Insurance companies are the "Death Panels".

[Tom Rinaldo]

What "panel" decides who qualifies for "experimental treatments"? Which bureaucrats determine who qualifies for a liver transplant? Who runs the panels that approve or disapprove paying for medications that treat serious medical conditions? Who has rationed health care for decades by imposing insurance policy maximum payment "caps"?

If there are "death panels" in this nation they are run by those who profit most by denying payment for health care to those who need it most. And that isn't the government. For over 40 years, who has insured Americans in their golden years when their life expectancy is shortest and health care costs are typically highest? Medicare of course, a government run program.

People are correct to fear "death panels". They are run by the same unchecked market forces that completely destroyed our economy. Why should any sane person trust them with their lives?

[Clio the Leo]

1. Well duh! ...... Rahm.

:sarcasm:

[Tom Rinaldo]

2. I don't get why current private Deth Panels aren't pointed to by Democrats

...except for the Demos who are already in their pockets, but not all of them are, yet...

[Tom Rinaldo]

3. Bumper Sticker:

P.S. I make political bumber stickers like this at Zazzle cause they have free graphic tools to do so. Anyone can. Zazzle charges a lot and keeps 90% of the money. I don't make these in order to make money (in a good month I earn max $3). It's just another way to get issues out there. If anyone wants copy and make this on their own you have my full permission to do so.

[grantcart]

4. Recently on "Shark Tank"

somebody was proposing a business model that would give a movie service of rememberance to the bereaved.

The plan did not get any buyers but one of the investment gurus went crazy;


"I love death as a business concept - its so universal - every body is going to do it."


Republicans complain about 'frivilous law suits' but they never say anything about frivilous insurance denials.

[Tom Rinaldo]

5. Maybe because denial of coverage is never viewed as frivilous to "business friendly" Republicans...

...rather it is central to the business plan of the current health insurance industry. That is a rather chilling but revealing moment you caught on TV. Life and death as a commodity.

The capitalist claim is always that free enterprise results in better goods and services through competition, but there are so many documented examples of how "the free market", especially a poorly or non regulated "free market", can skew core human priorities and encourage greed if not outright graft in the pursuit of higher profits at the expence of "the common good".

Democrats are shying away from a profound but essential public debate if they refuse to tackle head on an assumpiton that Americans are always better off having their most basic human needs attended to by profit making corporations. How can anyone say with a straight face that the business commuity can invariably be trusted more than government after seeing how a company like Enron gamed the entire energy sector and brought a State like California to it's knees? Especially now when we have seen how an under regulated banking and investment system just virtually destroyed the entire world economy?

Death Panels are real. They were invented by the insurance industry and they have killed tens of thousands of Americans just as surely as Chevrolet once murdered scores of Americans by knowingly refusing to spend a couple of bucks per car to make the fuel tanks of Pintos safe during rear end accidents.

Medicare has a track record of service over the last 40 years and so does the private insurance sector. Which has failed Americans more?

[slipslidingaway]

6. knr nt

[Cha]

7. Absolutely but the republicons are trying to deflect

by screaming Death Panels at Obama.

[Tom Rinaldo]

8. Yes. The Big Lie theory of propaganda

We are at a potential political turning point. The Right has spent years demonizing government in order to give their corporate masters a freer and more profitable hand. They stand on the verge of having that entire house of cards collapse in the wake of the Wall Street collapse. The myth that giving ever greater power and trust to ever larger corporations as a way of protecting our freedoms from "government intrusion" has been the bread and butter that feeds right wing "populism", which is how they prevent progressives from building stable majorities in Congress. The Right is pulling out all the stops now, pulling on every string attached to every right wing sleeper cell in the body politic, in order to beat back a mortal challange to their manufacutered social reality.

Businesses are NOT always more efficient than government, let alone more ethical or humane. Hundreds of thousands of them fail every year and many corporate giants only remain standing today because they were deemed "too big to fail", and it took the public sector, the U.S. Government, to resuce them. Medicare is well documented to by many times more efficient than the private insurance sector as measured by percentage of costs eaten up by Administrative costs, let alone profits.

The public knows full well how ruthless the Insurance industry has behaved. They know all about "coveraged denied", dropped policies, and rocketing insurance premiums with ever bigger co-pays. It's just that Democrats have always either been too civil (or too indebted to corporate interests themselves) to lable what the insurance industry ROUTINELY employs as "Death Panels".

[depakid]

9. But don't forget, their executives are not "bad people"

despite all the suffering that they cause, in order to pad their pockets.

We need to embrace them, boost their stock prices and give 'em a big old hug as the President did with John McCaim.

[Cha]

10. Wah Wah Wah...back to your

negative shite all the time.