"Healthcare Reform" Has Degenerated Into a Sick Joke- Welcome to Healthcare Apartheid

[Orwellian_Ghost]

The Next Phase of Healthcare Apartheid

by Norman Solomon

In Washington, "healthcare reform" has degenerated into a sick joke.

At this point, only spinners who've succumbed to their own vertigo could use the word "robust" to describe the public option in the healthcare bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.

"A main argument was that a public plan would save people money," the New York Times has noted. But the insurance industry -- claiming to want a level playing field -- has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze the plan. "After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care bill , the Congressional Budget Office said the public plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would sign up."

At its best, "the public option" was a weak remedy for the disastrous ailments of the healthcare system in the United States. But whatever virtues the public option may have offered were stripped from the bill en route to the House floor.

What remains is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will launch this country into a new phase of healthcare apartheid.

...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/05

[joeycola]

1. Not long ago, we were told that the Obama administration was aiming for a public option that could p

It seems like a lifetime ago.....



http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/05

.........Not long ago, we were told that the Obama administration was aiming for a public option that could provide coverage to one out of every four Americans. Now the figure is around one out of every fifty.

Not long ago, the idea was that taxpayer-funded subsidies were to be used only for the public option. But now the entire concept has been hijacked by and for the private insurance industry. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it on October 8, private insurance companies "are going to get 50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the taxpayers."

Pelosi was making the argument that the least the insurance industry could do, in return, would be to accept a higher level of taxation. But her comment was a telling acknowledgment that all the "public option" proposals now provide a massive funnel from the U.S. Treasury to the insurance conglomerates. The individual mandate is a monumental giveaway to private insurance firms.

The specter of "healthcare reform" that requires individuals to stretch their personal finances for often-abysmal insurance coverage is the worst of all worlds -- government intrusion for corporate benefit without any guarantees of decent health coverage..............

[joeycola]

2. "-- government intrusion for corporate benefit without any guarantees of decent health coverage."

:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

[HamdenRice]

3. Another disgusting mimimization of an historical atrocity. Do you know what apartheid was?

Do you have any idea?

Go buy a book and learn about history before you continue calling every form of differentiation apartheid, every hierarchy slavery and every not so nice person Hitler.

The author of the article in the OP is a fucking idiot.

[geek tragedy]

4. They'll be content to let hundreds of people each year

die from insurance industry abuses.

Bet they're really progressive . . .

[Orwellian_Ghost]

5. Up is down?

:shrug:

[geek tragedy]

7. Alan Grayson has showed us how hundreds die each year

from lack of insurance.

Those on the left who would join with the Teabaggers to block reform efforts are equally morally culpable as the Republicans.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

6. Reaching again?

Just get a dictionary pal.

apartheid Look up apartheid at Dictionary.com
1947 (policy begun 1948), from Afrikaans apartheid (1929 in a S.African socio-political context), lit. "separateness," from Du. apart "separate" (from Fr. àpart; see apart) + suffix -heid, cognate of Eng. -hood. The official Eng. synonym was separate development (1955).

" 'Segregation' is such an active word that it suggests someone is trying to segregate someone else. So the word 'apartheid' was introduced. Now it has such a stench in the nostrils of the world, they are referring to 'autogenous development.' "

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=apartheid

Hey you want to make a wager on how this horrible health care bill creates a two-tiered health care system? You want to make a wager on how many of those who get nothing or the crappiest coverage possible are people of color? Didn't think so.

[HamdenRice]

8. I was there in South Africa. I saw apartheid. It wasn't just segregation, the toll was much bigger

especially considering how much smaller SA is compared to the US. That's why the UN debated declaring apartheid a form of genocide.

You use a dictionary to define a catastrophic, all encompassing social system? Is that the only reference work available in the basement rumpus room?

Get a book Einstein. Apartheid was an all encompassing, totalitarian system of control, that involved the destruction of entire communities, perpetual border wars, man made, permanent structural famine, rigid control on movements, racial subordination, legalized police lawlessness, militarized dictatorship, up close and personal racial degradation, criminalization of almost the entire black working class under the pass laws, and more.

Your ignorance is utterly astonishing, and on display over and over on these boards.

And your seeming inability to describe your current political gripes against this administration without continuously trivializing the greatest crimes against African and African-Americans peoples -- slavery and apartheid -- is **puzzling**.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

9. Oh brother

Desperation and histrionics on full display Hamy.

Everyone knows what Apartheid is and was. Norman Solomon certainly knows. The use of the term in his essay is quite accurate and appropriate. Your reactionary, your every post these days, comment bears no connection to the article posted.

At least your consistent.

[HamdenRice]

10. "Everyone knows what Apartheid is and was"-- Uh, not they don't

Your ignorance of it is on display. What's next? The current public option is the same as the Holocaust?

[Orwellian_Ghost]

11. Funny you mention this

The word holocaust is quite different than use of the term The Holocaust. The word's been around quite some time as you are aware? Right?

holocaust

c.1250, "sacrifice by fire, burnt offering," from Gk. holokauston, neut. of holokaustos "burned whole," from holos "whole" (see safe (adj.)) + kaustos, verbal adj. of kaiein "to burn." Originally a Bible word for "burnt offerings," given wider sense of "massacre, destruction of a large number of persons" from 1833. The Holocaust "Nazi genocide of European Jews in World War II," first recorded 1957, earlier known in Heb. as Shoah "catastrophe." The word itself was used in Eng. in ref. to Hitler's Jewish policies from 1942, but not as a proper name for them.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=holocaust

So yes Hamy people can properly use the word holocaust in reference to an event other than The Holocaust no matter how much you in your reactionary fashion object.

[HamdenRice]

12. And some people are anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers

That doesn't mean their usage is one that a person who considers himself "progressive" should adopt.

But I agree to the factual point that there is indeed a movement among Holocaust deniers to make "Holocaust" just a regular old word.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

13. Even the linguists?

:shrug: