How Democrats, Republicans, and Big Medicine Sabotaged Obamacare From the Start

Tom Joad · #1 07-07-2014, 01:46 PM

This is in response to Pete's bullshit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by piece-itpete

Tom, I'm not detecting a whiff of excuse am I?

Pete

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runnin...e.php?page=all

Early in his presidency, Barack Obama tried to get the youth involved in the fight for healthcare reform with events like this 2009 rally at the University of Maryland.

It was the winter of our discontent, 2009. A season of bank failures, massive layoffs and $5-a-gallon gasoline.

Finally, a fractured country could at least agree on one thing: This had to change.

So President Barack Obama set out to deactivate the next bomb awaiting the U.S. economy, the one ticking inside our bloated, beleaguered health system.

Since the 1990s, insurance premiums had averaged double-digit annual increases. America was spending over $7,500 per person per year — 50 percent more than Norway, the next largest contender. Health spending alone was chewing up one-sixth of the U.S. economy, double that of competitors like Japan, and putting American employers at a severe disadvantage.

Although Affordable Care Act enemy House Speaker John Boehner repeatedly claims the U.S. has "the best health-care delivery system in the world," the World Health Organization puts us at number 36.

Worse, we were paying Maserati premiums for something that looked a lot like
a used Kia. Though pols like House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) loved to bray that America had "the best healthcare delivery system in the world," it wasn't remotely so. The World Health Organization ranked us an embarrassing 36th, behind such notables as Costa Rica, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. Other rankings routinely put the U.S. near the bottom of the industrialized world.

"We spend one and a half times more per person on healthcare than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it," Obama told Congress in 2009. "This is one of the reasons that insurance premiums have gone up three times faster than wages."

Big Medicine had done its best to keep it that way. Since 1999, it had spent nearly $6 billion on lobbying, three times what the next-largest industry, insurance, had spent. An obedient Congress had allowed it to build a system in which millions couldn't afford coverage, huge swaths of the country were essentially served by monopolies, and prices continued to go up.

"In the decade up to 2009, 79 percent of all the growth in household income was absorbed by healthcare," says Dr. Brian Klepper, CEO of the National Business Coalition on Health. "Everything in Washington is rigged, but the thing most rigged is healthcare, because they have even more money than the banks. Both sides take money at a rapid clip from the industry in exchange for getting their own way. So everything is done in the special interest, and nothing is done in the common interest."

But that spring, with an enraged electorate and the economy in tatters, Obama was given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to break Big Med's stranglehold. He vowed to do it the old-fashioned way: by introducing competition, forcing Big Med to earn its keep.

Everyone would sit "around a big table," Obama had told a crowd in Virginia the year before. "We'll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators, insurance companies, drug companies. They'll get a seat at the table. They just won't be able to buy every chair."

Five years later, it's hard to argue with Obamacare's success. Some 7 million people have signed up for insurance. The sick can no longer be barred from coverage, nor can the chronically ill be kicked to the curb.

Yet Republicans still rail that Obamacare is some so************************t perversion. Democrats, meanwhile, often treat the plan as an illegitimate child they'd rather not acknowledge.

What both sides neglect to mention is their complicity in sabotaging the bill, selling out an unprecedented opportunity to the very guys who created the time bomb in the first place.

continued

Ike Bana · #2 07-07-2014, 05:34 PM

I suspect that when it comes down to it, politicians will continue to kowtow to the whims, desires and beliefs of their ignoramus constituents, as it's their job security you know. Most of the electorate is happy as a pig in shit with their tidy employer sponsored health insurance coverage. Most of whom don't give a shit in Dick Cheney's hat for how many million of their fellow citizens would remain uninsured without the ACA, or how many would die needlessly every year due to the lack of coverage. The number has been in the neighborhood of 45,000/year.

And they like their health insurance so much that it doesn't bother them a whit, not even the most vocal teabag right-wing harebrained morons...that their share of the premiums goes into the pot that provides legal, insurance covered abortions and legal contraceptives (including the notorious phony abortifacients) that they began screaming about the minute their Negro president got involved in it.

BlueStreak · #3 07-08-2014, 07:43 AM

"...........putting American employers at a severe disadvantage."

That's the one I don't get; Supposedly "pro-business" conservatives utterly determined to keep employers saddled with this burden. This is why I don't believe their claim that they are trying to keep Americans form becoming dependent. Bullshit. They want us to be as dependent as possible. "They who do not work, shall not eat." They just don't want us to depend on the government, they'd rather the owners of that dependency be private businesses and corporations. Like the plantations of the Old South. This is why wages must be surpressed, pensions have to go, unemployment is referred to as "welfare", SS and Medicare are derided as "entitlements", etc., etc., etc..............

Dave

Oerets · #4 07-08-2014, 08:27 AM

As long as the industry is run as "for profit" what does one think will happen. So money will flow to keep it so.

Barney

piece-itpete · #5 07-08-2014, 11:42 AM

It's politics, and the Dems failed. They did succeed in reupping the Patriot Act and 'Bushs' tax cuts though.

Pete

Tom Joad · #6 07-08-2014, 12:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by piece-itpete

They did succeed in reupping the Patriot Act and 'Bushs' tax cuts though.

Pete

Care to post the roll call votes in the Senate and House on those two issues, so that we can see the party breakdown?

Lets see who supported it and who didn't.

Ike Bana · #7 07-08-2014, 04:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by piece-itpete

It's politics, and the Dems failed. They did succeed in reupping the Patriot Act and 'Bushs' tax cuts though.

Pete

It's the law...and even if through activist conservative court action (those fuckin' liberals and their legislating from the bench, eh?), there is some successful stripping of certain small sections of the law and stripping of funding for certain small sections of the law...it's the law and it's gonna remain the law. So get used to it Pete. And you're just gonna have to get used to the fact that you won't have to ignore that 45,000 of your fellow citizens are dying every year for the lack of insurance anymore.

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that there's no more blood sucking insurance company "pre-existing conditions", and coverage available for all children, and coverage available for almost 50 million Americans who had no chance for coverage prior to the ACA...it's a rousing success in my book.

piece-itpete · #8 07-09-2014, 12:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ike Bana

It's the law...and even if through activist conservative court action (those fuckin' liberals and their legislating from the bench, eh?), there is some successful stripping of certain small sections of the law and stripping of funding for certain small sections of the law...it's the law and it's gonna remain the law. So get used to it Pete. And you're just gonna have to get used to the fact that you won't have to ignore that 45,000 of your fellow citizens are dying every year for the lack of insurance anymore.

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that there's no more blood sucking insurance company "pre-existing conditions", and coverage available for all children, and coverage available for almost 50 million Americans who had no chance for coverage prior to the ACA...it's a rousing success in my book.

What's that down to now?

Pete