The Republican Healthcare Plan Sucks

Posted on 05/20/2009 at 11:33 pm by Bob Cesca

Wednesday morning, Joe Scarborough and Mike Barnicle referred to Rep. Paul Ryan as the future of the Republican Party. Well, he’s off to another great start following his epic fail budget proposal back in April. This time, he and Tom Coburn have released an equally ridiculous healthcare plan. Among the highlights:

•The creation of State Health Insurance Exchanges would give Americans a one-stop marketplace to compare different health insurance policies and select the one that meets their unique needs;

You mean, create a place where we can compare health insurance rates and shop for a policy? Brilliant idea. So innovative — oh wait. Someone tell Kid Future about this site and this site.

•Consumer protections that would require all participating Exchange insurers offer coverage to any individual regardless of age or health;

Okay, so the Exchange insurers would have to accept anyone. And charge people a gazillion dollars if they want to. In other words, cover old people and sick people, and feel free to gouge the shit out of them.

•Integrating low-income families with dependent children into higher quality private plans through direct assistance that will be coupled with a tax credit;

This sounds like the privatization of Medicaid.

•Requiring wealthy Medicare beneficiaries to contribute more for care provided under Medicare Part B.

You mean, a tax hike on rich people? Is that what they’re calling for? Wait until the tea baggers find out.

Future Boy’s awesome healthcare plan is only two and a quarter pages long. And an inch deep.

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  • http://zirgar.blogspot.com ZIRGAR

    Sorry, but this whole thing by the Grand Old Pussycophants is hilarious. They keep putting forth the same tired old ideas and wonder why each time they get mocked and no one sees those ideas as huge breakthroughs. “Maybe if we do it the same way for the millionth time it’ll finally work!” Losers!

  • http://www.osborneink.com Matt Osborne

    Obama has asked Congress for a plan that does three things: “it must reduce costs, guarantee choice, and ensure quality care for every American.”The GOP plan guarantees a choice, but the menu sucks. It does nothing to reduce costs that isn’t already being done. And there’s nothing in it that would increase quality. Obama should take one good suggestion in it and challenge the Democrats to do better.

  • J

    Isn’t this McCain’s plan? The one Americans really really didn’t vote for??

  • kansasdem

    Well, single payer is the only way to go, but Obama even disagrees with that!

  • http://mhrusa.com siva123

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  • ceu

    hair loss treatment? I can’t tell if the comment is serious or sarcastic.

  • roxsteady

    Nice try but, Edward Wolfgang Munser isn’t fooling anyone. Why don’t they just go away? No one wants to hear anything they have to say. Don’t they understand what the point of the election was? Idiots!

  • http://www.osborneink.com Matt Osborne

    I was reading the GOP plan, and the sum total of their plan to save money is this:1) Kill all the lawyers.Then, later on, the plan says we can save money by:A) Punishing senior citizens for their “bad habits”B) Giving out free flu shots (great! A universal benefit).C) Quit letting poor people buy junk food!Yes, let’s stop letting people buy junk food with their EBT cards. Blame the poor!Yes, for those who don’t know, food stamps are already being made electronic. We can actually automate enforcement of regulations like this one. Those bar-code scanners have been put in place for a reason because…….wait for it……there are already nutritional standards about what you can buy with EBT cards!Most of the urban legends about “food stamp abuse” were untrue to begin with, and now the last remaining real abuses are going the way of the Dodo.But the best part of this plan, to me, is the GOPs admission that “Washington and state bureaucracies already control more than 59.8 percent of health care spending.”This is a talking point primed to backfire. They mean to frighten Harry and Louise with the news that universal health care is THAT CLOSE ALREADY. Instead, they’re basically admitting to Harry and Louise that their party is on the wrong side of history.What are the chances Harry and Louise will feel like they have been left out?

  • eve

    Matt said:”Most of the urban legends about “food stamp abuse” were untrue to begin with…”That is a clue to one of the repubs biggest problems. They make policy proposals that are based on mythology.

  • http://politicalpartypooper.wordpress.com/ politicalpartypooper

    Well, this plan surely sucks. But if you all think the Democrats in Congress or the Senate will come up with anything better by the time the lobbyists are done getting them drunk with donations, you are smoking some potent weed.So long as insurance companies are involved, ANY plan will end up looking A LOT like this one.

  • http://www.southofstrange.com Proud Kool-Aid Drinker™

    PPP, you’re expressing a common worry. But here’s the thing: the government doesn’t have the manpower or the budget to take over universal health care all at once. The insurance companies will have time to compete. So the trick really is to just get a decent public plan in place at all so it can compete with private plans.And then if the marketplace is such a wonderful thing, the government plan will fail on its own merits. Or if (as I think far more likely) a government plan beats the pants off the private insurers, then they will adapt or be destroyed. Which is how the free-market thingy works, right?

  • http://arkytek.blogspot.com/ ∇•B=0  Silly Ratfaced Git  ∇•D=ρ

    I agree with PPP.We must keep up the pressure for a single payer system. A choice of which insurance company you will be fucked by is not a choice. Besides, you go with whichever insurance company your employer cuts a deal with, to do otherwise costs you more. Remove insurance companies and your employer from the equation, it’s the only sensible thing to do.

  • camel54

    It would be nice to have a single payer version of Univ. Care in place tomorrow, but that’s not feasible…it’s not possible I should say. I work in the health care software field and I can tell you it takes a lot of time and a lot of people to implement a system. Our software manages the uninsured populations in individual counties mostly but we are expanding to some statewide pilot programs, and I can tell you we’re looking at years to properly implement the system.The reason Republicans are going to fight this so hard and throw everything they have it this is because they know exactly what Matt O. was getting at, any success on the part of government managed health care will seal the coffin for the Republican argument for private care only. When people who couldn’t afford health care see that they can get basic primary care and not die a horrible death after losing limbs to controllable diseases as opposed to not being able to afford to see a doctor at all for any reason, the fight will be over.Again, I don’t disagree that a single payer system is needed, but right now we need to focus on what we can do in the short term to stop the 20,000 annual preventable deaths, put an end to children suffering from poverty related conditions unnecessarily.

  • zackly

    Can someone explain why Obama is against single payer?

  • http://politicalpartypooper.wordpress.com/ politicalpartypooper

    Zackly,Obama has never said he is against single-payer. But he has also never said he would fight for it.There’s a difference.

  • rogect8

    Personally, I think we’re giving too much credit by calling this a ”plan.” If that word is to have any sort of legitimate meaning, then what the republicans have put forth cannot be considered a ‘plan’ in any sense of the word…

  • http://blog.badtux.net Badtux

    Camel64, universal single-payer government-provided health care could be implemented *tomorrow*. You’d just process it via the same Medicare processing systems used to file claims today. Medicare’s payment codes system already has all the codes in it for younger people because Medicare already covers the disabled, who are of all ages, so it has codes for things like pregnancy and childhood diseases in it already. All that you’d need to do would be to hike the Medicare payroll tax by 5% or so to fund it, and that’d be the end of that.In short, the notion that “it’d be hard to implement” is BS. We already have single-payer health care, albeit only for the disabled and elderly. It’s called “Medicare”, and expanding it to everybody, not just to wrinkly old prunes and gimps, would take far, far, far less time and effort than coming up with a new program from scratch.

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