What I read in the Washington Monthly 6 yrs ago was that the DEMS behind the Health Care bill said..

[Leopolds Ghost]

What I read in the Washington Monthly 6 yrs ago was that the DEMS behind the bill said

it was a "workable" trojan horse to forestall single payer.

Brookings, Insurance lobbyists, and centrist Dems including (sadly) Edwards, Daschle, and Clinton got together and said stuff like "in the event of a new President (Bush was insanely unpopular at the time) we want to make sure we get out in front of any effort to reform the health care system by making sure the INDUSTRY is on board this time. The objective must be to protect industry profits from potential collapse due to baby boomer retirement,

and to provide an ALTERNATIVE to single payer, which there may otherwise be an increasing pressure to impose, and that would be unacceptable to the insurance cos."

And words to that effect, all YEARS before Obama elected, they were discussing the bones of this bill in public.

[amborin]

1. "protect industry profits" they sure accomplished that with this HCR bill!

Health Sector Totals to Candidates

Display: Select a Sector Agribusiness Communications/Electronics Construction Defense Energy/Natural Resources Finance/Insurance/Real Estate Health Lawyers & Lobbyists Transportation Misc Business Labor Ideology/Single-Issue Other

Total to these candidates: $41,912,484 (Dems 66.7% and Repubs 33.1%)

Health

Obama, Barack $19,462,986
McCain, John $7,389,547
Clinton, Hillary $6,397,849
Romney, Mitt $2,283,350
Giuliani, Rudy $2,075,197
Paul, Ron $828,483
Richardson, Bill $778,170
Edwards, John $587,941
Thompson, Fred $537,429
Huckabee, Mike $491,202
Dodd, Chris $339,850
Biden, Joe $283,880
Brownback, Sam $108,580
Thompson, Tommy $67,811
Nader, Ralph $62,251
Kucinich, Dennis $54,357
Vilsack, Tom $32,800
Tancredo, Tom $31,600
Hunter, Duncan $27,930
Barr, Bob $22,550
Gilmore, Jim $15,600
Gravel, Mike $11,721
Keyes, Alan $11,600
Baldwin, Chuck $6,050
McKinney, Cynthia


open secrets.org

[amborin]

2. LOL! I rec'd the OP, yet it's at 0 the DLCers are on the march as usual n/t

[emilyg]

7. I just recd

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. I'm glad you were paying attention!

You and the Washington Monthly, that is.

Too bad the rest of us weren't.

And shame on those Democrats!

Unacceptable to the insurance cos???

:nuke: :nuke: :nuke:

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[dgibby]

5. Great find!

K&R

[Nothing Without Hope]

6. Coakley's defeat in MA gives them another excuse! Oh, joy.

I do believe that a different MA Dem primary senatorial candidate, for example Mike Capuano, would have blasted Brown out of his truck.

[Leopolds Ghost]

14. Yeh, no ones mentioning what would have happened if

The candidate had run to Obama's left and pledged to be a thorn in the side of the fake reformers in Congress. Like Wellstone.

[Little Star]

21. If he was so great how did he lose the primary? Yeah,

I forgot lesson was not about HCR. Now can someone pass the kool-aid?

[Nothing Without Hope]

23. The evening before the primary, there was a robo-call from Bill Clinton

...very forcefully pushing Coakley. I think that may have affected the outcome. She was obviously the candidate the Dem leaders wanted, whatever their reasons.

[Little Star]

24. The Kennedy's wanted Capuano in the primary,

[Nothing Without Hope]

25. Interesting - I hadn't heard that. I think it's too bad he didn't win the primary. n/t

[leftstreet]

8. K&R

[Jackpine Radical]

9. K&R

[kenny blankenship]

10. I wouldn't doubt it. This bill has "a preemptive strike" against real healthcare reform

written all over its 2,000 pages. I've called it a preemptive strike against otherwise inevitable single payer style reform for many months now -since Baucus and pals started shitting all over it.

[Leopolds Ghost]

15. Why were they ever afraid?

[kenny blankenship]

16. Real health care reform will damage the interests of the insurance racketeers - that's inescapable

In both medicine and accounting, one applies "the Sutton Principle." Willie Sutton was the career bank robber who was reported to have said, in answer to the question why he robbed banks "because that's where the money is". The Sutton Principle directs diagnosticians to look at the most common causes for a set of symptoms and to test for them first. The most common cause is to be considered the more likely cause until ruled out. Accountants looking to cut business costs apply "Sutton's Law" and look to the activity of an enterprise where the largest amounts of money are spent first in order to find the largest savings possible in the shortest time. The largest cost is considered to be the most likely largest source of waste. The problem with US health care is that it costs too much. If it didn't cost so much, it would be much easier to cover more of the population. Therefore to reform healthcare you MUST first determine where is the LARGEST non productive activity or largest set of costs within the system? and you also need to answer what is the engine driving up costs that makes our system so much worse than all the others? The answer to both questions is the Insurance racket. Insurers provide nothing that restores health or prevents disease or treats injury; insurers push PAPER around and charge exorbitant rents to consumers in exchange for increasingly DUBIOUS, uncertain access to the health care system. They have set themselves up as gatekeepers, as rentiers. All money spent on insurers is WASTED from the point of view of restoring health. And in our dysfunctional system around 30 percent of all money spent on the system sticks to the insurers' fingers - all wasted. 30 percent of one sixth of your 13 trillion dollar national economy is an unconscienable amount of money to waste on people who return NO VALUE WHATEVER. There's no other word for it but CRIMINAL. I think "vampire squid boring into your face" also comes close as a descriptor. Now it's not hard to understand why the cost of the health care "system" we have keeps spiraling upward. Insurance companies are publicly traded corporations: they MUST show higher profits year over year or nobody will want to own their stock. How can profitability in health insurance go up, year over year, year in year out? There's only one way you can do that and that's to jack consumer prices up above the rate of inflation affecting all your cost inputs. The human body can't be made more durable, so costs of your "raw material" can't get lower, and every life that's saved today by medical intervention just sickens and runs up new costs tomorrow. To remain a TRADABLE for-profit corporation you MUST squeeze your health insurance customers harder and harder. You increase prices (premiums,deductibles and copays) and you decrease outlay (you deny coverage, you delay treatment until too late,etc) That's the healthcare cost engine that's stuck with a wide open throttle. Pharmaceutical costs are bad too, but of those you can at least say you get SOMETHING for the money you spend. Drug prices also respond to the bonanza atmosphere induced by out of control insurance pricing.

So the path to reform is clear. You have to gore the insurance industry's ox because "that's where the money is". The United States MUST do what all other advanced countries have done and remove profit taking middlemen from the center of the healthcare picture. The delivery of basic and essential health care must be made a profit-free zone for any intermediaries - public or private- between patient and doctor and hospital. If there are middlemen, they must be willing to provide access to basic and essential health care free of the increment of profit - or go into another line of business. They can be non-profit mutual associations, or state government agencies, or private insurance companies allowed to sell bells and whistles around the margins of basic and essential care. Any of those models can work because they all have in common a profit-free zone for delivery of basic health care. What is basic and essential care? It's about 70 to 80 percent of the overall health care expense of a nation. In France, 80 percent of the national health care bill is footed by the govt through taxes. In Canada it's 70 percent. In both countries private insurers ply their trade for profit around the margins, but the vast majority of the bill 70-80 percent is funded by the govt, at no profit.

Will US insurance companies be pleased to confine themselves to a mere 20 percent of the national health care dollar? Of course not. They'd take their ball and go home. Which would be good news for American citizens, and doctors too. The best medical news in US history. But rather than be the heralds of that good news, our elected Representatives and Senators and I'm sorry to say President also, have taken up the cause of the insurance mafia in a literal conspiracy against the interests of the citizens. They knew, as your memory of that article shows, that a shitstorm was coming for the broken down health care "system" and that the people's righteous anger was bearing down the insurers. Things that "can't go on this way" eventually don't go on any further. Eventually, power would switch hands. Eventually there would be a spark in the tinder, like Michael Moore's Sicko, and soon the little people would be banging on their doors demanding a National Health Service, or a Canadian style National Health Insurance program. Insurance racketeers would face sudden death. In order to preempt that fury, our senior Democrats got together with the insurance lobby and asked them, what law could we pass that we could call reform that would make the world safe from your victims -at least temporarily? What can we do to stave off genuine Health Care Reform? How can we use the government to assure your profitability for another stolen decade?

The why behind it is too obvious to merit setting down. They did it because insurance mobsters have been stuffing their pockets with cash since 1994.

[kenny blankenship]

17. The short version of that is - because they applied Sutton's Law and went "where the money is"

There's no percentage in genuine reform - not for them.

[Leopolds Ghost]

18. Yep! but it raises the question why they were ever afraid THIS Congress would do anything to them.

Much less the one we had in 2003-2005.

[kenny blankenship]

19. Oh I misunderstood completely

didn't realize you were referring to the insurance perps fearing Congress. I had it the other way round.

[tkmorris]

11. That is eminently believable, however

I do wish better documentation or sourcing existed of such a conversation. It is too easy to dismiss as tin foil hattery otherwise.

[Leopolds Ghost]

12. IIRC it was a Washington Monthly article, ca 2004, discussing the then-history of the bill.

Back when they were still crafting it, talking about how they were letting the insurance
lobbyists help write the bill with insider pols at the think-tank stage, to "avoid another
situation where the insurance lobby is against the bill", describing the purpose of the math,
and the mandates, with details on why they wanted to limit any public option so that the
fines for noncompliance would pay for it, traffic enforcement style.

With detailed quotes, I was pissed about it at the time.

It went into detail about how far back the current effort went (and this was with
respect mostly to Edwards' then viable candidacy.)

I'm positive it was one of those, I blogged about it at the time (several yrs ago).

If it wasn't that, it was Harpers. I'm pretty sure it wasn't WaPo (doubtful
since they don't like to post on who was behind a bill until after it passes).

Those are the only sources I take seriously for insider coverage of stuff like this, tho.

Might find it on Lexis-Nexis if you search "Edwards think tank insurance reform" for
specifically Washington Monthly, 2004-2006. I don't know how to pull that up, tho...

One of the things that pissed me off about it at the time was, I had a high opinion
of Edwards and was angered he was in favor of it.

[Leopolds Ghost]

13. More on the math they were talking about at the time.

It quoted how Edwards had differed with Clinton on the mandates but had "come around on
the math" based on assurances that the problem with health care was lack of financing for
the insurance industry because of the coming "baby bust" due to reduced "pool" of younger
(sometimes termed "deadbeat") customers, resulting in narow profit margins resulting in
higher premiums, Edwards was assured by the think tank advocates of the bill that
the majority of uninsured were "choice" customers who were uninsured by choice,
and forcibly adding them to the pool of insured would enable the gov't and insurance
companies to pay for an (assumed) small minority of uninsured (about 5% of Americans)
who actually would be covered by any public option.

This was actually painted as a good thing, i.e. that most uninsured were the problem,
not the solution, and forcing them into the pool of private insurance would help stave off
financial problems for the health care industry by "lowering the premiums for existing
retirees" while make the problem of insuring the "hard cases" much simpler. Not unlike the
way they've treated welfare and public housing (privatize it, restrict gov't intervention
to the "hard cases" and use profits to finance the "hard cases" resulting in a natural
incentive to kick them off the dole and maximize the use of mandates such as credit check
that are geared to middle class who can afford the mandates.)

[glitch]

20. Missed my chance to rec this. Thank you for your excellent memory.nt

[blindpig]

22. Whose side do you think they are on?

That is how democracy works in a capitalists economy.