They are doing everything they can, these Right Wingers, like Senators Coburn, Bunning, McConnell, McCain, among others and Representatives Kirk, Murphy, Dent, Foxx, Roskam and Biggert among the many others of the Neocon Republicans…to shoot down any form of health care that will end the lock on health care by their health insurance, medical and hospital friends.
Kirk stood up in the House the other evening to spout off about Canadians coming to this country for health care. He says it is called “Fargoing.” I can’t imagine that Fargo has such wonderful health care that people would come here for it. Maybe if they called it “Mayo-ing” it might make more sense. He protests and illumines, he says, to try to “protect the rights” of citizens, American citizens to keep their choice. Outside of some show of support for his friends in the health insurance field, like Rick Scott, the man whose company was fined a billion dollars by the U.S. government, why would Mark Kirk make such a meaningless comment? The Neocons are simply flailing around looking for any scrap of commentary they think will not cause citizens to burst out laughing at the very sound.
We know that the Canadian, the British, the German, the Scandinavian, the French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish…all these systems and other universal health systems do NOT ration care or deny or delay operations. There are false Emails and letters that purport to say this, but they are nothing but hoaxes and lies. Canadians themselves when asked say they do not want any other form of health care delivery. They are well over 90% satisfied and happy with their system.
Representative Murphy, a physician from Pennsylvania says that when the health care companies focus on outcomes, costs go down. So the idea is that they will, perhaps, someday, focus on outcomes. And then, perhaps, someday–we are to believe–they will have a change of heart and voluntarily stop making millions and billions. Should we all believe in this sudden change of heart and assume that they will allow everyone to have reasonably priced health care?
If they win this battle in the House and Senate and if they survive the revolution that will come afterwards, that is–physically survive an armed revolution, which could happen–there are angry people out and about these days…then why would they suddenly give back money that they have been working hard to steal from us each year in greater and greater amounts?
Here’s the keystone of the NeoconRepublican plan (after, of course, denigratingthe universal health care plans of the 36 countries considered by the World Health organization as better than ours.) The Republicans offer…yes…you guessed it–a tax cut. A $5,710 tax cut. That’s it. Everything else stays the same. No right to health care. No insistence that people have health care so that we don’t end up payinghugeamounts for them. No guarantee that insurance companies will take you. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Meanwhile, the average family currently spends about $12,000 a year on health care. So is this a good trade off? A tax cut that you may or may not get that covers roughly half of the average family cost and does nothing for catastrophic costs should they occur.
And what are they trying to prevent from happening…your old friends who have brought you this miserable health care situation? The NeoconRepublicans in Congress want to prevent President Obama from introducingcompetition into the marketplace. The government health care option will be less costly, easier to use, and you cannot be turned down for any reason. And yes, it will be a much better deal than the health insurance companies can offer. The consumer will now have a big club to hold over the heads of any health insurance company that wants his or her business. The insurance companies have lost all credibility. And they aren’t really negotiating. Behind the scenes, they support Ric Scott and his television commercials spreading every vicious lie he can think of in order to keep the average citizen on the brink of poverty.
“The point of all this is to drive the health insurance providers out of business and institute ( a single payer) socialized medicine.” So say the Neocon Republicans. Is it true? Yes, of course it is true. 75% of Americans in a recent CNN poll said that they wanted single-payer health insurance! Involving the government will eventually end up as exactly what the People say that they want. It would end up putting the health insurance industry out of business. Unless, of course, they wanted to do business ethically and reasonably as do the carefully regulated private health insurance systems that back both the German and Swiss universal health care systems. Just as Rush Limbaugh wants Obama to fail, we want the over-priced, arrogant, greedy, uncaring private health insurance companies to go away. But they probably won’t. There is money to be made. Simply not grossly outrageous profits.
Another argument the Neocon Republicans use is to say that people under age 35 are to blame for all our health care woes because they do not buy health insurance. The Neocon Republicans call them the “The Invincibles” because they do not think that they will need health care. First of all, I have never heard the term “The Invincibles” applied to those under 35. But if they think that they are invincible…who could blame them? People under 35 normally think that anyway and these days medicine has come so far that they may feel medicine can cure them of anything that they could encounter at age 35. If we make health insurance reliable and inexpensive, the under-35s will be there. Why would you buy health care insurance, if you are under 35, if it is enormously expensive and if you feel that it might not be there when you need it, even though you have been paying for it?
The “Patients Choice Act of 2009” which is the NeoconRepublican plan is an immediate misnomer, and a hoot. The fact is that people would have the farthest thing from choice. Only people with substantial amounts of money would have choice. The middle class and the working poor would have no choice. Sounds good, though, doesn’t it? You’ll have choice. You just won’t have enough cash..wampum…moolah…to choose the plan you want (if you are, in fact, not already excluded. Nothing about that in the Neocon Republican plan.)
They keep saying that “we don’t want another failed government program, like Medicare.” Well, first of all, Medicare is very popular. It runs for about 2% versus 20% for private health care. The people it is not popular with are the doctors. Now, about doctors…the American Medical Association is actually a cartel that allows only 16,000 chairs in the medical schools each year, even though we need an additional 6,000 doctors to keep up our inventory of doctors. So we import 6,000 aliens from Asia and other parts of the world to take care of our hospital needs. We also import nurses, but they are not as strong a political group as doctors. Doctors were a very big part of killing the laudable Clinton plan in the early 1990s and are still obstructing good health care for all Americans to this day. It is interesting that Republican Senators Coburn and Frist, plus House members Burgess, Murphy and Gingery are all doctors and all oppose any legislation that might harm their income or add more doctors or pay for medical education in return for service. Frist is hard to understand. He donates his time to perform surgery on people in Africa and yet he votes against medical plans that people can afford in this country.
In addition to Medicare which works, we have a lot of very efficient government programs such as the VA, which the Democrats really turned around, starting in 2007 after our big Warrior-President, George (AWOL) Bush let VA hospitals fall into disgraceful disrepair. We have other really good government agencies too, like the Justice Department who protect us, or the USDA that doles out carefully hundreds of million of dollars in food stamps and children’s lunches each year. And there are even quasi-agencies like the Post Office that will take a piece of mail from you on Monday in Bangor, Maine and deliver it to your sister in Salinas, California on Thursday for 42 cents or the next day for 13 bucks…now there’s choice. Not a bad deal. The Interior will be great again under Obama. Now that we have stopped putting mining executives in posts where they can regulate mining companies in which they still own stock.
You know, the Republicans have this one argument. It is this: don’t trust government to run your health care system. Look what they are doing with the auto industry. Look at AIG. Look at the big banks. When here’s what you should see when you look at them. A bunch of very large, out-of-control companies, run by greedy, immature executives who ran those companies into the ground and almost sent us into a 25% unemployment economy. A disaster. And who came to the rescue? The government. So NO MORE talk about how big corporate executives could run government better. The big financial experts failed. The businessmen who were put in by George W. Bush as political appointees failed. The career people at the EPA, the Justice Department, CIA, Treasury, the State Department, Interior….all solid management people have kept those agencies working in spite of the Bush Administration appointees. The bumpkins were the political appointees like “Brownie” at FEMA, the Arabian horse trainer who screwed things up so badly that the poor people of New Orleans may never recover.
It’s a good bet that the People will take the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare ahead of the Wall Street or auto industry management. Or the military where we all used to serve, a big government beaurocracy for sure, that is as efficient as it gets when it comes to unexpected and sudden challenges. We’ll take them to run our health system any day over the kinds of executives who ruined Lehman Bros., Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Chrysler or General Motors.
Medical malpractice suits were won by doctors 62% of the time, and the average of those cases that they lost only amounted to an average of $420,000. These amounts were reduced by Republican-sponsored legislation that put a cap on punitive damages of $250,000 regardless of what happened to the individual. But the medical industry and their lackeys like Representative Kirk still harp on medical malpractice as an example of why doctors charge exorbitant rates and hospitals are all but out of reach of the average person who gets sick. It is, of course, nonsense and a huge lie. Medical malpractice has become a minor influence on the enormous health insurance rate increases. The average amount that malpractice suits have on health care costs has repeatedly been shown to be no more than 1%.
The Neocon Republicans are under the gun from their favorite lobbyists, the health insurance companies. Also Democrats like Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Max Baucus of Montana. But the People want a public option. They want to be able to buy good insurance at a reasonable price. The only “choice” that makes sense for the American People right now is a program sponsored by the government of the good old U.S. of A. Tell that to your representative and any others whose numbers you can find. They need to know.