Wed 3 Feb 2010
The Republican Plan for Healthcare
Posted by USA / R. Marika Markle under Balkers
[8] Comments
I’m not making this up… they do have a plan… here’s the link to an article in National Underwriter Life and Health.
Here’s the link to the letter from the Congressional Budget Office.
Points from the article:
- Medicare and Medicaid would be completely revamped
- As a result of the changes to Medicare and Medicaid, beneficiaries would likely be able to get a good plan, and thus will have access to only a very basic form of coverage. Beneficiaries will also have to settle on a plan for themselves…that sounds like that very confusing drug plan where it was difficult for seniors to make informed decisions about what plan would be best for them.
- The last paragraph says it best:
“It is difficult to predict how such a sweeping change in federal spending on health care would affect the behavior of insurers, health providers, and individual consumers,” Elmendorf writes. “In particular, how spending would be reduced for physicians, hospitals, advanced technological treatments, drugs, or other health care is uncertain. However, it is likely that fewer services would be provided and treatments would be less technologically advanced compared with the circumstances that would exist under the alternative fiscal scenario.”
But then, who knows what the Democrats have to offer us?
I will attribute perhaps 15% of elected GOP office holders, as giving any damn about insuring all Americans for healthcare. The rest believe in social Darwinism on this matter, and in defense of the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism (which just failed miserably under Bush II), will take that to the lengths of denying around 50 million of their countrymen access to routine medical care.
In 1992 when Bill Clinton was running against incompetent incumbent Bush Sr., he was gathering lots of support for what eventually became Hillary’s single-payer plan of 1994. Which would have put America past this barbarism. Bush Sr., suddenly finds and proposes all kinds of money he never ponied up before, for tax credits for working Americans to be able to afford policies.
Think about that for a moment. 18 years ago, private insurers already had it jacked up beyond the reach of wage/hour Americans. If you weren’t getting it through your employer, too bad for you! Between jobs, tough luck.
The problem being of course, that these tax credit schemes – even if the nation could afford them without levying new taxes on those few who became very wealthy during the Reagan/Bush era – are always half-baked and wholly inadequate.
A few thousand dollars – hey, great! Guess what? Go try to buy your own policy on that. Even if you are healthy…
If you aren’t healthy, again you are screwed – and Republican officials aren’t at all worried about it. They have their government insurance, and defend to the death the rights of private insurers, to exclude the sick through pre-existing conditions clauses, and renewal increases so high you just can’t buy it anymore after you’ve filed claims. Which they most likely denied, and you and your doctor had to fight them on to even pay out.
Their business model, is to insure the well and exclude the sick. That is how they profit. And Republicans kick and scream to keep it all legal. Both are corrupt, and their current objective as in 1994, is to kill all reform.
Here again is Cigna VP whistleblower Wendell Potter, under oath about this exact corruption of his former industry. Watch or read;
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.html
This entire enterprise of shutting millions of citizens off from affordable medical services, is absurdity to a UK’er. A few months under our NHS (see http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/Pages/NHSEngland.aspx ), and America would never go back to the private system.
Roy: What might happen is replacing Medicaid/care with a voucher system which allows maybe $30,000.00 in coverage. When you exceed that allowance, you have to pay the difference. Say you need an emergency appendectomy, as my 23 year old niece did this summer. (no insurance, but her daddy’s a republican). Say the total bill was $56,000. If she had the voucher, she would owe $26,000 for the surgery plus any other medical expense, like doctor’s visits…for that year. My brother in law’s solution? Advise her to file for bankruptcy.
Martin: I thought you knew how stupid Americans are when 56,000,000 of them voted for George Bush a second time.
Nice to make your acquaintance.
If Medicaid can be expanded with budget reconcillation (51 Senators), they should do that and pencil in everyone who doesn’t have health insurance. That could also allow small businesses to get an expenses savings by stopping it for their employees, and we’d be on our way to the Single-Payer system we should have implemented decades ago as Canada did.
Built-in boost for job creation by small employers, new jobs for tens of thousands of needed healthcare workers, and pay-as-you-go with the expiring and failed 2001 Bush tax cut to wealthiest Americans. If your wealth is not going into new operations, you need to incur a tax increase beyond the expiring cut as a matter of fact. (Financial crisis and all, brought on by reckless failure to properly regulate the financial system in the Reagan/Bush era. …hey, remember when Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loans, and then they imploded and had to be bailed out? ;^)
And now for the big lie of health reform through “Tort Reform”, excerpted from an email I just sent someone;
As I tried to indicate, omitted by Fox of course, some states have already done it. In some states doctors are protected already / limited savings results, if any.
Do the math that Fox will never do for it’s sheep audience;
Let’s say you pass the strictest tort law – doctors will face no malpractice judgements / zero dollars ever awarded.
Golly. Hey, now doctors and hospitals can bring down their prices because their malpractice premiums are lower!
Really? Astronomical provider costs will come down? How much?
50%?. No. 30%? No. Maybe 10-15%. Maybe.
And since doctors charge less, honest upstanding insurers will charge less. Free market at work!
So the providers cut rates 15%, and then insurers hand every dime of it back to policy holders?
No.
And even if they did, it’s 15% off a policy that 100 million un & underinsured can’t come close to affording anyway. Clank!
The concept fails analytically, and is absurd.
“Tort Reform”, already tried as it is, is a diversion tactic for the corrupt GOP to fool working people into thinking that guaranteed health insurance, is not necessary and not in their interests.
Republicans do not want healthcare reform, as I spelled out in the last email. You cannot simply regulate the insurers to accept everyone and stop at that. The healthy and young will decline to buy policies until they are sick. Insurers will have only the sick on their roles, and will fail. Everyone must have a policy for health reform to work in a private-insurer system.
The GOP/Fox objective is to kill all reform. It is obvious from their present lock-step opposition, and from their history. They tried to kill Medicare in the ’60’s, and have opposed every attempt at national health insurance since Truman.
They might as well oppose child labor laws, or the prohibition on slavery. Same kind of profits-over-morality position.
See below how this lie of a solution, is failing in IL…
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Will try here to put up the signing video from yesterday. Not the Republican plan!!
It’s unfathomable to me why the Republicans are still beating a dead horse to try to stymie passage of the second bill. It’s gone beyond “Obama’s Waterloo”. Is it class warfare against the middle class? Those would be the people who were one phone call away from being told they were too expensive to be kept on the health plan. Is it class warfare on the sick & disabled…and women, who have more medical expenses than men…I never got why pro – life didn’t embrace this with an eye to birthing healthy babies. What would their agenda be?
Not only that Rebecca, but it puts them in the position of opposing changes in the bill they said they were for, only weeks ago. That’s going to hit the fan on them in the next few days if they don’t cave in. Which they may have to…
The GOP is completely without compass at this point. They are so tied in knots from the layers of lies and false fronts – like defending Medicare… – they don’t understand the aircraft is going down not up. Some 13 state Attorney’s General, filing suit within 8 minutes of the bill signing “it’s,
uhm - unconstitutional!”
You could only do that if you believed the bogus “polling” floated by Media Inc. that the reform “isn’t popular”. No, people wouldn’t want guaranteed coverage if they lose their jobs (or work wage jobs with no insurance), and they don’t mind insurers locking them out because they are sick…
What a joke. And emblematic of how corroded their brains are at this point. The GOP regimes of these states are going to find to their shock
that these reforms are popular, and their refusal to accept the electoral and legislative process that led to the bill finally passing, is going to mobilize their in-state opponents.
Jeff, simply a great add there with the signing ceremony vid. If you can watch Biden and Obama there and still oppose this, you’re never going to understand why this bill happened and why it had to.
And a great snapshot of (U.S. House Speaker) Pelosi in the pic below. Looking giddy – and she earned it. That Progressive veteran, put the votes together when GOP demagogues, TBag bullies and Media Inc. were all saying “No You Can’t”.
