Karen Tumulty highlights overwhelming public support for a public option for health care insurance.
…buried in the WSJ/NBC poll is this bit of data that is of interest to those of us following the health care debate. Asked whether a health care overhaul should give people a choice of both private insurance and a plan administered by the government, three-quarters rated it quite or extremely important. I’m told the unequivocal result surprised even the pollsters:
But wise old men, Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, still important despite their status as corporate whores/Britney-Spears-chasing perverts oppose it, more or less:
“While I feel very strongly that consumers should have the choice of a national, Medicare-like plan, my colleagues do not. . . But we were concerned that the ongoing health reform debate is beginning to show signs of fracture on the public plan issue, so in order to advance the process of developing bipartisan legislation and to move it forward, it’s time to find consensus here,” Daschle said.
Believe it or not, I found an interesting tidbit in Broder’s column on the subject:
Daschle reluctantly agreed that there would be no federal-government plan. Instead, states that want it could include such a plan on the menu for their residents, with technical help from the feds in setting it up. Five years from now, if a demand for such an option still exists, the president could recommend it, and Congress would have to vote on it.
Would something like that be a dead end or the thin end of the wedge? My take on health care is that single-payer works better and that a public option is likely to lead eventually to single-payer. So I’m behind any plan that includes public option. For now, Congress is simply too deeply in the pockets of the health care industry to push any kind of single-payer through, no matter how the public feels about it (it’s important to remember at times like this, that the United States is more of a corportocracy that a democracy).
I don’t know if letting it start at the state level is a way of killing it or if that makes it possible for it to trickle up? Any thoughts?
jibeaux
Hooray, new thread to briefly hijack. My teacher of the year friend would like to give thanks for the donations, he got one for $100 from a complete B-J stranger and he was so, so thrilled. So there’s your love.
Back on topic, does the Daschle quote mean that a public option is off the table? Please tell me I am missing something, because if we can’t elect a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress and can’t even get ideas with 75% public support out of committee, we just need to scrap this system of government.
I hope that I am overreacting about that.
EdTheRed
I could be wrong.
I could be right.
Your time has come, your second skin.
You climb so high and gain so low.
Walk through the valley.
The written word is a lie.
May the road rise with you.
May the road rise with you.
May the road rise with you.
May the road rise with you.
I could be wrong.
I could be right.
DougJ
Hard to say…what would we transition to exactly? I do think this shows that we aren’t much of a democracy.
cleek
per Yglesias: how many votes do Daschle and Dole have ?
Zifnab
It’s 1993 all over again, hurray!
That depends on whether we get good single payer or bad single payer. A shitty system – or one that’s so heavily knee capped that it can’t perform it’s stated function – will leave people with the “Government can’t get anything right” taste in their mouths. But it still won’t make private insurance any less asstastic. A public option under Bush, for instance, would be a fucking nightmare.
So I like the idea that if the government fucks up, the people have somewhere else to turn. And if FedEx and UPS can exist in a world with the USPS, I have no problem believing that private insurers can exist alongside a public option.
The worse the public option is, the better private insurers will fare. And I can definitely see us settling in to a sort-of holding pattern where good private insurers do well enough such that there’s less public pressure to fix bad public health insurance. I don’t see single payer as the inevitable result of the public option at all. I do see it as an end to the truly shitty insurance giants, however.
jibeaux
@DougJ:
I don’t know, an Oligarchy Of Policy Wonks.
This is obviously not a serious proposal, just the sound of despair.
Loneoak
That Daschle compromise sounds like the biggest dead end ever conceived of in the history of Beltway insiderism. What a effing stupid idea. The people resisting a federal public plan have no leg to stand on and they need to be called to account for this bs.
My hope is this: Obama is letting the clowns play around in Congress while he works up support in the populace for a public plan, and then he steamrolls the clowns. All he needs is 50 votes and any Democrat that votes no on a health care plan because it isn’t ‘moderate enough’ is toast.
harlana pepper
@jibeaux: I second that. All I know is that the menacing presence of health insurance/pharma lobbies hangs over this debate like a black, ominous cloud.
Justin
Private insurance generally follows one of two tracks.
Unhealthy individuals drive up the price of premiums and drive out the healthy, further driving up the price of premiums and so on. That is adverse selection.
Or, private insurers find ways not to pay for unhealthy individuals with creative legalese, or by simply not offering them a price.
AS won’t affect the public plan because healthy people don’t pay premiums in the same sense as private plans, but as for the second scenario, insurance companies and private employers will increasingly opt to dump people (especially the unhealthy) into the public plan. Years later, free marketeers on this issue can compare public vs. private per participant costs of health care and conclude that public costs more, is more ineffecient, etc. and shut down any more attempted reform.
low-tech cyclist
Good thing Daschle had to back out of being Obama’s point man on health care reform. If this is what he’s got to say about it, I’m quite relieved that he’s on the sidelines.
TenguPhule
And there’s the problem right there (in the eyes of the insurance overlords and their bought senators).
Insurance companies might be forced to not be as profitable because they’d have to deliver actual decent services or face being wiped out by a working government system.
BombIranForChrist
Leaving it to the states is dangerous for a couple reasons:
1. See California.
2. The bigger the scale, the better the plan will work. Really small states may find it really tough to come up with something that isn’t super expensive.
DougJ
That may be true.
polyorchnid octopunch
The system of government is not the problem. The problem is the people in it. There’s a great line in 2001 (the novel) where Bowman remembers a conversation with an engineer: we can design fail-safe systems against accidents and breakdowns, but we can never design one that will protect against malice.
At the risk of Godwin, it’s analogous to the argument made by the Nazis at the end of WW II: the German nation was collectively guilty. They hoped that this argument would allow them to avoid responsibility for their personal part in the many crimes that took place during that era. Simon Wiesenthal’s analysis of that argument bears examining, especially in light of the many crimes of the U.S. since 9/11.
One thing that people don’t understand about our systems of representative democracy in the West is the important role of the party. Both parties in the US system (and clearly one, possibly two of them here in Canada) have become completely corrupt. There are two ways for the citizenry to deal with this. One would be to join one of these parties in massive numbers and use their internal mechanisms to get rid of the corrupt within them, and the other is to start a new party and defeat both of the corrupt parties in an election.
The only real way to prevent this kind of takeover of the institutions of representative democracy is to have a society where a strong majority of citizens take their duty to participate in their democracy seriously.
As an outsider looking in, I can say that recent signs in the U.S. are encouraging on that front. There are some of us up here in Canada who are attempting to get the same thing going up here.
Legalize
My thoughts:
Barack Obama = hammer
Congress = nail
Hang Daschle and Dole. Pick a system you like (there are plenty) and implement it.
Absent that, we’ll get a watered-down hand-out to the insurance companies that won’t (a) lower costs or (b) provide quality coverage for every American. States won’t do it because they can’t pay for it. The federal government “advising” the states will turn into nothing more than the insurance industry having an easier time watering-down state laws as they now exist.
Bill E Pilgrim
Broder’s column BTW is the usual Beltwankery, about how Republicans (representing 20% of the population and sinking) should always be given exactly half the say in things if not more, because of course anything else would not be buy parmesan. Er, bipartisan.
I always wonder how he must define “bi” in general, according to that logic, i.e. you could be depressed only 20% of the time and still be “bipolar”.
Sort of like Rove recently claiming that Obama was the most “polarizing” President thanever, when O had 70% approval at the time.
The origins of stupidity in the breakdown of the
bicameralRepublican mind.TenguPhule
There is always a third option.
PeakVT
I don’t know if letting it start at the state level is a way of killing it
I think that a state would face the race-to-the-bottom issue if it tried to individually implement a public option. Perhaps it could work in Cali because it has serious heft, but Cali is completely broken (and broke) right now.
Reich has made the argument that the health care lobby is good at rolling state legislators. No idea if that is true but that would be another reason to dislike the idea of states taking the lead.
The Other Steve
It’s hard to say. My fear with any public plan in competition with private plans is the private plan people will refuse unhealthy people who need lot’s of healthcare… they’ll get pushed onto the public plan thus driving up the costs.
I’m ok with state arranged plans. Historically if things work at the state level, that generally ends up spreading up to the federal level, etc.
But unless this reform package says private insurers cannot turn away customers, and they must charge the same amount for all participants of a given coverage level. It won’t solve any problems.
Apsaras
You would think someone as in-bed with the insurance industry as Tom Daschle wouldn’t have to go around wearing a pair of Sally Jesse Raphael’s old glasses. Yes, I’m being a bitch. Too bad. Take it away, Matt Taibbi!
The whole blog post here.
mikeg
not just “… at times like these…”
Napoleon
This is a perfect example of an issue that is not an issue outside of the Villagers. They have convinced themselves that the public option is a problem because their echo chamber and paymasters (i.e. the lobbyist and advertisers) tell them that it is.
NBC Nightly News had a piece on this poll last night and to illustrate the fact that the public likes the idea of the public option they used a clip of some middle age white guy who starts by spouting what appeared to be Faux News/Rush approved talking points about how he doesn’t want the government running the medical system and telling him what to do but he ends by saying he absolutely wanted a public plan to be an option, but just an option, that would be available to him. He was very strong on the point, just as strong as on the point that the government should stay out of running healthcare.
A clear dead end. The whole idea of a public option is that it creates an entity with bargaining power that could hold down prices, and the size that it could determine the cost effectiveness of treatement. I do not have links readily at hand but its been well reported that one of the health insurance lobbies back up strategies if they can not kill a public option straight up is to kill it by forcing it to be broken up into a bunch of small regional plans that can not effectively bargain or determine the efficiency of treatments, and therefore can not effectively compete with them.
harlana pepper
Paging Dr. Dean!
TenguPhule
Apsaras
Sorry, everything below the block quote should be in the block quote. Would hate to try and claim Taibbi’s prose as my own.
Napoleon
@Zifnab:
What he said.
JenJen
So Daschle is basically saying to all of us without employer-based coverage: Suck. On. This. For five more years.
anonevent
@jibeaux: Last time I checked we were a Republic, not a Democracy. It’s not up to a majority of people, but a majority of those in Congress. It’s our job to elect people with spines.
harlana pepper
@JenJen: That was my take on it, for sure. And to think I was pooh-poohed by some for griping that Dean didn’t get the position. Of course, Dean has real convictions, genuine concern for patients and a passion for their welfare, so he was not an option. But, I think we can see who would have been the better choice. But a better choice for whom, I suppose, is the key question.
Jennifer
It’s definitely a way to kill it.
Restricting it to state-level means several things: first, instead of having a large national pool of 50 million insured, you have 50 separate pools of people, many of them with less than 500,000, too small to negotiate a better deal for their customers than the shitty deal they get now from private insurers. So you make sure it costs more.
Perhaps even more importantly though, it keeps the system fractured into 50 different jurisdictions, just the way the insurers like it. Every state has its own insurance commission; a national public insurance plan starts to break that down. And currently, the private insurers own the state insurance commissions, so that’s the turf where they’d rather fight.
As I’ve said elsewhere, if they try to just patch this over with some weak-assed bullshit, we could take matters into our own hands. We currently do not HAVE to buy insurance; 20 or 30 or 50 million people notifying their employer/insurer that they plan on dropping their policy 90 days from now would get something done, because once the insurers’ accountants crunched the numbers on what policy cancellations in such huge numbers would do to their ability to turn a profit, the insurers themselves would step up and demand something be done to save their worthless hides. It would be like the ticking time bomb on 24 except that in this case, you’d almost rather sit back and watch while it goes off.
Bill E Pilgrim
@anonevent:
It was that damn invertebrate revolution, the whole country became more and more shellfish.
jibeaux
@anonevent:
We’re a democratic republic, of course.
Stefan
But we were concerned that the ongoing health reform debate is beginning to show signs of fracture on the public plan issue, so in order to advance the process of developing bipartisan legislation and to move it forward, it’s time to find consensus here,” Daschle said.
Note what Daschle identifies as the key goal — not to develop the best health care option for the American public, but “to advance the process of developing bipartisan legislation.” Again we see bipartisanship fetishized for its own sake, irrespective of what it is supposed to achieve. Hey, if we can’t find consensus, then let’s not — let’s pass the Democratic version and let the Republicans suck on it.
Because there are two parties, one of which is moderate and one of which is far right-wing, any “bipartisan” solution will inevitably be pulled far to the right of the moderate mainstream.
donovong
Fuck Daschle, and Dole, and Mitchell and any and all of the chickenshit Democrats who can’t work up the balls to get this done right. There is no excuse for not getting a robust public option done now. Hopefully, when these idiots get back from their summer recess they will have grown some stones.
I am the biggest Obama fan on the planet, but if we can’t get healthcare done, I am going to be terribly disappointed and may just give up on ALL politicans again. It’s easier not to give a shit.
SadOldVet
Single-payer models abound. Canada and the European countries provide models that statistically have been show to reduce the costs per capita and costs as a percentage of GDP. These countries statistically have much better health, as measured by statistics such as infant mortality and longivity of lives.
Insurance company models exist with the United States as the prime example. American costs are tremendously higher than in any single-payer country and our overall health statistics are among the worst of the industrialized countries on the planet.
This having been said, a ‘public option’ would likely be a precursor to a single-payer system as more and more people figure out that they can get better care at lower costs than thru the for-profit corporate insurance companies.
Thus, I predict that any ‘health care reform’ will prevent a public option from being available or that if a public option is presented it will not be allowed to negotiate pricing and will have restrictions on it that will make it an easy target for rethugnican demagogery.
Thus, I predict that ‘health care reform’ will be passed that will force everyone to buy corporate medical insurance and assure rising prices and rising profits into the future.
The issue is not the ‘balls’ of dumbocraps, it is about the senators of both parties who have been bought by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
There are a significant number of dumbocrap senators owned by the medical insurance and pharmaceutical industries. They will work with their corporate masters to assure that the only thing that passes is a guaranteed increase in profitability for these industries.
In case you believe I have a jaded perspective, the dumbocrap senator from my state will be among those derailing anything that does not assure increased profitability for those industries. That senator is Evan Bayh. Evan’s wife is on the board of directors of Wellpoint (Anthem/Blue Cross/Blue Shield) where her most recently reported income from them was $337,000 for 2007. Additionally, she is on the boards of directors of multiple pharmaceutical and biotech corporations that would be adversely impacted by real reform.
les
I think that a part of the proposal that makes the public option work is prohibiting private companies from rejecting the unhealthy, excepting existing conditions, etc. If somebody has the money, the insurance company has to give them a policy and cover them. If that gets left on the bipartisan cutting floor, a public option is dead even if it gets in. If those are the terms, it’s easy to see why the industry is shitting the bed.
My pet peeve–the fucking AMA shilling for the insurance companies and their fucking bureaucracy. We could probably shave 10% on health care just by making everybody use the same claims process.
jackie
If you feel strongly you are going to have to stand up and fight. Every single day call or write your congresscritters. Make yourself obnoxious and encourage anyone you can to do the same. The lobby against this has alot of money and access. The only way to have influence is to convince them that to vote against you will hurt them because you are watching.
montcalm
in agreement with others – good thing daschle didn’t get the position. on npr this morning they said that obama called the daschle/etc proposal “serious, detailed, etc.” i don’t know whethere that’s approval or dismissal.
i also think that it’s interesting that overall approval for a public plan is 76% and yet among those with employer plans, 42% think that the public plan is bad news. obviously a big disconnect between those who have struggled to get covered and those who are privileged enough to have work that covers them.
harlana pepper
@Stefan:
Indeed.
4jkb4ia
A state option kills it. I find it difficult to believe that Mississippi will ever get behind a single-payer plan on its own and you have 50 petty corporations working out these issues individually. DougJ may think of how functional the New York state legislature is on a good day.
b-psycho
What’s more interesting is how in that same poll 47% thought having a public option would lead to being kicked off their employer plan…
Single-payer is going to come as a big business cost-dump. Whether you’re for it in the long run or not, that’s why it’ll eventually be implemented.
JenJen
@Apsaras: Very smart to quote Matt Taibbi here. That piece is the first thing I thought of when I heard about Daschle’s comments!
That’s really all anybody needs to know about the former majority leader.
@harlana pepper: I’m pretty infuriated today. This is a big deal to me, and I truly believed when campaigning for and electing Barack Obama that it was now or never on a FEDERAL public health care option. Leave it to the states? Seriously? Umm, good luck, Alabamans. And, let’s just come up with a shitty, bipartisan piece of crap worthless bit of legislation now, so as to shut all the DFH’s who are probably unemployed anyway up, and punt in on down the line.
In other words, their saying, “You’ll eat it and like it. Don’t like it? Wait five years.”
I want to break things, I really do. Preferably over Tom Daschle’s head. At least he has health insurance.
4jkb4ia
And if some of the states band together to buy health insurance, this makes the argument against single-payer on the federal level stronger especially if all the states that wanted it have gotten it.
Tim
Thank you jackie, that was the point I was going to make.
We can’t just sit here at our computers and bitch about these idiots. Right now the word from the WH call center is that they are getting far more calls against the public option than for it, and the same goes for senate offices. One even expressed surprise at the results of the new NBC poll on the subject.
Call the White House. Email the White House
Call your Senators. Email your Senators.
Call and email the other Senators on the HELP committee.
See the end of this GOS diary for contact info.
Apsaras
Honestly, I feel like all the “spines” and “balls” talk around here misses the mark. It presumes that the Democrats in the Senate are secretly as liberal as we are, and if only they’d screw their courage to the sticking place we would have Single Payer or a Public Health Care Option and a man and his husband both serving in the military and habeas corpus meaning something again.
Maybe they aren’t afraid. Maybe the Harry Reids and Claire McCaskills of the world aren’t wanting for spines, they’ve just chosen new masters. They’ve figured out that as long as they make a lot of noise about health care and jobs and all that stuff during election season, left-leaning people will vote for them. Then they can go on doing the work of Kaiser Permanente and Monsanto and Lockheed Martin (and taking their money) while the rest of us wring our hands and wait for them to deliver on promises they never had any intention of keeping.
Maybe?
John Hamilton Farr
Whatever the f*ck happened to FIGHTING for something that’s really worth it?!? These guys are so beholden to their corporate masters, it’s vomit-making.
Does nobody at all care about the American people? What the hell happened to this place since I was born into it lo these many years ago? Looks to me like nothing will get fixed until the survivors climb out from the wreckage, which is why I’m in NM…
(NM being permanently & forever “wrecked,” there won’t be that much change! :-)
Napoleon
@JenJen:
I totally agree, and IMO this very well could be the last clear chance to get it in my lifetime, barring some even more catastrophic economic or health care meltdown then we are currently experiencing which strengthens the hands of pro-health care reform forces. The last time conditions were right and we got a major reform was 45 years ago.
Tonal Crow
Since when has “public option” been spelled “Republican option”? These clowns need to hear our demands for a real public option day in and day out, until they can’t stand it anymore. http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
patrick
While I am generally opposed to single issue voting, I’m making an exception.
The Public Option IS THE COMPROMISE between Single Payer and For Profit health insurance.
My Senators and Congressman can be right on every single issue I care about, but get this one wrong and I will oppose them LOUDLY.
As a small businessman, father of four, I can’t buy insurance at a price I can afford because of pre-existing conditions – I get kidney stones.
If the Public Option leads to SIngle Payer, I’m good with that.
4jkb4ia
I read the story now. What Daschle is talking about doesn’t depend on state legislatures but could morph into a Conrad-type insurance exchange. But it does have a strong whiff of 1993, whoever said that above.
JL
When the state of GA privatized natural gas to lower costs and increase competition, our rates doubled. Without some type of control, the competition meme is ridiculous. The big companies will just buy out little ones. Can anyone say monopoly?
Alan
There will be no government plan unless it allows the insurance companies to cherry pick who they get to cover. Just like they pushed the elderly onto the government (later prescription drugs from the elderly’s supplemental policies) they’ll suck up the healthy gravy and stick the government with all of the sick. You must understand, it’s important to keep the insurance industry ongoing and profitable. It stimulates the economy. (gag)
jcricket
As they do quite well in France and Switzerland, albeit with different regulations preventing private insurance companies from simply raping their subscribers like our insurance companies can with impunity.
There’s no fucking point to healthcare “reform” without a public option. Yes, it’s a wedge which will eventually expand and probably combine with medicare and medicaid, in order to maximize cost savings and health effectiveness – but it’s clear the private industry has had 70 years to come up with a viable solution for universal, affordable healthcare, and they haven’t done it.
And as every single other industrialized country around the world proves, nationalized health insurance can cover everyone, will cost less, and result in generally better health outcomes while not introducing greater fraud or malfeasance. Even the least-funded, worst system (Britain’s NHS) is basically better than ours in nearly every measure.
I’ve come to the conclusion that America sucks, and enjoys sucking, at least according to the idiot politicians we keep electing.
Alan
@Alan:
Oh and let me add… in doing this the RW will be able to complain about the high cost of a government program while pointing out how efficient the private sector is able to manage the gravy.
The Other Steve
@les: What les said. If private insurance can compete unfairly by pushing the high risk people onto the public plan… it will turn out just like Republicans say and public plan will be too costly. The risk has to be spread evenly across any and all plans to be fair.
Again, I point to the Dutch model.
I am not set or fixated on single-payer, and I think it would be a dreadful mistake for Democrats to be as well. We have to have an open mind here, and I do think that a public option can coexist with private options in a free market scenario. The various options can compete on what level they cover… 80%, 100%, low copay, HSA, whatever. Do give people choices. But don’t allow people to be locked in by employer or any other hook or crook.
If a plan isn’t working for a consumer, they should be able to go shopping and pick a plan that does work without penalty or barriers.
The Other Steve
@patrick: This is an excellent point. The public option is the compromise.
mvr
So I live in a state that is a virtual theocracy with respect to reproductive health and which is run by the insurance companies for lots of other issues. (Yep, Nebraska.) I do not trust my state to try to offer a good plan as an option to compete with private insurers. (Did I mention that they term limited out all the old guys who were not ambitious folks looking to further their political careers, one part of which is trying to positon yourself to the right of all others?)
So there would be no birth control coverage, let alone abortion coverage in any state plan we’d get. Nor would be get real negotiation for better rates on our behalf. It’s bad enough that the citizenship of the state isn’t large enough to be a plum to insure.
We need a federal-level public option!
Fwiffo
I don’t know what’s hard to understand here. If most of congress is willing to kill thousands of innocent Iraqis to protect their political asses, I don’t know why they wouldn’t be willing to stand aside while insurance companies kill innocent Americans.
They’re bad people; once you understand that, it’s much easier to understand everything they do.
jcricket
EJ Dionne had a great article about this useless/unnecessary push for “bipartisanship” in healthcare reform.
Yes, it would be great if Republicans weren’t obstructionist idiots. But since they are, compromising with them is useless. Just find one or two that aren’t idiots (Snowe & Collins, pretty much), and let the rest vote against what 2/3 to 3/4 of America clearly wants.
America responds well to strength, and poorly to weakness (sometimes to our own detriment). When Democrats continually act weak, and then pass legislation watered down by their own ineptitude, we all suffer, and Dems will find themselves out of office again.
Of course then the Republicans will pick up and make things worse (read: we’re all California now), and then the cycle will repeat.
clussman
Death by a thousand fractures. Anytime you want to kill federal legislation you say it should be a state issue (see also: abortion).
Splitting the public insurance option out to the states would fracture the leveraged buying power (read: price negotiating power) that the federal option would have. In other words, meet the new health insurance plan, same as the old health insurance plan. And if people see no tangible benefit from their state insurance, they’ll be much less likely to demand a national plan.
gypsy howell
I’m beginning to hope that no healthcare ‘reform’ gets passed, because whatever these douchebags do, guaranteed it will be WORSE than what we have now.
I’m already paying $14,000 a year for medical insurance, and god help me if I actually get sick, because that’s when they’ll dump me.
At this point, it’s becoming clear that Congress and Obama are only going to make this worse – think Medicare prescription plan, a huge boondoggle for the insurance and drug industries, and shitola for the people it’s supposed to cover. My rates will continue to skyrocket, and at some point I’ll find myself in the big donut hole of no longer being able to afford the insurance I have, and not being old enough for Medicare.
This is turning into a nightmare.
Not exactly the CHANGE I was HOPE-ing for.
jcricket
Notice how when individual states use their “state’s rights” to do something like legalize gay marriage the same “state’s rights” proponents suddenly go all “constitutional amendment” on you?
Fuckers.
Linkmeister
I skimmed, so if somebody already said this, my apologies.
Leaving it to the states to develop would be horrific. For one thing, all but one or two states require balanced budgets. In bad times (Iike now), states would have to look at the most expensive items in their budgets for reductions, and health care would be one of those.
Hawai’i is looking at 3-day-per-month furloughs for state workers for the next two years or laying off 10,000 employees in order to balance its budget right now. It’s already cut education and health budgets for the poorest among us.
States can’t do it.
Jennifer
We’ll get real health care reform when people turn out in our streets like they’re turning out in Tehran, and not a moment sooner.
SixStringFanatic
@donovong:
I completely understand your sentiments. It is quite a challenge to do the work necessary to get some decent people in Congress; it then becomes infuriating when the dead weight still in Congress holds the line against progress. However….
We didn’t get to this point overnight. It took years, and several election cycles, to assemble the dwindling mass of meek and mild “warriors” that the Democratic party had large become by 2004. We’ve only had two election cycles since that low point and we’ve scored impressive gains since then. There is lots more work to do on that front.
I would also argue that while this may be our best chance at real health-care reform to this point in time, it is not our last best chance at real health-care reform. It would be moral-buster for sure to come away from this tilt with nothing to show for our work, but I don’t think that, like the mid-nineties, a defeat this time around would cause people to just walk away from the fight. If we lose the battle for health-care this time around, it will only be due to the work of a few easily-rolled old line Dems. They will then be the targets for the next phase of our efforts to remake a stronger Democratic Party that better represents the ideals of the party.
As several people have already pointed out, the solution to both of these problems (providing real health-care and a better Democratic Party) is work on our parts. Lots of it. The lobbyists have dollars but we have numbers, voices and votes. Time to use what we have to the best of our abilities. Call your local Congress critters and bring a much more personal effect to those survey results.
Throwin Stones
@Jennifer: I am intrigued with your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Jennifer
@Throwin Stones:
I’ve got lots of unworkable ideas.
gypsy howell
Unfortunately, we’ll all be too sick and feeble to march.
Jennifer
@gypsy howell:
As I was saying in comment #67…
TenguPhule
<blockquote.I’m beginning to hope that no healthcare ‘reform’ gets passed, because whatever these douchebags do, guaranteed it will be WORSE than what we have now.
I’m already paying $14,000 a year for medical insurance, and god help me if I actually get sick, because that’s when they’ll dump me.
I can’t decide if this is satire or true wingularity insanity.
Jennifer
You’ve obviously never had to buy private insurance, then. For a healthy 50 year old with no pre-existing conditions, it starts at around $500 per month unless it has a large deductible and high co-pays.
Jim-Bob
State-run public option won’t trickle up, unless it’s a standardized plan, which is to say that it would be funded, run, administered according to Federal standards.
To leave it to the states would mean reducing the pool of clients, and make it easier for AMA, PHarma, et al to fight battles locally. Then there’s the whole issue of reproductive health–only anti-choice clinics and institutions get state support, etc.
State-option is health care reform FALE. Six ways from Sunday.
In hindsight, having the GooPers nail Daschle’s scalp to the wall of their cave was a blessing.
Because he was a War-Hero(r) I’ll defer comment on Dole (or his racist skank wife, for that matter).
TenguPhule
Actually I was referring to how he seemed to think a government plan would be worse then paying $14,000 out of pocket for no coverage when they drop him.
Zifnab
@Jennifer:
What’s this “unless” you speak of?
I cough up around $200 a month (with my company picking up the other half), high co-pays, large deductibles, and all, and I’m 20-freak’n-6 and as healthy as a horse.
We considered moving plans, but everyone else we tried was actually WORSE. Insurance is a scam. I’ve had half a mind to cancel it and take my chances ever since I first started working.
latts
@4jkb4ia:
Any plans implemented by ‘red’ (conservative, Southern, etc.) states will be designed to fail, period. In those areas, public benefits are for minorities, single mothers, and other assorted losers, so anything they’re forced to provide will have to be both substandard and easy to demonize & defund for political gain.
@jcricket:
“States’ rights” only exist as a means to deny individuals’ rights.
Jennifer
@TenguPhule:
I think you’re misreading the original comment, which is that a person with private insurance is already paying $14K a year and worried that it will be cancelled the first time they get sick – which is an entirely valid worry – and also worried that they will face the exact same worries only with a higher price tag if they bandaid this fucker the way it looks like they’re lining up to bandaid it.
Zinfab – I’m not an expert on what everyone else is paying for similar or different coverage…all I know is I pay a lot for very little in return but some people pay a whole lot more…and that as soon as I turn 50, I can kiss the 20 years of self-employment goodbye because I’ll no longer be able to afford insurance.
jcricket
I think what he was saying is that the government “plan” the current yahoos seem hell bent on imposing would be worse, not that any government plan would be worse.
As in, some kind of federated states union patchwork “plan” that you can only qualify for in ten years if the private insurance companies don’t offer a plan that you might once have been able to afford before you got sick.
I think he’s on your side. A good government plan would be better. A shittier government plan (Medicare Part D) would be worse.
Zifnab
@latts:
States (and corporations) are people too!
Zifnab
@Jennifer:
I’m at a small company with very little bargaining power, so I definitely don’t reflect the mainstream corporate worker. And I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just saying that no matter how bad you think it is, the reality has a way of being worse. :-p
jcricket
Then Republicans will say, “See, government healthcare sucks, we should get rid of it”. Whenever government has to cut services, they blame over-spending, fraud or waste, not a lack of revenue. Whenever times are good, we should cut taxes. When times are bad, cut taxes. Let’s cut health care spending, unless it involves comparative effectiveness research or limiting the ability of an insurance company to profit by dropping sick people. And on and on and on.
It’s all circular logic, designed to do one thing: keep Republicans in power. It’s not designed to achieve any other end. As Orwell said:
Fuck ’em. Keep up bipartisanship as an act, because the American public thinks it matters, but don’t compromise with the GOP anymore – there’s no benefit to anyone, least of all the American people.
The Grand Panjandrum
Tom Daschle is a health care industry whore. Bob Dole is a limp dick pharma whore. For chrissakes are these Democrats ever going to grow a pair? … I’m still waiting.
BTW +3, Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA rocks!
gypsy howell
@TenguPhule:
You misunderstood what I meant. OF COURSE I would like a public option. OF COURSE I would like a single-payer plan. I want fuckin’ socia-lized fuckin’ medicine!
But I don’t think we’re going to get it. No, I think they’re going to cave to the insurance companies, and we’re going to end up with some boondoggle plan that costs us more money and shovels more profits to the insurance & drug companies. In which case, they might as well leave bad enough alone.
Jennifer and jcricket got it exactly right. It’s like the nightmare days of the Bush regime – with every passing day and every new piece of legislation coming out of the DC swamp, things just went from bad to worse.
DFH no. 6
@TenguPhule:
Yes there is, in theory. But not in actuality, not in these United States, and thank the FSM for that.
For all our political problems — and they be legion — revolution (necessarily extremely violent and horrifically deadly in the unlikely event any such thing is ever attempted here) would be a “cure” infinitely worse than the disease.
I can fantasize all I want (and man, do I ever, sometimes) about who would be first against the wall, but a pure fantasy is what it is. I do sometimes wonder about the other side, though.
Working through our (mostly) Enlightenment-derived institutions and rules of law — imperfect though they be — is really our only option, this side of massive death and destruction, anyway.
Delia
Kevin Drum linked to this article in the LA Times yesterday about a Congressional hearing with three top health insurance executives about this practice of rescission. That’s the one where you pay your premiums for years and as soon as you get a catastrophic illness the company gives its flunkeys bonuses to find a good excuse to cancel your policy. There are the usual horror stories from patients or their survivors in the article. Anyhow, the congresscritters asked the CEOs if they’d be willing to cut back on this practice and they all said “No.” The Republicans, who are looking for any excuse to stay in bed with the insurance companies, were horrified that they didn’t at least make an effort to lie.
I am shocked, SHOCKED that this story hasn’t received wider circulation. After all, the LAT isn’t a two-bit rag. Well, no I’m not. It’s embarrassing when you’re trying to smother the public option for something like this to come out.
TenguPhule
The first non-negotiatable condition of health care reform: Congress and Health Insurance Excutives will be required by law to have the same health insurance coverage as a random minimum wage worker picked out from the general pubic each year.
TenguPhule
And nobody who’s terminally diagnosed and got cancelled has shot them yet?
There is no Justice in the world
latts
@Zifnab:
LOL… well, I’d say that corporate ‘citizens’ are essentially powerful sociopaths, since they are motivated by nothing but than their own benefit.
steve s
Let’s see. For real health care reform, a public plan would have to survive
1 all the republicans
2 the billion-dollar insurance industry
3 corrupt and/or weak democrats
4 a president who craves compromise
5 the retards on cable news
Yeah, we’re f***ed.
WereBear
If government covered health care is so bad… Why do they still have it?
They should vote for it. Or give it up.
Dream On
Let people buy into Medicare. And change the law so Medicare can once again negotiate with drug companies over bulk prices for prescriptions.