Now I've come to the harsh reality that both bills in Congress are written to benefit the health care industry, especially the big insurance corporations, more than you and me. After all, the industry's lobbyists wrote both the House and Senate bills.
The House bill, as currently written, mandates we all buy insurance from the very corporations that have priced many of us out of the system already. They will offer crap, high deductible policies with numerous loopholes to us knowing full well we have no other place to go as we will be forced to pay fines (ie taxes) or go to jail if we refuse to be strongarmed by the healthfraud industry. What little subsidies currently in the bill will be taken out as soon as Republicans get control again in 2010 or 2012. Remember, they had no problem cutting the childrens' CHIPS program subsidies.
The public option in the bill is a joke -- it is only going to be available to 2 or 3% of the population, won't receive any funding from Congress and will die a quick death without giving any meaningful competition to the insurance industry.
People will still be without decent healthcare, will still go bankrupt over medical bills. The only difference is you will either pay more to the insurance corporations OR pay fines to the government. I guess if you really needed healthcare you could go to jail. Then they would have to provide government healthcare to you.
Members of Congress will not do any meaningful reform as long as they are getting big bucks from the industry, including Democrats. Members of Congress also do not feel our pain as they have great healthcare benefits, which we pay 3/4 of the cost of. That does not include the millions we pay to fund a private clinic for members of Congress.
The 2 bills do not meet the standards of "do no harm" in my opinion and therefore I have joined the ranks of those saying kill the bills and start over.
Please read:
from
http://obamboozled.blogspot.com/2009/11/if-democrats-dont-pass-health-insurance.htmlThursday, November 5, 2009
Deceit has its price
By Bruce A. Dixon
BAR - November 4, 2009
The “public option” in the president's health care bill is like the “clean” in clean coal. One harnesses the awesome power of the word clean and attaches it to coal, which is anything but. Likewise Democrats deploy the rhetorical power of the words “public” as in “everybody in, nobody out” and “option” as in choice to describe an arrangement will be neither public or for most, an available option.
The president said it himself in early September. his public option will be neither public nor optional for any more than a tiny percentage of Americans, and unlike his wars and bank bailouts, has to be “deficit neutral.” It will force millions under penalty of law to buy the deceptive and defective products of greedy private insurers.
Most alarmingly, the Democratic version of the public option will be rigidly means-tested to ensure that only the poorest get in, and financed with a John McCain style tax on those who receive nearly adequate benefits from their employers. This is a patented recipe for ghettoizing and socially stigmatizing those who do avail themselves of the public option, setting one segment of society against another poorer one, the exact reverse of the everybody in, nobody out spirit of social security and Medicare.
And though we are told that insurers will not be able to deny policies on the basis of pre-existing conditions, there is mounting evidence that insurers intend to enforce the same discriminatory requirements by claiming that conditions such as diabetes, overweight, smoking and more are the result of patient behaviors and “lifestyle choices” for which the insurance company cannot be liable UNLESS IT IS ABLE TO CHARGE MORE. The president has even deceitfully lowered the number of uninsured referred to in all the Democrats' pronouncements by subtracting the 12 or 15 million undocumented from all its numbers, as though they are expected to live in our midst as an underclass with no access to health services.
In the year since the last election the president has made concession after concession to drug and insurance companies, to private health care providers and their lobbyists. The White House, establishment Democrats and their echo chambers in the corporate media and even on the internet have worked hard to suppress voices advocating the simple, practical and elegant solution of single payer Medicare For All, which is still favored in polls by a substantial majority of Americans.
The longer the health care reform drama takes to unfold, the shabbier the president and his party are looking. With overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress, the Republicans can no longer be blamed for anything, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are sending signals that they may not be able to pass the president's health insurance reform this year. They can't blame Republicans for this because there are not enough Republicans to stop legislation in either chamber. The Republican talking point on health care now is that the president is spending too much time on it, and needs to concentrate on something, anything else, like sending another 40 or 50 thousand troops to Iraq.
Ever men and women of their word, Democratic leaders in Congress have stripped out of the president's bills any chance for states to pursue their own single payer regimes, and backtracked on promises to allow a floor vote on the Medicare For All measure, HR 676.
Deceit has its price.