Healthcare reform boils down to this - please ask yourself these questions

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

1. Is your current specific individual healthcare situation improved by the healthcare on the table as you understand it?

yes ___ no___

2.Are you willing to kill off our current reform bill in order to get something better?

yes ____ no____



If you answered yes to #2 please answer the other questions


What do you have to have in a better bill?


When do you expect this better bill?


What events have to occur in order for a better bill to actually happen?


Who will be responsible for delivering a better bill?


Are you ok with the fact that there will continue to be deaths due to Lack of Coverage while we fight for a better bill?


If your individual circumstances changed would that change your opinions about the current bill?

[Festivito]

1. Too soon yet, but, 1.YES, 2, yes.

1. The bill will stop them from dropping me, that is a clear YES. But, what does it do if I get sick and cannot pay premiums. Who are the unlucky 12-million? Me?

2. Yes I want more.

Full coverage for everything for everybody, which should be cheaper, safer, .. better.

Two years from now, after they kick our teeth out.

Yes, more people will die, unnecessarily. More are right now, more will with this bill in place.

I am not resolved to this yet, I need to hear more of what the thousands of pages say. If my situation changes I would only become more resolute.

BTW, my two questions:
It should cost 3-4K$/American for full coverage as it does in Canada and Europe, everyone, everything. We now pay between 6-8K$/American with a bloated mess of insurance companies not covering everything and everyone.

1. Do you think we're good enough to achieve a European or Canadian cost and can do HC for 3-4K$/year? ____ Yes, ____ No.

2. If we are good enough, how much more would you want to pay per American in order to deny some people or services. That is how much more, not how much less do you wish we all pay to deny HC. $______.00

[johnaries]

2. I'm afraid there's too much mis-information for people to be able

to answer #1.

RE: HR 3962(the "Pelosi Bill"); no co-pays for preventative care, lowered co-pays and deductibles, cannot be dropped or have premiums raised for being ill, no more caps on yearly outpays, etc., etc. Yes, it would MUCH better for me!

http://www.centerforpolicyanalysis.org/id57.html

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21849473/CBO-House-Health-Care

[Better Believe It]

3. No on #1 Yes on #2 The insurance industry and big Pharma wrote this bill.

If passed, it will kill meaningful health care reform and a single payer system for at least a generation.

[BzaDem]

4. This is incredible. Why do people keep assuming that we can somehow get something better?

It is really amazing (though not surprising) that there are still people on DU who acutally think that we can actually get something better than the current House bill (and that the way to go about doing it is to kill the House bill). There are always people who are living in another reality. But the sheer number of such people on DU is really a sight to behold.

In reality, we are not going to get a bill as good as the House bill. The resulting bill will unfortunately be much more conservative. This is as true as the statement 1+1=2. (In fact, both statements derive from nothing more than first grade addition of numbers no higher than three digits.)

But facts and logic don't sway the alternate reality crowd on DU. After all, these people think that 50+Biden = 60, or that 180=218. If they don't understand (or are in denial about) basic math, there isn't much hope in arguing with them based upon logic and reason.

The only hope of bringing these people back into our current reality is failure. Unmitigated, absolute failure.

This was one reason I was not disappointed when I heard Pelosi was leaning toward bringing the robust public option to the floor. As much as I wanted to see it enacted, I knew that it would never pass the House (let alone get 50 or even 60 votes in the Senate). But I was still not dissapointed that Pelosi was leaning towards bringing it up. Because some people in the Democratic party need a wakeup call. The resulting failure (by probably around 30+ votes) of a vote on a robust public option might have hurt momentum for passing a bill in the few days afterwards. But it would have provided a huge, in-your-face wakeup call to those in other realities. We would be able to stop having meaningless discussions about what type of single payer system we would be enacting. We could start to focus on the actual policy that is going to come out of Congress this session.

Unfortunately, this wakeup call never came about. Pelosi made the rational decision not to hold a vote that she knew she would lose. What Pelosi didn't see is that sometimes the rational decision is not the correct one. Some people in our base are not rational. They are irrational. Facts and numbers aren't enough. They need to see failure up close and personal in order to become more rational.

Undoubtedly, there will be other opportunities for this wakeup call. Reid most likely put a public option (which not only is not robust, but is opt-out) in the bill in order to pamper the small fraction of our base who would be apoplectic if we didn't have the vote. The result might be 10-20 cloture votes. And after 10-20 distinct, unambiguous failures to end debate, Reid will propose an amendment to get the best possible bill passed, and it will pass.

This isn't a desirable state of affairs. Reid shouldn't need to pamper a group of people who won't see reality until they see failure. But I understand why he needs to.

[Better Believe It]

5. I understand. Wanting a universal healthcare bill that will actually help people is irrational!

We should settle for a piece of crap written by the insurance industry because that's "realistic" and the best we can expect from the Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic president.

And this is change we can believe in!

So who won the 2008 elections?

[BzaDem]

6. The only way you are able to get away with your BS is by twisting other peoples' words.

I never waid wanting a universal healthcare bill is irrational. I said actually expecting to get one is irrational. It has been irrational since the election results of 2008 were known.

To put it bluntly, we did not win the 2008 elections. At all. Maybe the Democratic party officially won, but we did not. By "we," I mean "people who want a robust public option." The group of people who want one in the house are a MINORITY of the 435 seats. So really, this whole thing comes down to you not yet accepting the fact that we did NOT win the 2008 elections.

I'm sure you are going to post some useless BS about how this means I don't want universal healthcare and how the Democratic party platform contains universal healthcare and blah blah blah. And you are free to do so. There is no rule against spouting irrelevant information. But none of it changes the fact that if "we" is defined as "people who want universal healthcare," we plainly and unambiguously lost the 2008 elections.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

7. Not too many responding, but what I would have predicted is that

if your personal situation WAS helped by the bill that appears to be coming forth, you would not want to kill the bill and take the help that is offered like a drowning man grabs a lifeline.

I also thought that if your personal situation was not improved, that you would be willing to kill the current bill.

I personally fall into the first category, but I understand the second completely.

The questions I asked though, are really the gist of the matter. We need real reform desperately. It was a huge issue in the last election and was discussed at great length in the debates. The voters rejected Romney, McCain, Clinton and voted in Obama who had a detailed and specific healthcare plan which he dumped in the garbage the day after election and let the Congress and the "stakeholders" craft their self-serving legislation which turns out to be a combination of the Romney/McCain/Clinton plans!

This is what I have learned through this bruising experience so far:

*Campaign rhetoric counts for nothing if you don't have the will to push your own program. So now the campaign that brought me hope has made me more cynical than I would have believed possible.

*The incredibly flawed and reprehensible John Edwards had it right when he said if you negotiate with "the stakeholders" they will eat their lunch and yours too and that you had to be adversarial and "fight" them. Well, he was right.I never understood why you had to negotiate with regulated industries in the first place. You don't - they are regulated.

*The reason we don't have reform is that while the people want reform the politicians don't. They all want the least amount possible in order to keep their gravy train running and the people sedated for a little longer. But because the excesses and horrors had actually spilled over into the lives of too many Americans, they did in fact have to make a stab at patching some of the more egregious practices. Since did not make any real effort at cost containment, the actual problem of healthcare consuming our GDP is not addressed and we'll be back at the starting gate in short order - unless the excess population has been successfully killed off or is serving in prison labor farms for stealing bread and there is no one left to care.

*There is no expectation for anything better in the future - we will always get the reform "they"(you know, them) ALLOW us to have.
UNLESS there grows a large and compelling third party 2 issue movement and party for: single payer healthcare and campaign finance reform combined. You will never get one without the other.

So, my best advice is to take the reform we are allowed at this time and then figure out the future.

[Zodiak]

9. I feel the same way as you, Pheobe

The bill is horribly corporate and does too little for those that are underinsured/not insured.

But it is the best we can get out of our corrupt Congress....it should pass. But it should pass with our EYES WIDE OPEN..not with bromides, lipstick on pigs, and a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.

It is our responsibility now to change Congresscritters who have demonstrated themselves to be corrupt...not reward these idiots for the turd they produced. We will know the score when this is all said and done.

[CTLawGuy]

8. 1.

uncertain. I have state employee provided health insurance that I consider good.

2. No. Pass a bill that has positive aspects and then build on them later. For instance the banning of rescission is something that should NOT be put on the table.

[quiller4]

10. No to #1 and no to #2.

[paulk]

11. no on #1

I don't know on #2

I don't think we'll get anything better, so I find myself thinking we should take what we can get - but I'm not totally convinced that "what we can get" isn't a step backwards.

The most discouraging part of this whole clusterfuck has been that, even with large Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democrat in the White House, the reform it seems we are going to get is weighted so heavily toward the benefit of the health insurance industries and "Big Pharma".

I really did expect better.

I didn't think it was possible to get more cynical about politics, but the last election cycle and our current situation have proven me wrong.