You know, the real meaning of Obama's "Choice" meme now, and always, has really not been about choice at all, its about denying Americans access to quality affordable health care, and prioritizing coercive corporate profits over people's lives, forever.
Please take a few moments to read why the administration's oft repeated "choice" meme is really an almost obscenely hypocritical coded message to the elite promising them that their profits will continue, Americans will get NO AFFORDABLE CHOICES.
You would never hear a European leader say that if their healthcare system helped sick people, and for that reason, went over its budget, he would veto it, for example.
NY Times: Millions of Americans face years without jobs
Lets face it, the healthcare system we have known since the postwar era is in a crisis and the powerful players who can are trying to loot as much as they can before it (and American families, and the nation) collapses.. Their profit-centric system is completely unsustainable.
Millions of Americans have lost health insurance, are underinsured, or have never had insurance at all and can't afford even basic healthcare. They are off the healthcare map.
Everyone has been seeing huge premium hikes and millions of hapless Americans and many businesses have had to reduce coverage or even drop insurance coverage.
Even the luckiest of us have had to pay more, as the insurers charge more. Businesses, bluntly, are reeling. They sometimes pass more of it on to employees. But, we long ago reached our breaking point. We are broken. But, what do we get from Washington. NO CHANGE, NO NEW LEGISLATION THAT STOPS THE INSURANCE GOUGING,
NOTHING BUT DENIAL AND MORE DENIAL. Nothing but faux outrage and unfortunately, what I increasingly think of as O-drama. Skillfull evasion of the real issues.
Have the hikes sparked honesty and discussion from this administration? NO. Americans need to speak up to the "professional" politicians, and say, STOP THE CRAP. You are not fooling anybody. Time is a wasting. We already waited for EIGHT YEARS of Bush, and we expect action, not in years, now.
Any politician who thinks they can pretend that a bill based on insurance companies is not already, a failure, is an idiot.
They need to get to work. Or get out.
How can they give Americans what they voted for, quality affordable health care, like the health care people right across the border in Canada get, for example?
NOT by their "business as usual approach" obviously. The bill they have wont work. It cannot work because clearly its designed to fail. Even Obama admitted during the primaries that you could not mandate that people buy healthcare under our current system - because enough healthcare to actually "cover" people (and not just the hospitals for their costs, delivering very minimal care) is not affordable for 4/5 of Amrican age earners without ditching the huge costs associated with insurers and billing them, and the studied, intentional avoidance of government regulation of drug prices to international norms..
Look at the four year delay, proof that they already know their lies, their false hopes, won't work.
First, we need some honesty. Especially from President Obama. People need to call him on his hypocrisy. Not allow more speeches that pretend that these hikes are some kind of abberation, not the norm. We need to similarly stop the media from pretending that things will improve without the long needed, and now, by necessity, total structural change. These hikes are not "spikes", they are permanent thefts of people's life blood. Our nation's future. They are intolerable and the system is not fixable in its current form. If they wanted, or meant, to fix it, they would have years ago.
As long as we have corrupt politicians in Washington, prices will rise.
That is why we have to demand real change, NOW, or we will never get it.
If not now, WHEN?
The charade that is called "party politics" is being used as a smokescreen for "big ripoff in progress".
Its all a play, and the actors aren't very convincing.
The hypocrisy of the Obama administration in pretending that the increases don't mean anything is particularly galling. The reason of course is that they have put all their eggs in that one very broken basket, that one which is designed to deny Americans affordability. That is being done, sneakily, by means of the "choice" meme they repeat so often. However, "choice" is not just a big lie, its the very means by which they conceal the lack of any valid choice. Your child ended up being killed by this system? Well, YOU just made the wrong choice! Your mother had every penny she had taken and she still died because she could not afford medicine she needed, well, she just didn't save enough, or she bought the wrong brand insurance, the system isn't designed that way. Americans still can afford healthcare, as long as they have a choice. (Even when their own Fed says unequivvocably that 4/5ths of them can't)
Its all such a soothing LIE. To conceal that we actually have no choices as those choices all are chosen for us in the pursuit of money, even when its killing literally millions of people. It has to stop.
Choice? lets look at our real choices. Not only were valid choices during the last year never offered, people who stood up to demand they be considered wre arrested. And we really have no choices.
They claim insurance gives you choices in healthcare. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone else has more choices than almost all Americans. American doctors choices are also highly limited, and that often results in highly adverse consequences, including deaths, for patients.
Also, Americans choices in doctors are more limited than those of citizens in the entire rest of the developed world, American doctors are increasingly gagged by contractual agreements that prevent their patients from getting - or even learning about quality care.
A caste system has developed that has only a small number of Americans getting modern, world class care, which must be segregated from the much greater number getting increasingly mediocre HMO-mangled care.
The working class, unable to afford to self pay, gets no care until drained of all they have, many getting practically no care - unless they are destitute - and then qualify for Medicaid -stripped of everything they own. The system was designed to be punitive- and dysfunctional, even at the very beginning, at huge cost.. The care the underinsured or uninsured only too late receive is intentionally too little, too late.
The "reform" being proposed, cannot and does not change any of these dynamics. It was designed by politicians, for politicians, its coercive, and is already clear that it intentionally preserves the problems in all their glory. Even at the beginning, it did.
By virtue of the fact that it cannot be allowed to threaten that system, will be inherently inadequate and punitive.
Paradoxically, research has shown that this approach, when taken )both in the US and elsewhere, as it is the default in the Third World) (surprise) dramatically increases costs and destroys lives, (even as it maximizes profits on the misfortune of families)
The net result is to make what we do, how we do things, MORE expensive than it would be to simply GIVE everyone high quality care WHEN THEY NEEDED IT, NOT later.
This should be obvious to anybody with the ability to think logically, and its been pointed out in many scholarly papers. Its also been pointed out that by avoiding the lessons that have been learned over the last century all over the world we are dooming Americans to a situation that cannot improve, only grow worse as they fall farther and farther behind the rest of the world health wise. It all comes down to the administration's choice to throw its lot in with private insurers, no-matter what the cost in lives. They absolutely cannot discuss the terrifying implications of double digit premium hikes because to do that is to admit their defeat on affordability. Because that is the clear message of these premium hikes to any intelligent person. The American elite and the political class of both US ruling parties have invested their constituents irresponsibly in a system that only benefits them, not their constituents. It adds absolutely no value besides insulating politician from responsibilities that polticians elsewhere have no problem with. And it costs so much that it makes affordable healthcare for all impossible by its existence (perversely, its main function is to deny care)
The Obama administration is trying to pretend that healthcare that relies on private insurers and avoids using the buying power of the government to make modern drugs affordable to all (the norm in the rest of the developed world) will be affordable when the evidence is overwhelmingly that it will not. One has to admitre the sheer gaul of the administration and the incredible deftness of their PR firms, but the reality is staring us all in the face, we need to discuss it.
Instead, they are trying to focus attention on anything but that, the one problem we need to solve to roll prices back to the level where Americans can afford them. The only way to do that without causing HUGE disruptions for providers is to eliminate the 50% waste of insurers and billing them, losing around six tenths of one percent, or 450,000 jobs in the health insurance industry. (At least they would not have to worry about finding jobs with heath insurance, plus there would probably be an economic boom once we addressed healthcare in a modern, affordable way, without worstening the deficit) Otherwise, if we adopt the fake reforms being put forward or if we stay in the mess we are now, healthcare gets less affordable fast and we disrupt one sixth of the economy by making healthcare unaffordable for all Americans.
Look at Canada. Every Canadian can go to any hospital or doctor in the country (sometimes, when a Canadian needs a procedure not available in Canada, the Canadian government even pays for Canadians to be treated by expert specialists elsewhere, like here.) For an American to buy such quality "coverage" (in other words, the coverage that covers and not merely pretends to) would cost, I am told, $45,000 a year.. Far more than the so-called "Cadillac plan".
Compare that real healthcare to the the HMO approach which increasingly is to withhold tests, gag doctors, and force them to deny care. They don't admit it but their actions show that they hope the patient with a complex or unusual problem dies before they get care.
Its going to get much worse before it gets better if we stay on the road we are being led along. The race to the bottom, the lowering of the legal "standard of care", is inherent to a system that prioritizes profit, whose business model depends on denying care.
And, of course, even the "bait" in the bait and switch, is phony.. Any "self sustaining" public plan dependent on premiums is really not dissimilar. It suffers under a huge self-imposed disadvantage in that it always has to play second fiddle to the private plans, guaranteeing THEIR profitability and dooming itself to the death spiral - which will make affordability impossible.
Everyone should consider the "choice" imposed on a public plan by its limited risk pool, the portion of the population not being offered a plan through work, who is willing to pay the huge cost of individual insurance (so private individual insurance can remain profitable) It will take the sick, it will price out the healthy. It must pay "market rate" (defined by what people will pay) As it exists alongside of for profit plans they will ALWAYS cherry pick the healthy because they will be cheaper (after all, they are experts at dumping the sick)
The public plan will rapidly be buried with costs and because it is not able to negotiate prices down (needing to pay the going rate, which is determined by the existence of other payers) it will guarantee non-affordability for most of us. For example, it will continue the gouging on drug prices.. Americans will continue having to pay as much as four times more for drugs than Europeans, and similarly for other goods and services.
As far as CHOICE is concerned, contrast the US situation as it exists with that in Europe, where Europeans from any EU country, (and they all enroll everybody) can go to ANY hospital and see ANY doctor. Insurers, in the nations where they exist, are usually nonprofit by nature, heavily regulated, and they make no decisions about care, doctors do. All necessary medical care is included, (NOT "minimal" as many here would have you believe)
Government involvement is deliberately structured to maintain DOCTORS independence and typically, it acts in the public interest in ways that Americans have never seen here. Because things work. They do guide policy so that the public interest is best served.
The net result is that millions of Americans, including many "insured" can not afford care, and annually, hundreds of thousands (only those in hospitals are counted in the 101,000 preventable deaths figure) die from lack of care here, while Europeans and Canadians not only get care,, they get far better care than most Americans do, because the system is not based on profit, and cost is not prioritized above all else.
You would never hear a European leader say that if their healthcare system went over budget, he would veto it, for example.
Just another example, of how Americans need to hold politicians to higher, international standards or risk another decade of decline, a decline that will increasingly be impossible for this nation to recover from as whole generations become sicker and sicker due to their not getting quality healthcare when they do pay, and increasingly, few being able to afford even basic quality health care.