Where's the Outrage?

I have now been arguing for months about a single-payer, universal health care plan which requires no ADDITIONAL MONEY. I recently debunked the notion that private industry can somehow work better than the government. At the very least, even Republicans have to admit that the government has been standing for over 250 years. Name one business that has been standing for over 200 years. Can you name any? Some of the most profitable and long-lasting businesses, like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, have just collapsed under the weight of their own stupidity and greed.

Now we find new secrecy being applied to healthcare reform. Somewhere in the bowels of Congress or at one of those trendy restaurants over a couple martinis, politicians are making deals. Why? This is very simple. I don’t want a hybrid (public-private system) which will be more efficient and less cost-effective. The only reason to have a hybrid system of any sort is so that Americans can pay insurance companies money. There is no other reason. So I’m figuring the reason that they are our these backroom deals is so that Americans won’t see the quid pro quo.

If we want to keep paying billions of dollars so that corporate executives can have luxury jets and vacations in Fiji, all we have to do is look to Medicare Part D. (You can’t tell me that 90% of the congressman that voted for this huge piece of garbage even understood it.)  This was a huge disaster. The only reason it was so complex was that the Bush administration allowed the pharmaceutical companies to write the legislation. The purpose of the complexity was to confuse the American public. When, in fact, the whole system can be very simple. Allow the government to negotiate drug prices. Remove the dough hole.  Then we don’t have to worry about charity from large pharmaceutical companies that give away a couple of samples to the poor while they pocket billions from the rest of America.

If the goal of healthcare reform is to provide high-quality cost-effective medicine, the only reasonable solution is a single-payer universal healthcare. With a single-payer system we can accomplish the following:

• Cover all 46 million Americans who are currently uninsured without spending any more money.
• The government, working with doctors, other healthcare providers and researchers can develop “best practices” for the most common diseases like diabetes, hypertension and congestive heart failure.
• Medicare, Medicaid and all other health programs will be rolled into one program called universal healthcare. States save money. Businesses save money.
• The government negotiates with drug companies and other medical hospital suppliers to drive down costs.
• Pay primary care physicians to take care of a population of patients.
• Give MDs bonuses for keeping their population healthy.
• Give patients tax rebates for losing weight or staying in shape or not smoking.
• Pay hospitals to take care of a population of patients this removes incentives to keep patients in the hospital unnecessarily. It also removes incentives to readmit patients.
• Reform immigration so that we are covering all Americans with health care form.

From TP:

In a speech on the House floor this afternoon, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) railed against health care reform. Specifically, Broun attacked the idea of a public plan, saying “this program of ‘government option’ is being touted as being the panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price is gonna kill people.” Broun pointed to Canada and the United Kingdom in his argument against the public option, claiming that those countries “don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society.”

Watch it:

I hate when people say stupid things without one shred of data. People are going to die? Really? Why? Just because we aren’t going to allow insurance to rip us off any more? Insurance adds so much value that insurance by itself heals patients?

Update from dday:

• a deficit-neutral policy, which is what every single proposal for this bill has included;
• aggressive solutions to bending the cost curve, which also is a goal of pretty much everyone;
• protecting small businesses, which every iteration of the plan has, including the employer mandate proposals that exempt certain small businesses and make them eligible for purchasing health care through the insurance exchange;
• rural health equity, a pretty small point;
• a public option that doesn’t use Medicare bargaining rates, which isn’t different from what, for example, Chuck Schumer has called for, although I find that to be a toothless public option, which I’ll explain later;
• time to read the bill, which I support;
• bipartisanship, which is the most ridiculous of these demands, but which actually does exist in the bill on the Senate side, where dozens of Republican amendments have been included in the HELP Committee markup.

Bipartisanship is nice when both sides want to honestly work toward a solution. We have a fractured Democratic party with these so-called “Blue Dogs” who should support universal healthcare because it is budget neutral. Unfortunately, these Blue Dog Democrats do not support universal healthcare. Why is this? Instead, they’re talking about some hybrid option which is clearly going to cost billions of dollars and to be budget neutral will require raising money from somewhere. Then you have the Republican Party, whose only mission seems to be to obstruct whatever progress the Democrats are trying to make. They have not offered one intelligent alternative in the healthcare reform debate. They had no alternatives to the economic stimulus package. They’ve offered no alternatives to the climate change bill. So I’m not sure what bipartisanship is supposed to achieve if the Republicans insist on not offering any viable options.

Tags: Economy, Healthcare // 1 Comment »