Why do I keep getting appeals from MoveOn, DFA, CREDO to support mandated private insurance

[Leopolds Ghost]

With no mention of single-payer (except to say that fining people who do not purchase insurance, like Switzerland, is "single payer -- our "own" people are trying to tell us this!) with a public "option" (managed by the same firms) thrown in as a fig-leaf for those who qualify and do not wish to be fined by their friends in Congress and case managers in the "private" (state capitalist, like the FED) insurance industry who wrote this bill in 2000?

An option (available only to the "deserving") to avoid a fine for not purchasing existing insurance... hmm. "You keep using That word I do not think it means what you think it means."


More importantly, how do I get it to stop?


Unsubscribing merely emboldens these center-left functionary PACs,

as they seem to have become, since they only ever advocate what the leadership is currently pushing,

Unsubscribing over one issue (when they already sat back and did little on FISA) merely convinces them that we are only RW trolls, who oppose the current snake-in-the-grass proposal to turn health care from a right into an individual obligation, crafted by the Brookings Institution in close partnership with private insurance lobbyists who openly stated the objective was to strengthen health care by making it more profitable -- by criminalizing non-consumers and forcing them into the market. Like the Clinton administration (the same people pushing this bill now) criminalized poverty.

The objective seems to be to mobilize netizens to be part of the leadership's internal lobbying effort and keep them "on the inside", instead of providing a reasoned critique from the outside, as individual knowledgeable citizens engaged in civic discourse who understand concepts of immorality (like: not fining the working poor who wish to opt-out of a private insurance system). Of course, morality is supposed to be relative with some folks, isn't it? It's all shades of grey, that's why folks can't get too het up when the poor family gets evicted down the street in their otherwise affluent community.



On edit: based on the hostile response this message has gotten from some, I take it that MoveOn, CREDO, etc. are secure in their belief that mandated private payer is sufficiently uncontroversial that they can lobby for it as a deliberate alternative to single payer (Medicare / not fining people who do not wish to contract with a private party, cf. John Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx for that matter), without polling their membership?

That fining young people and the working poor for opting out of the marketplace some wish to put them in is universally held among older and well-employed Democrats as the sensible thing to do to decrease their own premiums, trickle-down style, by ensuring the coffers are flush?

[billyoc]

1. Report them to your ISP as spammers.

[Leopolds Ghost]

3. Not spammers, they genuinely believe all good members of the Party should support the industry plan.

Of course, some of these mass e-mail newsletter groups are simply funded by other organizations (mobile phone companies, the Democratic leadership) to target-market progressives and sell them on whatever the leadership thinks we should be advocating at the moment. That's not messaging -- it's manufacturing consent.

[berni_mccoy]

2. Because if you took the time to read HR3200 you'd realize it's not the boogie man you want it to be.

[Eric J in MN]

4. The House bill doesn't define the public option as...

...the gov't selling insurance for private companies.

Though the Senate HELP bill can be interpreted that way.

[Leopolds Ghost]

6. Does any Dem support fining people who do not enroll in private insurance

Or cannot afford to by their OWN market test (not the gov'ts -- we've seen how they treat the working poor)?

Health care is a right, not an obligation.

The existence of a fine implies that the public option will be a joke in whatever form it takes.

Were a public option available to most uninsured, wealthy and upper middle class members of the Democratic Party would not be insisting that private coverage be made mandatory with a grab bag of "options" for those that qualify. (means-tested)

The fine is DESIGNED to make sure most people enroll in existing private plans.

(the lobbyists who wrote this bill in the early 2000s, back before Mitt Romney or Edwards signed onto it, said the purpose of the numbers as they are constructed is to increase the profitability of the private health insurance industry, not decrease it, and that the objective was to create an alternative to single payer which they viewed as unacceptable)

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. I'm still trying to figure out what the fuck your first sentence means. nt

[Leopolds Ghost]

7. You know perfectly well what "state capitalism" means.

If you didn't understand what I was saying you wouldn't be cursing
(presumably in disgust that "ANY good Democrat would OPPOSE what MY MoveOn is doing")

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. And i call bullshit -

you claim to be for single-payer, but against the public option, on grounds that people will be 'forced' to buy insurance and not opt out -

but with single payer you are FORCED to buy insurance (through your taxes) and nobody can opt out. You claim that 'the plan' is for private insurance to administer the public option (when there is no single plan as of yet), but who would administer single payer? Medicare?

What's the difference?

You are just trying to keep ANYTHING from changing because you KNOW that single payer is off the table, and if you can help get enough people to mistrust the public option then who wins? The people or the insurance companies?

As for my cursing, fuck you and fuck your fucking insinuation that I substitute fucking cursing for fucking thought.

And fuck you.

[Leopolds Ghost]

9. You support fining people who do not "purchase" a commoditized product from a private party

You don't understand what it means to be a liberal.

And you don't understand why it's illegal to, say, tax Americans who do not shop at Wal-Mart.

It's called freedom of contract between private consenting parties and is the basis for the inferred right to privacy in the Constitution (source of Roe v. Wade) and is also the basis for claims that we live in a "free market" that is supposedly better than "socialism" (which wants nothing to do with schemes like this one). In essence, this Third Way is state capitalism.

Health care is a right, not an individual obligation of a "consumer" in your fictitious "marketplace".

It isd you who are trying to reframe the debate by insisting that the current plan is on "the road to single payer".

It was written by industry lobbyists to STAVE OFF single payer. They SAID SO. They said so when they sold it to Mitt Romney as the "Massachusetts Plan" -- which you, and the Clinton crowd, support. The Romney Plan.

What else do you want to take away as a right and make an individual consumer obligation?

[Leopolds Ghost]

10. Furthermore, a tax is not a penalty.

There is a clear distinction both in intent, and in the desired consequences.

The intent of the fine is to PENALIZE persons who do not wish to purchase PRIVATE health insurance.

If most of them qualified automatically for the so-called "public option" then there would be no fine.

(A public option which has become a joke and I see no reason to believe Obama would fight for it to remain anything other than a fig leaf, an astroturf program for the working poor whom they cannot browbeat into "getting off the dole" so that industry and admin can get together and do a photo-op and say how proud they are that 5% enrolled in it but that the system is oversubscribed already and can't be expanded when most Americans "have chosen to buy private insurance" after being threatened with a fine "and we must respect that choice".

JUST LIKE the mass transit funding debate. "The system is over subscribed already" "It's good for the poor but how do we get choice riders" "If we can get 5% off the roads then we can use the money saved to build new highways" etc.)

[RaleighNCDUer]

11. And just HOW is that different from paying taxes?

I again call bullshit.

You KNOW that there will be no single-payer. Without single payer, the next closest thing is a strong public option which does NOT have to be to buy private insurance, but rather a buy into an expanded medicare. By opposing a public option you leave things exactly as they are - which is either very stupid or very disingenuous.

Single payer does not mean 'free healthcare'. Ain't no such critter. So what is the difference between paying for single payer with taxes, or paying for a public option? Either way, we pay.

Of course, single payer is the best way to go but it AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN. So if you get in the way of the public option, that leaves only one possible result - continued profiteering of the insurance industry.

[Leopolds Ghost]

12. 1. a tax is not a fine. 2. it's immoral & unconst. to tax people for not purchasing private goods

From designated private providers. That's known as mercantilism.

3. The current plan would ostracize the poor by creating a means-tested public "option" just for them and require them to jump thru hoops to avoid being fined. Hillary Clinton called them "deadbeats" and said that the cost of emergency care for the poorest of the poort was what's driving up the cost of private, for profit health care for "everybody else". The mayor of DC said the same thing when he closed DC's public hospital and said the state was no longer in the business of providing indigent care to people too "irresponsible" to pay for primary care. Because that's what they want for everybody else except the ostracized "deadbeats" who insist on a public plan (restricted to those who qualify so they can treat the plan like shit, like they do to means-tested programs, and nobody respected will have standing to complain, because nobody on Medicaid would be respected or listened to).

4. A blanket fine OR tax on the demand side drives up price inelasticity for the ENTIRE private insurance market. You know what that means right? It means there is a Sword of Damocles over EVERYONE'S head who even thinks about threatening to opt out of their existing plan. And they wish it to remain a market, driven by market motives.

5. The means-tested program would be paid for by fines paid by those who refuse to enroll in the program or (what is intended as the DEFAULT option, anyone who does not do it they'll make your life a living hell) purchase private insurance (who will also administer the public plan, thereby reaping the profits of the 5% not just the remaining 95% of uninsured forced to buy insurance from them directly at inflated rates to support increased health care costs for affluent boomers; see above). Perverse incentive.

And thoroughly regressive.

I hear a lot of the same rhetoric being used that I heard in the SUV debate. "I would NEVER endanger my kids by buying a small car... there should be a law."

How about this?

"We pay for schools with a lottery, so lottery funded health care is an acceptable alternative to single payer!"

It'd be less immoral than a fine.

And no, single payer does not make purchase of privately held insurance mandatory. That's not the meaning of single payer.

[Laelth]

13. I agree with you that the individual mandate is unacceptable.

It's definitely not liberal. Without a robust public option (and by that I mean a plan that is projected to enroll at least 50+ million Americans within five years) it is nothing more than a massive give-away to the criminal insurance industry.

We could do much better.

:dem:

-Laelth