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Our party sacrificed roughly 50% of our principles and goals to the insurance industry right at the start just to appease them and get them to the table. Then our brave and noble leaders continued to give away more, and more as if it was a fun party game.
What we end up with is a bill that gives about 95% of the possible outcome to corporations, and 'wins' maybe 5% for us. Woo Hoo!
Let's hear it for the Awesome diplomacy and tactical skills of our party. With majorities in both houses, a massive popular president at the Bully Pulpit, and a HUGE Public Mandate that our party could have called upon in a coordinated campaign, our party managed to achieve 5%!
We are now all supposed to cheer the MIGHTY HUNTERS who came back with glorious 5% win as if this was the goal all along, as if this is a momentous victory, as if nothing better was ever possible and nobody could ever possible imagine doing better than this.
All of us who want better than this, and demanded better than this, and protested all the give-aways ever step of the way are being attacked and told that we don't really want any kind of win at all. We are being told that we really want a total loss, so we are really just republicans. Because a 5% win is such a wonderful glorious thing!
The people who are perfectly happy celebrating 5% are unhappy because we expected a popular president, and a party with a large majority in both houses and a public mandate to come back with at least, oh, say 20%
Achieving health care step by step is reasonable. Taking 3 steps back in order to take 1 step forward is not!
We threw women under the bus to get this GLORIOUS 5% victory. Woo Hoo! Our party represents full equality for women!
And, our politicians must have had no choice but to guarantee that insurance companies will get mega subsidies and mega profits. Sure, people can't be denied insurance for pre-existing conditions. (I personally appreciate that advance) But how much does that mean when they can still charge higher co-pays and deductibles and then deny or cancel coverage when you actually try to use the service. None of those practices are prohibited. I'll be able to spend a large chunk of my fixed income on an insurance policy, but will my government make sure I'll ever be able to actually use it every month? For how long?
While our politicians were bribing insurance companies with huge guarantees of OUR MONEY to get them to participate, instead of mandating their participation, why couldn't they include strong guarantees to protect US? Why are Corporations bribed and we are mandated? I thought the Government was supposed to represent and benefit US? How about bribing us and mandating Them?
In all of this, our party totally accepted the insurance industry's insistence that the ONLY WAY to cut costs was to cut service. Has everyone noted this? Costs were cut by delaying service roll-outs, and by reducing and restricting the services that will be available (especially to women). What a huge success advocating for us! Woo Hoo!
Hey, wasn't that the kind of thing health care reform was supposed to be AGAINST. Wow, Great victory there guys!
Nowhere at all are insurance companies expected to cut their costs. No place are they expected to reduce their profits, or their executive rates of pay, or bonuses, or least of all their bribes to politicians. The best our politicians could do is timidly saying "we are going to try to negotiate prices." But they agreed to limit participation in the public plan to a tiny portion of the population, and delay the roll-out, so they won't any significant negotiating power. And, our Valiant politicians agreed that the goal for negotiations will be to match market rates, not reductions below the already inflated market rates.
Wow, that's bargaining from a strong position!
Instead of getting the insurance industry to cut costs, we were told FROM THE VERY BEGINNING that the real goal was to "reduce the rate at which costs increase." Wow, what a victory! Not only do we only get 5% of what we wanted, but we get to stay with costs we were already knew were far, far too high, and we get to watch them go UP. Just maybe not quite as quickly as they have in the past few years when the economy was better.
Maybe we will only be hit with 10% increases per year instead of 12-20% increases. Nobody can say. There isn't any real restriction. It seems sort of like an honor system promise at this point. But as long as the insurance industry keeps bringing in their mega profits, hey, it is all great! We got our wonderful 5% victory!
Someday, somehow, this brilliant approach is supposed to result in us paying rates comparable to the rest of the industrial world. Can anyone out there (using real math and logic) explain to me how that would be possible? Anyone?
And, can anyone tell me how we get to real health care, step by step, when our politicians
1. represent corporations more than us
2. throwing out our most important and essential goals right at the start
3. don't even pretend that cutting costs for consumers is one of the objectives
Wow, I'm so stoked about how powerful our politicians were at the negotiation table though. Who could have predicted that they would have achieved so little so masterfully! Woo Hoo!
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