If Obama treated health insurance like he did student loans, we'd have single payer

[yurbud]

His rationale was bullet-proof: we were giving money to banks for profit in addition to the cost of the student loans themselves, and with the savings of cutting the bank leeches out, we could provide the service to more people.

Here in California, former State Senator Shiela Kuehl made the exact same point with every time she introduced her single payer health insurance bill that made it through both houses only to be vetoed by our corporate-owned terminator governor. Kuehl even had a study to back up the savings that was done by the Lewin Group, who often work for conservative pols.

If you read this passage from Obama's speech on the change to student loans, and replace certain key words, he makes a good argument AGAINST subsidizing private insurance and FOR single payer or at least a public option like a Medicare buy in.

Everyone accuses Obama of being a hyper-logical Vulcan, but by letting Rahm, the Blue Dogs, and DLC take the lead on health insurance reform, he's acting a lot more like the money grubbing Ferengi.

And to help cover the cost of all this, we're going to eliminate waste, reduce inefficiency, and cut what we don't need to pay for what we do. And that includes reforming our student loan system so that it better serves the people it's supposed to serve -- our students.
Right now, there are two main kinds of federal loans. First, there are Direct Loans. These are loans where tax dollars go directly to help students pay for tuition, not to pad the profits of private lenders. The other kinds of loans are Federal Family Education Loans.
These loans, known as FFEL loans, make up the majority of all college loans. Under the FFEL program, lenders get a big government subsidy with every loan they make. And these loans are then guaranteed with taxpayer money, which means that if a student defaults, a lender can get back almost all of its money from our government.

And there's only one real difference between Direct Loans and private FFEL loans. It's that under the FFEL program, taxpayers are paying banks a premium to act as middlemen -- a premium that costs the American people billions of dollars each year. Well, that's a premium we cannot afford -- not when we could be reinvesting that same money in our students, in our economy, and in our country.

And that's why I've called for ending the FFEL program and shifting entirely over to Direct Loans. It's a step that even a conservative estimate predicts will save tens of billions of tax dollars over the next ten years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the money we could save by cutting out the middleman would pay for 95 percent of our plan to guarantee growing Pell Grants. This would help ensure that every American, everywhere in this country, can out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-Higher-Education/

[Cant trust em]

1. No scare tactics used by the opposition in the student loan debate.

I don't think there was a "death panel" correlation.

[yurbud]

2. actually, when I was googling the speech, I found a post on freerepublic sayin "Obama wants to

take away your Perkins student loan!" Essentially the same scare tactic.

[Cant trust em]

3. I should clarify. There's always something, but nothing as visceral the health care stuff.

[yurbud]

4. yep. Working at McDonald's the rest of your life isn't as bad as dying.

[LooseWilly]

5. It's a two-fer... free food that will speed your death...

O8)

[yurbud]

8. so you need less health care! It's brilliant. The perfect social program.

[LovinLife]

6. No we wouldn't. People still don't realize the problem is the Democrats and corporations. Obama is a

pawn. These people would never betray their master and all of the money they get. Obama never stood a chance at beating the insurance companies.

[yurbud]

7. he didn't even try. He had a brief window in his honeymoon when he could have rammed this through

with a lot of public support.