The Republicans said that they wanted to repeal the health care reform bill. Then they said that they wanted to de-fund it. In other words, if we can’t remove it altogether, they said, we will simply not let anyone participate in any kind of better health.
Why would a United States Congressman or Congresswoman want to prohibit an American citizen from receiving better health care at a lower cost?
Here is the principle we must follow on this. When a politician says something irrational we must look at first the situation and ask “why?”
Michele Bachmann, a Republican House member from Minnesota, is not stupid. So then, why would she speak out against health care reform? She clearly does not want to offer a substitute and she clearly does not want to offer amendments to improve it. She merely wants to continue the system of 15-20% increases that have made the health insurance industry rich beyond the dreams of an Arab sheik.
So she lies about the health reform bill, saying that provisions that have been in it since it was signed are “secret” and the costs involved, which have been paid for by adding taxes and shifting emphasis, were somehow not discussed or debated.
Michele Bachmann seems to have been diverted from the Christian principles that she says she was raised on and says she believes. Fame and riches are difficult to turn down.
As soon as she started making speeches favorable to the health insurance industry, she began to get campaign contributions for her safe little seat in Minnesota, in the millions from Right Wing lobbyist groups. She is a smart woman. She’s a graduate of the thinly accredited religious Regent University law school, but she is also reputed to have attended William and Mary Law School, although there seems to be some debate about that. Don’t be confused by her Malapropisms, like “Hoot-Smalley” when describing the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs of 1930 and how they caused something that actually happened in 1929.
She’s no dummy. She gets it. She but dumb as a stone, won over the hearts of Republican men. Neocons don’t like their women too smart. Palin was able to walk and wave and shout Neocon slogans at the same time. It made her about $22 million in one year. saw how a woman like Sarah Palin, attractive, if not as stunningly beautiful as a Valerie Plame,
Look, Neocons don’t like government, don’t want government and want to shut down government so that they can pay as little as possible in taxes. If they wanted to govern properly, there are enough of them who are smart who could have prevented spending 4 trillion dollars more than we took in under Reagan and Bush the First and another 8 trillion under Bush the Second…and that was before they caused the Wall Street crash.
And we would not be sitting here with a Republican House of Representatives that wants to cut social services, cut the incomes of public workers, cut the pensions of those who need them to live, cut Medicare and Social Security…and yet borrow another $800 billion from China to give billionaires a tax cut of about $100,000 per million.
We need tax increases, not tax cuts. We can say it over and over again, but the Republicans won’t listen because their very existence as a Party is dependent upon this one fact…they lie.
They continue to say that tax cuts stimulate the economy. And stupid people continue to believe them. Even as the economic ships of millions of American hicks are slowly sliding below the waves, as they are drowning in debt from 20% interest rates on credit cards, loss of 50% of the equity in their homes, military expenditures that are not only equal to but greater than the military budgets of all the countries in the world, and approaching double that amount…they still vote for the idiots, like Bachmann, who create all these problems and blame them on others.
As the hicks are out of work, out of unemployment benefits, living on food stamps and handouts, they are and will continue to vote Republican. The great mass of Americans, as proved by the last election of the House of Representatives, is now so ignorant that they cannot even defend themselves against predators, like the Koch-funded Tea Party.
Let’s be honest. They are so stupid that, instead of tarring and feathering the tea baggers, they stand and listen and look at their watches so that they can get back home in time to watch American Idol or watch Donald Trump exhibit his neurotic egotism.
Michele Bachman says in a television commercial that $105, billion in taxes have been levied to pay for the Affordable Care Act. That is not true. While there are $105 billion in taxes…possibly…there could also be only about $25 billion…possibly, in the bill depending on whether certain things are funded. But her assertion that it was some secretive plan, is to quote the Washington Post, “…bordering on the ridiculous.”
Here are the facts. The first two are incontrovertible. One, this amount, additional costs of $105 billion (over 10 years, i.e., $10.5 billion per year) have long since been written into the bill. Anyone who read the bill (as Bachmann should have) would know that.
Second, this bill is designed to SAVE money and reduce health care costs for Americans. There is no debate about that. The only people who don’t want this to pass are those in the health insurance industry. They will eventually go out of business, even if there were no affordable health care act..
You cannot keep raising health insurance rates at 10, 20, 30% per year because soon, instead of the current 47 million people without health care, it will be 100 million and then Democratic governors will coordinate programs across state lines to bring down health care costs. That’s the only way it can logically end. Then we would all deal directly with doctors and hospitals using the government for insurance backup instead of health insurance companies.
Finally, please tell everyone you meet or speak with to start using their heads. Three things should tell you that the Republicans are not at all interested in the average man. They are interested in helping the rich and helping the corporations that the rich own.
Facts:
1. Four hundred (400) families now own as much as the bottom 120 million Americans.
2. Deliberate Republican policies, of Bush, of Cheney and of Karl Rove put 14.9 million Americans out of work. Their policies did it. We know because we found out how they deliberately ignored Wall Street crime and cheating during the investigation of Bernie Madoff. They literally encouraged Wall Street to cheat the public.
3. After creating a situation in which the nearly 15 million unemployed needed unemployment insurance, food stamps and other social services, a situation that cost the government an additional $700 billion a year, they complained that Obama had deficits of a trillion dollars a year. These are Bush deficits, created by the disastrous policies of the Bush Administration leading to a Depression.
4. Once they had given us a $13 trillion debt, they began to clamor for cuts in government. But they don’t want to cut the parts where they make huge fortunes…military contracting. They now want to cut Social Security and Medicare!
5. Finally, and this should be the final straw for anyone’s determination on whether Republicans only care for the rich, they said that they would literally not pay unemployment for people who were laid off because of Bush policies unless Congress and the President approved their $800 billion tax cut for the rich.
How could anyone in his right mind go to a speech by Michelle Bachmann and listen to her say that there is a “secret” $105 billion in costs added to the Affordable Health Care Act? Why would anyone believe her after she and her fellow Republicans took $400 million in campaign contributions during the health care legislation.
Health care legislation lasted an entire year, daily discussions, debates, amendments. The Republicans put up 160 amendments and if you read them you’ll see that they all came directly from the health care industry in ways that would have defeated the health care legislation. They don’t want to do health care for the American people. If they did, they would take up the Democratic offer to improve the legislation. In fact several parts already have been improved.
The Neocons spent an entire year…to prevent its passage…and now are trying—not to improve it—but to kill it. Why kill it? Because it takes 60 votes to pass it in the Senate again if you repeal it. That is the only reason they want to start over…so they can keep it from happening.
Like Sarah Palin, despite a raspy irritating vote and too much eye makeup, whatever that’s called, she seems to be found attractive by a number of people who must find her many …was he inebriated, was he being held hostage, was he simply becoming senile or paranoid, or the person himself or herself…was he being paid off, is he simply an evil person, one who—for some reason—secretly hates his or her fellow man?
So here is this situation. For many, many years…20 years at least or more…the American People have had their health care controlled by third parties. The way you afford health care, which has grown to be so expensive that it defies explanation, is through insurance. And because our government has allowed corporations to merge and buy up smaller companies, a number of very large insurance companies own all the contracts with employers to insure their employees and pay their hospital bills or doctor bills.
As Dr. Kenneth Arrow has discussed in his definitive work on the economics of health care, health insurance is either a good system for keeping people healthy and a bad business or a bad system for keeping people healthy and a good business.
In other words, as an insurance business you are taking risks. But the health care industry doesn’t care about risk, it only cares about doing what is necessary to keep someone healthy. So the natural incentive for the health insurance company is to reduce costs by reducing service.
If you reduce service, people are less healthy. If you reduce, for example, the service of giving pap smears, you reduce a woman’s odds of staying healthy. But you may make more money. If she becomes very ill, then you lose money because you have had to pay huge amounts to fix her problem. The recent attitude of the health care industry, supported by Neocon-Republican politicians is to simply deny coverage and then let the insured lodge a complaint and then file a lawsuit. Often the person dies before the suit can even get to court.
Health care costs in the rest of the industrialized world are half of what they are here. They cover everyone. In many cases if you want to have a private policy, you can have that on top of the public policy. But if you figure that the average cost for health care is $10,000 per year here in the U.S., just to take a number at random, then your cost in Europe, for example, almost anywhere, would be $5,000. So imagine if you health care costs were cut in half and if care were more readily available.
That would be good for you and bad for the current crop of health insurance companies. And that would also be bad for people like Michele Bachmann who get their campaign financing from the heatlh care industry.
