Worse Than Nothing

I totally agree! I also know that our take on things may be unpopular, at least at this moment, but that’s exactly how I feel.And I might remind everyone that I’m NOT serving my own interests in my opinion. I have the public option already! I’m covered by Medicare and a highly regulated supplement plan! I expect no less of an option for every one of my fellow Americans.

You may be right. But honestly, it sounded to me like a poorly written line, as it was followed by “if you like your insurance, you can keep it.” As in, you’ll have a choice, but he wanted to dispel the lie that you will be forced off insurance you like. But we’ll see, won’t we? I also point out, the President doesn’t write the bill, so once I again, I say wait and see.

Again, Lee gets it!!! I heard what you heard!____________________Obama wants to tidy up when the whole house needs to be condemned and rebuilt.The format of the speech went like this:1. Emotional problem identification (which he’s very good at and does effectively).2. Talk about how he’s going to feed the fat cats — don’t worry Big Pharma and Corporatists I got your back!3. Soaring “feel good” rhetoric about “who we are”___________”I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business: I just want to hold them accountable…I want a Public Option within the insurance exchange.” -President-let’s-keep-the-profit-making-in-health-care Obama___________

Lee,I agree in part here. I would love to have heard him make a stronger case for the Public Option and thus I would chastize him for not opening the door for everyone to buy into that.Untimately, however, I believe one of the key members of the audience was the Snowe, Nelson, Conrad crowd who probably would vote against it. He needed to thread a fine needle between the public option and Snowe’s need to look like she is against any major new government programs.I would take this away. He made a stronger case of the public option than most people thought he would. It’s up to the progressives to hold firm and finish the job.

I do not understand how people think you can tear down 1/6 of our economy and think that things will end up better. It is, literally, impossible. It’s why the financial system is still the way it is. Could more be done to change it? Sure. But if the FDIC had nationalized the big banks in September, we would ALL be on bread lines right now. If we hadn’t been killed by our neighbors for what we had in our pantries.My issue with abstinence-only education is that it clings to idealism with a total blindness to reality. That is the same way I feel about people who are like, “why not just shut down the insurance industries and put single-payer in?” I deal in reality and so does the President. Get on board or get out of the way.

I agree, Lee, that Obama’s plan is an ungainly mish-mash of a bunch of ideas that range from mediocre to outright bad. He’s created a lumbering Rube-Goldberg hybrid of a bunch of crappy ideas. Why make something simple when it can be complicated and expensive profitable?He included three (really) bad ideas here -1. Co-ops … really? Co-ops? Doesn’t anyone realize the insurance industry already has a plan for either slowly suffocating or outright torpedoing these things?2. Mandates? … really? Mandates? Great. Let’s secure customers for the insurance industry buzzards with the force of law. More money in the pocket of wealthy insurance CEO’s.3. Institute everything over the course of four years. So, a timeline? … really? A timeline? Wonderful. Not only kick the can down the road for people who need help now, telegraph the battleplan for those who have the ready cash to spend our side into oblivion in PAC money and media saturation in the midterms so that the meat and teeth any progressives get lucky enough to include in the bill will be slowly wrung out of it before effective change can take hold.Soaring rhetoric, sure, and nice jabs at the GOP neanderthals lies over the last month, but all of it in service of incremental changiness that can be systematically killed by a thousand cuts.Yup. Definitely worse than nothing. I’m officially disappointed in Hope and Change.

Can you explain how “single-payer also keeps “profit-making” in healthcare.”I’m a recent heavy user of the Canadian health care system, and I have not seen how the doctors that treated me and billed the provincial government, and the nurses and technicians who were paid by the hour by the provincial government had anything to do with profit making. Please enlighten.

Lee, I see our bright and compassionate president as somewhat of a hostage negotiator.Always have, really.I think the complex assortment of inherited crisis represents a clear view that America is seemingly too easily victimized by the greed and irresponsibility of various market forces and drivers.There are mighty forces to hold at bay and I’ll be damned if the president isn’t in the center of the circle with a wooden sword and some sort of radiation and greed repelling shield staving off the bone-picking ghouls of America’s vibrancy and soul.There is an enormity of task at hand and by all accounts, we’re beginning to put it right and keep it that way.Doubters should be a little humbled today.

I didn’t get that at all. I thought public option would be available to whoever wants it, regardless of income. I guess I need to go over the text of the speech. Bob, don’t you guys talk?

404error wrote:

Can you explain how “single-payer also keeps “profit-making” in healthcare.”

I’m not sure if you, 404error, fall into this category, but I’m shocked and amazed by how many single-payer supporters don’t even understand what it is. Medicare is single-payer, and it PAYS for-profit places like hospitals, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, retailers, etc. Even if we killed all private health insurers and enacted single-payer, there would still be for-profit healthcare in America.

Lee has the right to his opinion, even if you don’t agree with him. I don’t but, I took something else from the speech. The President wasn’t belitteling the public option. He was just pointing out how the right has jumped on this without explaining what exactly it was!

I also know 6 people, close family friends, who work for Humana Healthcare. I don’t agree with a lot of the policies of the corporation, but the little guys working there making 30-50k a year are the ones who would be hurt if you overnighted a single-payer system. The profiteers are at the top, not the bottom.

Give me a break, Lee.If the public option was going to pass easily, you’d be screaming about how Obama sucks because he didn’t adopt single payer. If a single payer bill was going to pass easily, you’d be screaming about how Obama Sold Us Out because we’re not modeling our healthcare reform on the UK’s system.It’s you and Gleen Greenwald who need to step back from your microscopes and look at the macro picture again.If John McCain had won, would we even be talking about healthcare reform at all?As a kidney transplant patient who had to quit my career in Hollywood to take a government job just to get health benefits I would not have afforded for “pre-existing conditions”, I think making the most basic, line in the sand, this-is-the-minimum-of-what-I-will-accept stance of consumer protections is a HUGE leap forward for every single person, not just those like me. Since this is the bare minimum that all bills contain, we’re already way ahead.Don’t get caught up in the microscopic view that the media paints with it’s broad brush – stop, smell the roses, and realize that this is where we take our stand, this is what we pass, and this is what we build from.

Lee:I have often posted to disagree with you.Now, however, is not one of those times. I agree; the rhetoric was amazing and well delivered. The substance, however, of what will actually be implemented seems to be worse than not doing anything at all.I seem to remember, during the primaries, one of the reasons I was so adamant AGAINST Hillary Clinton was the idea of mandatory health insurance for individuals. Obama used it as a club against her.Also, the idea that one cannot defang the insurance industry for fear of putting out the mid-level workers is absurd.I know someone in the insurance industry who makes $450K a year and he’s nowhere near any upper-level echelon.The fact that they ALSO employ many $30-50K workers does little to the fact that their business model is inherently criminal.

Yes. Doing nothing at all is the way to go. Let’s all do that.

This is a false dichotomy. The choice is not between doing nothing and doing SOMEthing, but doing nothing or doing something better.If a party’s signature platform can’t be sold with solid house majority, solid “up or down vote” majority in the senate and a president in the White House, then what the fuck did I phone bank for and sign up voters and put bumper stickers on my car about?The republicans, with literally the slimmest Senatorial majority possible pushed through so much harmful shit, and cried “UP OR DOWN!” all the time.I have absolutely no idea why no democrat has said, let’s call the bluff, have the vote, and let them filibuster. REALLY, really, filibuster; Strom Thurmond, diaper-and-phonebook style, not this sort of “implied threat being read as a fait accompli.”I get the politics of “taking what you can get” when you’re out of power and have to bargain and leverage. But dudes. We’ve got the house, the senate and the white house, with larger margins than they had when they went hogwild in the past 8 years.It has made me throw out every DCC plea for more money that has come my way.

I feel like excluding the public option would make this whole effort a failure, but I certainly don’t think it’s worse than nothing. Stopping rescission alone is better than nothing. Stopping the use of pre-existing conditions for denial is better than nothing. The idea of shopping for insurance across state lines but using strong federal regulation to prevent that race to the bottom doesn’t seem like a bad idea.It would be great if it could be less convoluted and every individual could have health care period, but it’s childish to think that could happen overnight. The medical software we make for helping communities serve the un- and under-insured took two years to be written and that was with an existing version already there. It took another year after it was released to work out most of the bugs and streamline it for users. Like the example the above commenter made about the iPhone, we can’t just flip a switch and go from our current system to a completely different one. Nor can we switch to the one we will most likely get in a month. Be realistic.

Lee – I think you’ve become radicalized on this issue – perhaps for good reason. The difficulties of dealing with our existing health care system when it crashes on your head – I don’t even want to imagine, and you’ve been living it. So I’m not going to pile on too much here. But – I pretty much agree with Bob in this debate, and am on board with the president’s current trajectory. I guess I was always going to be on board – I’m still not convinced that there’s anything wrong with the co-op options, other than that they won’t force big insurance out of business (which isn’t an objective of mine). But to claim that what is on the table is worse than nothing is simply false – and for all of the people who will indeed get SOMETHING out of the deal, if not all that everyone hoped for – I’m simply not willing to be down on everything.That said – I appreciate the watchdogging from the left on the subject of mandates, and agree that we ought to keep the pressure on to ensure that any mandate comes with something that we all can actually afford, and that meets our needs. And I would indeed like to see that our options include nonprofit options, instead of only the requirement to buy private insurance. Which says to me – more letters, more emails, more phone calls…QT

Again, the dems don’t have the votes Josh. Sad, but true, thanks to the Blue Dogs. So all you people that keep chanting that we have a majority just are not getting it.

It will come to a vote but your main point of having a majority is what I was addressing. If you listen to Lawrence O’Donnell who has experience with trying to get health insurance reform under Clinton, the votes are not there. So I don’t know what you’re disagreeing with.Blaming Obama is wrong headed. He is working with what he has, putting out a plan, (he can’t write it) that will appeal to the most people on both sides.If he had the votes, his proposal would be much more to the progressives liking IMO.