based on a recent Harvard Medical School study, estimates that 135,000 American citizens and over 6,600 US veterans will die due to a lack of health insurance before current proposed healthcare reform measures would take effect.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand US lives far exceeds the total number of Americans who died in the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the attacks of 9/11 combined. The lives of over 6,600 US veterans is more -- by over 1,300 -- than the total number of US soldiers who have thus far died in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Health reform policy experts who spoke with Raw Story confirmed that the House and Senate bills would do virtually nothing for currently uninsured Americans until 2013 and 2014, respectively. Raw Story’s calculations are based on the House health reform bill’s projections. The Senate bill, however, would add another year of lethal lag time, driving up the estimated death rate by tens of thousands more US citizens and veterans.
In part, the proposed Senate and House healthcare reform bills don't begin providing comprehensive coverage for several years because they are designed to meet President Obama's promised goal of creating a "deficit-neutral" healthcare package.
Raw Story’s analysis is based on a recent Harvard Medical School study published in the American Journal of Public Health and a subsequent report by a team of Harvard Medical School researchers who took part in the initial study.
The first study revealed that approximately 45,000 Americans die each year from lack of health insurance. The second study, released on the eve of this past Veterans Day, estimated that more than 2,200 US veterans died in 2008 due to a lack of health insurance.
In an interview with Raw Story, Dr. David Himmelstein, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the two studies, also pointed out a rarely discussed fact: The proposed reforms in both the House and Senate bills, even in the long run, would still leave "vast numbers" of Americans uninsured and those who are partially insured with inadequate coverage.
In the House bill, for instance, even after uninsured Americans would begin receiving health insurance, a projected 18 million would still not be covered; roughly 23 million would remain uninsured in the Senate bill.
"So basically they’ve taken the bad approach and the slow approach both," said Himmelstein, a proponent of a national single-payer healthcare system. "And there’s no particular reason other than political expediency why either of those things should exist."