Ending Private Insurers' Chokehold on Health Care

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Sunday, February 28, 2010 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)

Ending Private Insurers' Chokehold on Health Care
by Pierre Tristam


For once, I agree with Republicans on health care reform. We should scrap it all and start over. Thursday's encounter between the two parties was good talking-point theater but awfully runny with repeats of the past year's parroting of a "government takeover of health care" and other dim-witted fabrications. (Don't talk to me about a government takeover of health care when the biggest fort you're defending is Medicare.) Instead of acting like the grown-up majority they are, Democrats, led by their chief appeaser, deferred to a minority of cranks and shills, each one of them better insured than most of us, as if the Republic's future depends on them. It doesn't. Quite the contrary.

The Republican minority, by its calculated prevention of progress on any issue of importance since March -- health care, jobs, taxes, global warming -- is ensuring that America's appointment with has-been status will be moved up a few decades, to China's delight. Democrats are complicit. So go ahead. Make the Republicans' day, and scrap it all.

But scrapping the Democrats' proposal isn't enough. A few details aside, even the best of the Democrats' idea of reform is not significantly different from what's in place now, which is to say that it isn't that different from the do-nothing approach Republicans favor. It builds on an existing system dominated by private insurers whose twin goals are to cover as few of the sick as possible while making as much money as possible when covering the healthy. That's not an insurance system. It's a predatory swindle. And it's certainly not a health care system.

Care isn't defined by what you can afford, but by what you need. Anything short of that is health care's equivalent of segregation, which is what we have now. Sure, some of the best care in the world is in the United States. But aside from the elderly, who have it all, most of us are barred from it. We're either slaves to insurers' orders or priced out of the swindle altogether, as some 50 million Americans are. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/28-2

[bvar22]

1. Exactly.

There are a couple of provisions of the current bill (Baucus-care repackaged with Obama's face on the new label) that should be broken out and offered as clean, stand alone bills forced to the floor for Up or Down votes.

The Democrat's current plan does NOTHING to address the REAL source of our current problem.
The Democratic Plan merely reinforces the Corporate RIGHT to Profits.
The Democratic Plan actually MANDATES Profits for the Health Insurance Industry, and does very little for the Human Right to Health Care that every civilized country in The World takes for granted.


But HEY!
Look at all the Baseball Players!
Its not meeee. Its the "Free Market"!!!

A Two Tiered system will emerge that will be based on a reduction of benefits and service for the Working Class and Poor.

The Elite Ownership Class will STILL have access to the Best Health Care in the World which will be subsidized by Americans who Work for a Living.

"A Uniquely American Solution" indeed.

[Kalun D]

2. First

you have to end the corporations chokehold on the government through the bought and paid for politicians.

[eridani]

3. K&R

[nashville_brook]

4. knr