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After a health care rally in which he insisted that something must pass, no matter what its content.
Given that you have stopped insisting on any real change in health care, now what? I am still furious over your Obama House of Health Care analogy at Saturday’s rally, and outraged that people could arrange to have a victim of health insurance share the stage with people who did nothing but apologize for legislation which, if enacted, would put her in an even worse situation than she is in now. How did you even convince her to tell her story? Did you just make sure she knew nothing about the legislation? The overall take home message seemed to have been that we must pass anything, and that the actual content of the legislation is completely irrelevant.
I don’t remember her name. She described how she had worked for an insurance company, and saw quite a bit of fraud and underhanded dealing. She had what she thought was good insurance, until she had a permanent spinal injury from a car wreck, resulting in losing her job and her house and going bankrupt. And what does health care “reform” offer her? It FORCES her to buy insurance that is far worse than the insurance she used to have, and if she chooses to pay her ongoing expenses instead of paying for a useless product that is only slightly better than catastrophic insurance, the IRS goes after her. In other words, the only thing that changes is that she now gets to live in poverty for awhile before she incurs more medical expenses.
I have this thing about analogies—I can never hear one without succumbing to the urge to beat it completely into the ground. You say that it should be our priority to get everybody into Obama’s House of Health Care first, and then we can fix it up later. You didn’t mention that the house has four stories—a basement plus two stories plus a penthouse. Here’s a clue for all the smug people who are living in the penthouse already—the basement accommodations totally SUCK! The Basic Plan (and the only one eligible for subsidies) is barely more than catastrophic coverage, and requiring everyone to have it makes it far harder to pay for ongoing medical expenses, which of course are not covered until you hit the $5000 deductible. You didn’t mention that the landlords collecting the rent are useless sociopathic intermediaries who offer no guarantees whatsoever of habitability. Or that there is no rent control at all, or that they get to charge older people double rent. Or that if you can’t pay for one or two months, you get kicked out, just like the Basic Health plan in Washington State.
But at least they have to let you in, I hear you say. Really? I don’t understand why anyone thinks that the “reform” will actually stop the insurance parasites from refusing to insure people with costly medical conditions. They’ll merely stop denying applications for pre-existing conditions and deny it more often for having a bad credit record. People who have had trouble paying medical bills in the past are highly likely to have bad credit records. They’ll raise premiums sky-high for everyone to preserve their profits if they insure additional significant numbers of actual sick people.
Earlier this year, Obama said that our health care system is an expression of our basic values. God help us if he is right, because “reform,” with its many-tiered “choices,” expresses the basic value that the health care you deserve depends on how much money you have and on nothing else. The disposable human garbage gets to live in the basement because that’s all we can afford. We will still die and get bankrupted, only now we get to live in poverty until something expensive happens to us.
The penthouse elite may be sufficiently disconnected from reality to think that “reform” offers us the chance to keep our doctors. The basement dwellers know better. If “reform” passes, you will have forced us into permanent slavery to whatever providers our employers and insurers choose for us. My company just eliminated my insurance plan for retirees and current employees and substituted a completely different plan with my doctor not on it. Because such insurance is offered, you refuse me the right to choose a public option, and the Senate just refused to allow me into Medicare on exactly the same grounds. Could you please at least acquire the basic decency to stop bloviating about our “choice” of doctors?
Speaking as a partisan Democrat, I’m having a hard time understanding why you don’t see that it is passing this legislation that will harm Democrats badly, not NOT passing it. The public would tolerate being taxed by private entities if that was an absolute guarantee of getting health care when they needed it. It is nothing of the sort. The public is going to be furious at skyrocketing costs, and the complete absence of any guarantee that insurance companies will pay any particular claim. The Republicans wouldn’t even care if the bill required everyone to sign over half their yearly income to insurance companies—they’d just be mad that it was Obama who demanded it. Democrats are furious at the constant betrayals of any hope for change, and will likely sit on their hands in 2010 and 2012. First the public option got restricted so that few members of the public had it as an option. Then the Senate got rid of that in return for allowing early Medicare enrollment, also highly restricted as to who was eligible. Now even that has been eliminated. Exactly how much more of this do you expect us to put up with?
When is the Progressive Caucus going to start advocating on behalf of the public? So far you’ve done nothing but signal that you will make any compromise in order to get any old bill passed, and now some of you are shocked!! SHOCKED!! that the well heeled profiteers took you up on it. What in bloody HELL did you THINK was going to happen? If none of you have the gonads to insist on real cost controls now, please explain why you think that it will become easier to do after you give useless parasites $500 -$800 billion that could be better employed on infrastructure repair and green energy.
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