Not that we didn’t know this, but a Beachwood reader spells it out very well:
ability to pay without being too bloody obvious about it. That’s why, I
suspect, even in the unlikely event we do get some kind of public
option, it will be so damned hard for ordinary Americans to get access
to it that most of us will still be stuck with the private bloodsuckers
whose main profit point is DEPRIVING people of care.
You might counter by noting that this is the richest nation on Earth
and, surely, we can afford to cover everyone. But not necessarily.
Per-capita GDP looks pretty good. But far too much of that wealth is
concentrated way up at the tippy-top of the pyramid, the section with
the floating eyeball. For most of us nearer the base, our incomes are
unlikely to support anything other than a heavily rationed system that,
while it might well make sense on a broad public-health scale, would be
transparently unjust (especially by comparison with what the
globalization winners would get) and therefore intolerable.
The fragmented and opaquely unjust system we have, therefore, is
something that both Republicans and Democrats devoutly wish to
preserve, especially if they can render it even more fragmented and
opaque. Hence all the mixed signals andthe Democrats’ utterly
mystifying emphasis on cost savings rather than security or justice.
Emphasis mine because COME ON. The deficit fearmongering is just one more tool in the Republican/Blue Dog arsenal to preserve the status quo (and in the Blue Dogs’ case claim at the same time to have “reformed” health care so their constituents don’t kick their asses). People say they care about the deficit and really, what they care about is what’s in the mailbox today: A giant bill that’s gonna break them, or a check that’s gonna save them; either way they’re worried when they open the box up. They’re not thinking about the deficit.
We got all riled up now. We the people currently getting screwed, we the people currently freaking out about our jobs (if we still have them) and our credit cards (if we haven’t maxed them out) and our homes (if we haven’t lost them) got all riled up about how this one thing has the power to turn everything else around for us. We’ve been writing letters to the president and letters to the paper and we’ve gotten good and pissed off reading everybody else’s stories about how all they wanted to do was get a splinter removed or something and now they owe 20 gazillion dollars.
This doesn’t happen, simply because the president lacks the courage to do what needs to be done which is nationalize the fucking health care “industry” and ignore the howling Republicans and tell Congressional Democrats they can either eat it or choke, and yeah, he’ll lose his Congressional majorities and probably the White House and hopefully it’ll be in the primaries. Because we went and got all riled up.
For what it’s worth, I actually believe Obama does want to do the right thing. But he’s either getting some shitty advice now and listening to it, or he’s just totally letting himself get rolled by Congress, and as I said over and over about the last president, it doesn’t matter what he thinks or feels or wants. It matters what he does. And what he’s got to do, pull some seriously brave shit, is something we’ve not seen before, because it’s going to take tearing down not only our current health care system but the whole idea that you deserve health care if you’re rich and employed and you don’t if you’re not.
A.
Health care (not insurance) has now attained the status of the roads in Louisiana pre-Huey Long or electricity in the Texas Hill Country pre-LBJ or fill-in-the-blank with a crucially survival-centric need THAT MANY DESERVING PEOPLE CANNOT OBTAIN WITHOUT POWERFUL INTERVENTION. And for which delivery the public will be grateful for and likely will “pay” for with loyalty.
Don’t just plead with people ahead of time (Obama repeatedly last night: that’s a GOOD thing) to believe you. GIVE it to them. SHow of hands- anyone know any Republicans that have sent back their Medicare or Social Security checks in protest?
What I don’t know enough to understand is why Dems won’t focus on 1)delivering that thing and 2) playing defensive afterward to counter the Republican propaganda that will to convince people that the valuable thing they just got is actually a pail of socialist radioactive toxic waste.
Obviously part of it is Dems lack (for some good reasons) the blood thirst to control the channels of communication but that’s only part of it.
What I love is all this talk about not screwing things up for the next generation.
Fuck me. How screwed will the next generation be if they never get born because the people who would have been their parents don’t make it past age 12 because they didn’t get the health care they neededRIGHT THE FUCK NOW!.
If we can’t take care of our kids NOW, why the flying flaming wig fuck should we be worrying about the next generation?
Jeebus. I think I just shot my eyeball across the room.
The saddest part, by far, of the whole health care debate right now is that it isn’t the Republicans that are torpedoing the effort. It is a far too large group of Democrats. And, the reason for that is both obvious and subtle. Obvious, because it is easy to read the tables of campaign donations per Senator, and see that the foot draggers are big, big recipients of insurance and drug company donations. Subtle, because those tables are merely compilations of who people list as their employer on their donations form.
The subtlety is that Senators respond when people hand them money. When a large part of the people doing that work for industries that will lose profits if a bill passes, Senators strive to prevent that. That seems admirable, except that the whole concept of the US Senate is to be a body that thinks “nation” first, “state” second, and “people” last. Currently there are only a few Senators who give a moments thought to whats best for the nation, and they tend to be only those who are Democrats, and in utterly safe Senate seats. If anyone thinks there is a Republican who thinks about what is best for the nation, just look at Arlen Specter.
The tippy-top isnow making a third of all income. And as Al Frankenpointed out in a slightly different context, taxing them to pay for health care would not be class warfare.This is:
Kind of puts a surtax in perspective, eh?
When people bitch about paying for someone else’s problems, I lose it. One, you probably wouldn’t even notice the amount lost to you if there was any way to quantify how much of your tax dollars were actually going to health care, it would be small compared to the amount being wasted by bloated inefficiency and government waste now. For that matter it would probably be small compared to what the average suburban american spends on junk food per annum.
http://www.pnhp.org
I will never, ever again vote for a candidate for any national office who does not publicly support a single-payer national health care plan.
Take the pledge. Popular demand is the only thing that can break the will of the wealthy and powerful. We must only elect single-payer candidates.
Obama won’t support it because insurance and Big Pharma own him through campaign finance, just like everyone else in DC.
go for class warfare. the poor KNOW the rich have been WINNING IT. we just didn’t call it what it was. DAMN STRAIGHT IT’S CLASS WARFARE. now sit down and shut up.
Wise up. It is pretty clear that most of the country doesn’t want what the hard left is selling, and all the vituperation in the world isn’t likely to change that. So, since the left now apparently believes that the most leftist president and congress in our history are not leftist enough, you now suggest “class warfare” as your weapon of choice. Have you listened to yourselves? Give it a breather, please.
And what he’s got to do, pull some seriously brave shit, is something we’ve not seen before, because it’s going to take tearing down not only our current health care system but the whole idea that you deserve health care if you’re rich and employed and you don’t if you’re not.
Damn straight, but it isn’t just health care.
Just like you deserve to be able to see a doctor, you deserve a good education — and so do your kids, whether you/they have the money for tuition at a “charter school” or not.
In CNN’s Black in America 2 last night, this point got made hard. Kids from an underprivileged part of Brooklyn were shocked and moved to tears by the poverty of kids in South Africa (if you can’t afford the uniform you can’t go to school, period).
Just like you deserve health care and education, you deserve a safe workplace.
Just like you deserve health care, education, and a safe workplace, you deserve affordable, decent living quarters.
Just like you deserve health care, education, a safe workplace, and affordable, decent living quarters, you deserve a living wage.
You shouldn’t have to be rich to be considered human. That’s the corruption at the heart of the right wing, the corruption at the heart of the ‘conservative’ philosophy/political stand, and the true corruption at the heart of the GOP. If you’re poor, you’re trash — and if you’re female and/ or colored, you can’t not be trash even if you aren’t poor.
MAD, you are like my idiot conservative friends who think CNN is the fucking liberal media. Obama and Congress are leftist? Did I read that correctly? The Democrats are so far up the collective asses of the corporate health care industry they look like a half-mile long millipede. You want a leftist agenda?
1) Single-payer health care. No more private insurance. It’s gone. Fuck them. They’ve made enough profits to last for ten generations anyway.
2) Nationalize America’s oil companies. Exxon-Mobil made $14 billion in the first fucking quarter of 2009, yet gasoline prices are still above $2/gallon. If Obama were leftist, he’d pull a Hugo Chavez and declare America’s petroleum resources the property of the American people.
3) Enforce the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and restore the power of America’s labor unions by breaking up companies like Walmart and McDonalds that close up stores before letting employees join unions.
Anyone in Washington talking about these things? No? Maybe you should have a clue about what the fuck you’re talking about instead of listening to goddamn AM radio all day long. Jeebus!
the mushy middle just doesn’t want to rock the boat.