ObamaCare: Worse Than Doing Nothing?

Keeping the Insurance Companies in Command by RUSSELL MOKHIBER


That’s the conclusion of single payer advocate Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), in his just released autobiography – Everybody In, Nobody Out: Memoirs of a Rebel Without a Pause.

“Had I been in Congress, I would have unequivocally voted against Obamacare,” Young writes. “It’s a bad bill. Whether it’s worse than what we have now could be argued. We rather think because of its ability to enshrine and solidify the corporate domination of the health system, it’s worse than what we have now. But whether it is somewhat better or a lot worse is immaterial. The health system isn’t working in this country — fiscally, medically, socially, morally.”

Young rejects the idea that President Obama should have compromised on single payer in the face of industry opposition.

“I don’t have any sympathy for the idea that the president had to compromise because his opposition was strong,” Young writes. “Winning is not always winning the election. Winning is making a huge fight and then taking the fight to the people — re-electing people who are supporting your program and defeating those who aren’t.”

Young first met the young Barack Obama in the mid-1990s at social gatherings.

At the time, Obama was lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School and practicing law.

“We did not become bosom buddies after a few of these social gatherings — I just viewed him as a nice, bright guy living in the neighborhood,” Young says.

When Obama ran for the Illinois Senate, Young supported him.

“I was happy with his views on health care,” Young writes. “He recognized that major reform was necessary and indicated support for a single-payer approach. No blushing friend, I took every opportunity to solidify his position. While not an official adviser, I tried to influence him as much as I could. My colleagues and I sent him notes touting the advantages of single-payer and the form it might take and talked with him and his staff about it whenever I had the chance.”

“I felt I did influence him,” Young said.

When Obama ran for the Senate in 2003, Obama told the Illinois AFL-CIO:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

But just a year later, Obama had flipped and came out against single payer in Illinois.

“I was very disappointed by his move to the right to keep the insurance companies in command,” Young told the Springfield State Journal Register in 2004. “I’m not accusing him of lying or misconduct. I’m accusing him of a lack of courage.”

But despite Obama’s “lack of courage,” Young supported Obama in his run for U.S. Senate and later for president. Young was just setting himself up for more disappointment.

At a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in August 2009, Obama was asked whether he supported a universal health care plan.

“First of all, I want to make a distinction between a universal plan versus a single-payer plan, because those are two different things,” Obama said.

“A single-payer plan would be a plan like Medicare for all, or the kind of plan that they have in Canada, where basically government is the only person — is the only entity that pays for all health care. Everybody has a government-paid-for plan, even though in, depending on which country, the doctors are still private or the hospitals might still be private. In some countries, the doctors work for the government and the hospitals are owned by the government. But the point is, is that government pays for everything, like Medicare for all. That is a single-payer plan.”

“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter because, frankly, we historically have had a employer-based system in this country with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that I believe would be too disruptive. So what would end up happening would be, a lot of people who currently have employer-based health care would suddenly find themselves dropped, and they would have to go into an entirely new system that had not been fully set up yet. And I would be concerned about the potential destructiveness of that kind of transition.”

“All right? So I’m not promoting a single-payer plan,” Obama said.

In March 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — by a narrow margin.

“PNHP’s policy experts did a line-by-line examination of the bill and, while acknowledging that it contains some modest benefits that make changes around the edges of our existing system, basically gave it two thumbs down,” Young writes. “To this day, much to the chagrin of many of our friends who wanted reform, I remain adamant in my rejection of Obamacare.”

“Why? We want a system that excludes the private insurance companies,” Young writes. “ We demand such exclusion not because these companies are good or evil (although we think they’re pretty evil). Rather, the reason to exclude them is that they don’t address the needs of the American people.”

Young also rejects the idea of a “public option,” pushed by Democrats such as Howard Dean. A public option “would not have made any significant difference on the overall impact” of Obamacare “contrary to the view of many progressive who believed that it would,” Young says.

“Since WWII, we have learned a lot about disease and certainly have had dramatic improvements in what we can do,” Young writes. “I’m talking about surgery of the heart, vaccination, nutrition issues. All these things have been largely defined in the last half-century. We’ve had something approaching a 12-year life expectancy rise just from scientific intervention.”

“We have all this knowledge, all these options, but we have a very backward financing and delivery system and the result is a great deal of human suffering,” Young says. “And that’s why we remain opposed to the Affordable Care Act. We think we have a winning proposition despite the reality in Congress. Polls repeatedly vindicate our position. A solid majority of the public and 59 percent of doctors support the single payer approach.”

“President Obama could have made it happen,” Young says. “He could have stuck to all the virtues of single payer. And I won’t deny he may have been defeated in the first round. There’s no question that this fight has been dirty and it’s going to get dirtier.”

A Tale of Two Healthcare Plans

Wednesday, September 12, 2012 by Reuters

by David Cay Johnston

 

 

No issue affecting taxes so clearly divides the two parties in the U.S. election as healthcare. The two parties, in their platforms, describe very different approaches to healthcare economics. Both use political plastic surgery to cover up ugly truths.

The stakes are huge. Americans spend $2.64 per person for healthcare for each purchasing power equivalent dollar spent by the 33 other countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD data shows the U.S. spends $8,233 per capita compared with an average of $3,118 in the other 33 countries.

A growing share of federal tax dollars, in direct spending and in tax breaks, is going to U.S. healthcare as the population ages, even though about one in six Americans lacks health insurance.

America‘s healthcare system, more accurately described as a non-system sick care system, totaled 17.6 percent of the economy in 2010, compared to an average of 9.2 percent in the other 33 countries, as the OECD data shows.

In the United States, total public and private cost of healthcare is significantly greater than the total of corporate and individual income taxes, as well as payroll taxes. For each dollar paid in all three of those taxes in 2010, healthcare came to $1.29.

If we just lowered our costs to those of France, which has universal care in what is widely regarded as one of the best systems if not the best, it would save almost as much money as Americans paid in individual income taxes in 2010. The French spend 6 percentage points less of their economy on healthcare. In the United States, the individual income tax in 2010 came to 6.3 percent of the U. S. economy, the lowest since Truman was president.

Take a look at your pay stub to get an idea of the kind of money being spent on a system that fosters bankruptcy, bedevils small business and ranks 31st among the 34 OECD countries in preventing premature death.

REPUBLICAN PLAN
The Republicans say the federal government is “structurally and financially broken” and that “three programs - Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – account for over 40 percent of total spending,” which is “harming job creation and growth, (while) projections of future spending growth are nothing short of catastrophic, both economically and socially.”

The Republicans promise to “empower millions of seniors to control their personal healthcare decisions,” a vow immediately followed by a promise to cut federal spending.

The clearest explanation of what that would mean comes from Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee. Before he started obfuscating, Ryan laid out his plans in detail. He boasted that by changing Medicare from a plan that provides treatment for every older American into one that gives seniors a fixed sum to buy their own health insurance, taxpayers would save through 2084 the present equivalent of $4.9 trillion.

What Ryan did not mention is that his plan would also mean $8 of increased private spending by seniors and the disabled for each tax dollar saved.

We know how Ryan’s plan would raise total costs because David Rosnick and Dean Baker, economists at the Center for Economic Policy and Research which promotes government policies that it says would benefit workers and the poor, used the same formula that Ryan (or his staff) applied to the same Congressional Budget Office data, but on private medical care spending. Ryan’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Beyond the fact that it makes no sense to spend $8 to save $1, older people do not have the money. A tenth of Americans age 75 and older live below the official poverty line. Another 24 percent have only saved a tad more.

Every indicator shows that Americans have not enough for their old age and that a shrinking number have pensions while the Republicans now in charge of the party want to cut Social Security benefits, if not kill the program.

So why would any Americans under age 55, whose healthcare benefits Ryan wants to cut when they reach 65, think they can afford to spend $8 to save $1? Recently Ryan has softened his plan to let those who wish stay in traditional Medicare. Since anyone not rich who can count would stick with Medicare, Ryan’s promised taxpayer savings would never materialize.

Alan Grayson, the combative one-term Democratic representative from Florida, got it right when he said on the House floor in 2009: “The Republican plan – don’t get sick and if you do get sick die quickly.”

DEMOCRATS FAVOR UNIVERSAL CARE

 The Democratic platform calls for universal healthcare. “We will end the outrage of unaffordable, unavailable healthcare,” they say, though after six decades that party promise remains unfulfilled.

President Barack Obama‘s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will enable those with pre-existing conditions and twenty-somethings without work to get health insurance. But the plan does nothing to address the larger economic problem. American healthcare costs too much and needs replacement, not a nip and tuck.

Portugal, with half the income per person as America, provides universal healthcare. Cuba, the CIA tells us, ranks 40th in infant mortality, while the United States is nine steps lower at 49th, an astonishing fact given U.S. spending compared to the poverty induced by Castro’s collectivist economic policies.

Doing worse than Portugal and Cuba is, in my view, not just costly but immoral.

Just as Republicans are trying to limit the franchise, so are they trying to limit who gets healthcare. The Democrats are better only because they recognize that universal care can be cheaper while removing an annoying and costly distraction from business.

Death and taxes will always be with us. What we need is to spend less on taxes while doing the best we can to stave off death.

America Needs Healthcare, Not Health Insurance

Ironically, the Roberts Court could actually be the instrument that leads us toward something approaching a rational, affordable healthcare provision.
By Marshall Auerback and L. Randall Wray, AlterNet
Posted on March 30, 2012

In Friday's New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that the Supreme Court conservatives grasping for reasons why Congress lacks the power to do anything that they don’t like have forgotten an important distinction: the one between a judge and a politician. We're not sure this is correct. It's always been the case that for all of their lofty protestations of being "above politics," the Supreme Court has been political, whether it be the Warren Court or today's Roberts Court.

That said, we're not sure the Supremes are wrong to question the constitutionality of a private health insurance mandate that Krugman seems so keen to defend, asking: "Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage O.K., while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional?"

Historically, Krugman has been one of the most eloquent critics of the insurance-based model. Yet he makes the mistake common to many progressive defenders of Obama’s healthcare bill: He conflates two distinct issues and thereby masks the fundamental flaw underlying the entire approach. Private health insurance is not synonymous with healthcare. There is a big difference between levying a tax for a public good (i.e. healthcare) versus forcing people to buy a service from a private health insurance company, which is by no means synonymous with healthcare.

Using insurers to provide funding is a complex, costly and distorting method of financing healthcare. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you have been paying “food insurance” premiums—with some of your purchases excluded from coverage at the whim of the insurer. Is there any plausible reason for putting an insurance agent between you and your grocer? No. Then why should an insurer stand between you and your healthcare provider? And why should you be forced to contribute to such an arbitrary scheme?

Furthermore, it is important to note how unusual the United States is—no other comparable nation (in terms of high per capita income) lacks universal healthcare coverage, and many nations that are much poorer provide universal access. And in most of the nations that are similar in other respects to the United States, government plays a much bigger role in healthcare delivery and in financing the system.

“Reform” measures actually promote the status quo by pulling more people into an expensive healthcare system that is managed and funded by insurers. Since two-thirds of household bankruptcies are due to healthcare costs, forcing people to turn over an even larger portion of their income to insurance companies will further erode household finances and exacerbate the problem. This is despite the fact that research by, among others, David U. Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, demonstrates that single-payer reform could save about $380 billion annually that's currently wasted on insurers' overhead and the unnecessary paperwork (and screen-work) they inflict on hospitals, doctors and patients.

Even under today’s “reforms” in the Affordable Health Care Act, healthcare remains a function of employment, which preserves a significant cost disadvantage for U.S. corporations and is particularly unappealing during periods of high unemployment.

The US is the only country in the world where healthcare has become a marginal cost of doing business, thereby putting US corporations at a significant cost disadvantage vis a vis their foreign competition.

The reality is that healthcare is not a service that should be funded by insurance companies. An individual should insure against expensive and undesirable calamities: tornadoes, fires, auto accidents. These need to be insurable risks, or insurance will not be made available. This means the events need to be reasonably random and relatively rare, with calculable probabilities that do not change much over time. We need to make sure that the existence of insurance does not increase the probability of insured losses. This is why we are not allowed to insure our neighbor’s house.

Insurance works by using the premiums paid in by all of the insured to cover the losses that infrequently visit a small subset of them. Of course, insurance always turns out to be a bad deal for almost all of the insured—the return is hugely negative because most of the insured never collect benefits. The insurance company’s operating costs and profit margins are more or less equal to the net losses suffered by its policyholders.

Ideally, insurance premiums ought to be linked to individual risks; if this actually changed behavior so that risk fell, so much the better. That would reduce the costs to those policyholders who do not experience insured events, and would also increase the insurance companies’ profitability. Competition among insurers would then reduce the premiums for those whose behavior modifications had reduced risks.

In practice, people are put into classes—say, “over age 55 with no accidents or moving violations” in the case of auto insurance. Some people are uninsurable—the attendant risks are too high. For example, someone who repeatedly wrecks cars while driving drunk will not be able to purchase insurance. The government might help out by taking away the driver’s license, in which case the insurer could not sell insurance even if it were willing to take on the risk. Further, one cannot insure a burning house against fire because it is, well, already on fire. And even if insurance had already been purchased, the insurer could deny a claim if it determined that the policyholder was at fault.

The insured try to get into the low-risk, low-premium classes; the insurers try to sort people by risk and to narrow risk classes. To be sure, insurers do not want to avoid all risks—given a risk/return trade-off, higher-risk individuals will be charged higher premiums. Problems for the insurer arise if high-risk individuals are placed in low-risk classes and thus enjoy inappropriately low premiums. The problem for many individuals is that appropriately priced premiums will be unaffordable. At the extreme, if the probability of an insurable event approaches certainty, the premium that must be charged equals the expected loss, plus the insurance company’s operating costs and profits.

However, it is likely that high-risk individuals would refuse insurance long before premiums reached that level, since they will be better off paying out of pocket. With costs skewed toward the less healthy part of the population that bought this insurance, the insurance company would invariably seek to mitigate this impact on cost through a process of pre-screening to identify those likely to require expensive treatment, and either rejecting their applications or charging significantly higher premiums to compensate.

Again, this tends to guarantee that the uninsured pool is the most at risk. In any event, once an insurance policy is written, the insurer does its best to deny claims. It will look at the fine print and try to find exclusions and uncover preexisting conditions (say, faulty wiring) that would invalidate the claim.

From the narrow perspective of the insurance companies, all of this is good business practice. Even under a system which denies coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions (the quid pro quo for the mandate), the legislation gives ample scope for the insurance companies to limit coverage. Sarah Palin was right. There are death panels in our healthcare system: they’re called health insurance companies.

And the reality is that as human beings we are all a bundle of “pre-existing conditions.” From the day of our birth, each of us is a little bundle of preexisting conditions—congenital abnormalities and genetic predispositions to disease or, perhaps, risky behavior. Many of these conditions will only be discovered much later, probably in a doctor’s office. The health insurer will likely remain in the dark until a bill is submitted for payment. It then must seek a way to deny the claim. The insurer will check the fine print and patient records for exclusions and preexisting conditions. Often, insurers automatically issue a denial, forcing patients to file an appeal. Again, good business practice for an insurance company, but lousy if the objective is guaranteed healthcare provision.

Given today’s political constraints, perhaps a full “single-payer” option might not be feasible, but one earlier variant of the proposed healthcare legislation did feature a Medicare buy-in. In effect, if the Supreme Court does strike down the major provisions of the Obama healthcare plan, Congress could easily use Senate reconciliation and expand Medicare via the Senate’s buy-in provisions (the House can approve this on the basis of a simple majority vote). The Congressional Budget Office has already signed off on this as a means of saving money (“budget savings” is in some respects a nonsensical concept, but it provides the necessary political cover to deploy what is essentially a budgetary procedure).

More important, the expansion of Medicare would provide a genuine “public option” that, by competing against private insurance companies (which would presumably no longer have any genuine cost constraints given that the ban to deny coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions would likely be struck down with the individual mandate), would help control costs. It would also help solve the problem of preexisting. And because Medicare does not deny coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions, it is actually far more cost effective than private health insurance. As James K. Galbraith notes in The Predator State (2008):

“Public health insurance entities such as Medicare do not evaluate risk because they are universal. Therefore, they save the major cost associated with private health insurance. They pay their personnel at civil servant salary scales and are under no obligation to provide a return to shareholders via dividends or meet a target rate of return. Insurance in general is therefore intrinsically a service that the public sector can competently provide at lower cost than the private sector, and from the standpoint of the entire population, selective provision of private health insurance is invariably inferior to universal public provision. “

In other words, this brings us closer to the “ideal” low-cost universal insurance plan that has long been advocated by people like Paul Krugman. Allowing a Medicare buy-in to Americans under age 65 would give people a genuine alternative to private health insurance and thereby render the whole issue of denying coverage on the basis of preexisting conditions moot. And it would substantially enhance the global competitiveness of American corporations.

A Medicare buy-in would also have the added benefit of getting us closer to a single-payer system, which is a far more rational way to control healthcare costs, largely due to the administrative complexity associated with our current patchwork system and the corresponding inability to bargain with suppliers, especially drug companies, for lower prices. Residents of the United States notoriously pay much higher prices for prescription drugs than residents of other advanced countries, including Canada. This proposal would also give American healthcare consumers far more bang for their buck than the current legislation. It would indeed be the height of historic irony if the Roberts Supreme Court was the instrument that led us away from a private health insurance based system toward something approaching a rational, affordable healthcare provision.

Corporate Demands, Federal ‘Reform,’ Keep Shifting Healthcare Costs to Workers

Friday, May 13, 2011 by In These Times

by Roger Bybee 

 

Despite its $14.2 billion in profits last year untouched by federal income taxes, General Electric is now demanding that its unionized workers accept a new high-deductible “Health Choice” health savings account plan.

GE’s demands are particularly obscene because it is sitting on $25 billion in savings and is threatening to close more U.S. plants, i.e. move more jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere. And they're particularly dangerous because GE is modeling bad behavior for other corporations to emulate.

As UE-GE Conference Secretary Steve Tormey has said, “Nobody is more symbolic of the assault on workers than General Electric." The United Electrical workers union, one of a handful of unions now negotiating with GE, warned its members:

...numerous studies of these high-deductible plans...reveal that employees forced into plans like Health Choice are “significantly more likely to avoid, skip, or delay healthcare because of costs” than those with more comprehensive insurance. ...
What GE is really saying with Health Choice is that medical expenses are no longer primarily their responsibility, but that of GE employees.

But GE is only the latest entrant among employers trying to establish a new healthcare normal by thrusting heavy additional costs onto the backs of working families. And the much-trumpeted federal healthcare "reform" legislation may actually exacerbate this race to the bottom.

(Of course, public employers—like the state of Wisconsin, led by labor's arch enemy Gov. Scott Walker—have also been pushing to make public workers take up even more of the burden of healthcare costs. This despite the fact that, as David Cay Johnston has pointed out without managing to dent mainstream media coverage, public employees have always been paying 100 percent of their benefit costs. When they gained improvements in health and retirement benefits, they had to sacrifice on wage increases.)

How federal healthcare 'reform' helps drives the race to the bottom

The race to the bottom is, unfortunately, likely to be intensified as we get closer to fully implementing the Affordable Care Act in 2014. In fact, the ACA may well tend to establish a bare-bones, high-deductible policy as the new norm. The taxation of perversely mis-labeled “Cadillac” benefits has the very real potential of putting the squeeze on union-won healthcare benefits, especially in high-cost states.

Despite the efforts of AFL-CIO Richard Trumka and others to limit the damage created when the Obama administration suddenly adopted John McCain’s regressive idea of taxing better benefit plans to fund expanded healthcare coverage for the uninsured, it may not take long before fast-rising medical inflation pushes the dollar value of union-won health benefits up to the Cadillac level, as IUE-CWA Local 201 President Jeff Crosby has noted.

As Dr. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler wrote recently,

The insurance required under the federal ACA is no better than Massachusetts’ bare-bones plans. And as employers emulate this inadequate coverage, the race to the bottom leaves an increasing number of Americans UNDER-insured. Public workers are just the latest group to see their coverage downsized.

What used to be called “health insurance” is now labeled “Cadillac coverage” – and reserved for those who drive Mercedes.

Himmelstein and Woolhandler remind us that the Democrats’ ACA plan was based on the Massachusetts model passed in 2006 with Gov. Mitt Romeny's signature, and whose “achievements” are much less than splendid. Bankruptcies caused by catastrophic medical costs, which account for over half of all bankruptcies, are still rising in Massachusetts, they state:

While only 4 percent of the state’s residents remain uninsured, much of the new coverage is so skimpy that serious illness leaves families with crushing medical bills.

For instance, the cheapest (and most commonly purchased) coverage available to a 56-year-old Bostonian through the state’s health insurance exchange costs $5,616. Yet, if you’re sick, the policy doesn’t start paying bills until you’ve paid a $2,000 deductible. And even after that you’re responsible for 20 percent of the next $15,000 in medical expenses.

Insurers try blackmail

By basing itself on the Massachusetts plan which keeps for-profit insurers as the parasitic middlemen at the core of the healthcare system, the ACA sacrificed the potential for comprehensive, high-quality benefits covered from the first dollar.

This potential has been underscored in the fight over retaining ACA’s requirement that 80 percent of premium revenue be used by insurers to provide healthcare and improve quality, freeing up 20 percent for profit, bureaucratic overhead, and sales and promotion.

No less than nine states are seeking waivers from the 80 percent requirement, falling prey to insurers’ blackmail demands. Insurers are threatening to stop selling individual coverage in a number of states unless they can spend, in several cases, just 65 percent on paying for healthcare and quality improvements.

Both the states and the Obama administration are petrified by this coercive technique. The Obama administration’s timid mentality was revealed in this statement by Robert Laszewski, a consultant to the health care industry and a former insurance executive. "The last thing the Obama administration wants is the Des Moines Register writing about 500 people who lost their health insurance in Iowa because of the Obama health plan," he chortled.

Single-payer destiny?

The emerging situation is not pretty. Major corporations and right-wing state governments are fighting furiously to shift more costs onto workers and their families. Instead of setting a new, higher standard, ACA effectively serves to reinforce a new lower standard of “acceptable” coverage. Given this, the limitations of the ACA may become very obvious very quickly both to the public and Congress.

There may even be a possibility that that the essential need for maximum-strength single-payer or “Medicare for all” healthcare system—unburdened by for-profit insurers—will become evident much faster than most have imagined. (Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) introduced  single-payer bills in Congress this week; Vermont has now passed its own single-payer system into law.)

Himmelstein and Woolhandler make the case concisely:

While the ACA can’t live up to its “affordable care” moniker, a single-payer reform could save $400 billion annually on administrative costs, enough to offer every American first-dollar, comprehensive coverage. While U.S. insurers fight tooth and nail against the 20 percent limit on overhead, Canada’s single-payer program runs for 1 percent.

Blue Shield plans 50% rate increases in 2011

(Cuz they are all about caring...pigs! I hope they choke on their caviar!--jef)

***

By Eric W. Dolan
Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Health insurance costs for hundreds of thousands of individual policy holders with Blue Shield of California could go up as much 59 percent this year, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The California health insurer has announced it is seeking to raise rates an average of 30% to 35% for 193,000 policy holders due to rising health care costs, the fact that healthier people are dropping coverage during a bad economy, and other factors.

Roughly one in four of Blue Shield of California customers are expected to see increases of more than 50% over five months. Most of those who hold individual policies are self-employed, aren't covered by their employer or have been laid off.

"Rates are going to continue to rise unless the cost of medical care is brought under control," Blue Shield spokesman Tom Epstein told the LA Times. "We need to reduce what we pay to hospitals, medical groups and pharmaceutical companies."

"The rate increases reported today cover a period of more than one year and have almost nothing to do with the federal health reform law," Blue Shield of California said in a statement. "These rates reflect trends that were building long before health reform."

Despite the rate hikes, Blue Shield of California said it expects to lose tens of millions of dollars on its individual health care business in 2010 and 2011.

Last year Anthem Blue Cross proposed a 39 percent increase for its nearly 800,000 customers, but a public outcry forced the insurance company to settle for a maximum hike of 20 percent.

Anthem Blue Cross announced Wednesday that it expected to raise rates again an average of 9.8% for individual policy holders.

Health insurance premium hikes greater than 10 percent would be reviewed by state or federal regulators under new rules proposed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services in December of 2010.

The new regulations would force health insurers to publicly disclose proposed increases and the justification for them.

"The proposed regulation will help safeguard consumers from unreasonably high rate increases by providing consumers with detailed information on proposed increases," the department's website states. "Disclosing proposed increases, along with the insurer’s justification, would shed light on industry pricing practices that some experts believe have led to unnecessarily high prices."

On Wednesday, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) introduced a measure to establish a robust public health insurance option as a supplement to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. She said the public option would lower insurance costs and address deficit concerns.

Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) vowed to pass legislation to repeal the new health care reform laws in the House, despite such a repeal's inevitable death in the Senate.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated a repeal of Obama's health reform laws would cost the US $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years.

Billionaires Should Pay No Taxes At All!

by James and Jean Anton
www.endendlesswars.org
Sunday, 19 December 2010

When Obama said America was being “held hostage” by the Republicans, that he had no choice but to compromise, he lied.

He could have pushed the Public Option (sorry to bring this up Mr. President. We know how much it upsets you when we “fucking retards” bring it up). He could have extended unemployment insurance. He could have fought unemployment by Just Saying "No" to outsourcing. He could have proposed a jobs program like FDR did in the form of public works, and improved the infrastructure to boot. He could have attacked the decade-old billionaire and millionaire tax empire by proposing to raise their taxes to help pay off the deficit they created. He could have done some of the above using reconciliation, or he could have shown some real leadership.

He could have been the transformational leader that we thought we elected.

Of course, he didn’t. And of course, he wasn’t.

Instead Obama chose to act as if the Republicans were in charge, which they were not, claiming they were holding a gun to his head, which they weren’t - that he was being held hostage, which he was not.

He “compromised.”

He invited the Republican leadership to the White House, and offered to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two more years. These cuts originally were a “temporary” Bush-era ploy to “help the economy.” They did nothing of the sort. Instead they handed tax-free windfall billions to the most privileged people in America. The cuts cost 544 billion dollars, and resulted in an economic crisis that began in 2008 and continues today.

In addition, he sweetened the “deal” by proposing a Social Security “tax holiday“ (which will deprive the Social Security Trust Fund of 112 billion dollars), and an extension of the Estate Tax windfall that will benefit three-tenths of 1 percent of Americans (and cost Americans another 68 billion dollars over the next 10 years.)
There would be many other tax breaks for energy interests and select businesses as well.

Total cost for his proposal: More than 860 billion dollars. His “compromise” will cost more than the Bush/Cheney tax scam. It is almost as much as the total cost of the wars in Iran and Afghanistan since 2001. It is more than twice the cost of Medicare.

He did not dare run these audacious ideas by the Democratic rank and file. Instead he invited the ultra-conservative Republican leadership to the White House, and made a deal.

There would be no national debate.

There would be no debate at all.

Obama went over to the Republican side, drew a line in the sand, and thumbed his nose at the rest of us.

He declared that Progressives and Liberals shouldn’t act like “sanctimonious purists.” That they should put the interests of America ahead of their own interests. In other words, he accused his own constituency of not caring as much about the welfare of America as his plutocrat constituents do.

Republicans were surprised and delighted. (Some pretended to believe they could have gotten even more... but the reality is that most Republicans felt like they had just taken Ecstasy). Newspapers like the Washington Post hailed the “compromise” as "the most significant bipartisan vote since President Obama took office.” He was congratulated by Senate minority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, who consistently receives a 100% score from the ultraconservative American Conservative Union.

Newt Gingrich approved and applauded. Need we say more?

You don’t have to be an economist or a think-tank devotee to see why they were so happy.

Obama made fools of the American people.

The plutocrats know that in 2012, when Obama runs for reelection, America will still be held hostage. This is because in regular hostage deals, the criminals give up the hostages before they receive the pay off.

Obama never freed the hostages.

Plutocrats are giddy because they know that Obama served them once, and that he will serve them again. His willingness to “compromise” guarantees that the tax empire give-away will soon be made permanent.

They are orgiastic because they know that Obama has no real intention to rescind the Social Security tax “holiday.” He practically said so. Not in 2012, not ever.

As long as the Social Security trust fund is there to prop up the economy, Obama will siphon it off. Money will flow from the nest eggs of the working class into the pockets the ruling class.

And what did Obama get for regular Americans with his “compromise”?

Those who pay into Social Security get a little extra pocket money from Obama’s “tax holiday.” Obama hopes that we spend every dime of it, to stimulate the economy. If we put it in the bank, the “tax holiday” will not stimulate anything.

People who are dependent upon Social Security get nothing.

Obama will show how serious he is about deficit reduction by freezing Social-Security payments for eternity. Not only will the trust fund be siphoned off, it will be steadily diminished by inflation.

Employees who are exempt from paying Social Security (who have exempt state-run or other pension plans) also get nothing. No extra cash. Nada.

Low-income workers may actually see reductions in their paychecks. The way the law is written, approximately 50 million taxpayers (approximately one out of three) who make less than $20,000 will see an increase in taxes.

The unemployed get a short-lived extension of benefits. But Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke predicts that it will take four or five more years before we are back to “normal” unemployment levels. Do you think Obama will have the guts or the will to ask the hostage takers to pay out unemployment checks for four or five years?

And no one seriously expects the Obama “compromise” to create jobs for anyone.

What will happen when the economy does not improve (for us regular Americans)? What will happen when the Social Security trust fund shrivels away? What will happen when unemployment benefits run out again? And again... ?

We are not supposed to worry about that for now.

One can only speculate.

Maybe Obama will go to the plutocrats again and take their advice. Maybe he’ll draw another line in the sand and dare us “fucking retards” to cross it.

Maybe he’ll declare that BILLIONAIRES SHOULD PAY NO TAXES AT ALL.

And give us regular Americans a Medicare Tax Holiday!

End Corporate Domination: More Than Advocacy We Must Resist

Monday, December 20, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
by Margaret Flowers

On December 16, 2009, I stood in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building with about a dozen single payer supporters. We were holding signs and standing vigil on the eve of the first time in U.S. history that a single payer bill would make it to the floor of either body in Congress. Senators Sanders, Brown and Burris introduced an amendment that would have substituted a national single payer health insurance for the health bill being created in the Senate at that time.

We celebrated that night because it was a victory, though a small one. Despite all of the corporate dollars and the teams of industry lobbyists opposing single payer, our persistence in pushing for the amendment, which included lobbying, letters, emails and protests at the Senate building, had paid off. The amendment was introduced on the floor of the Senate on December 17th, although it was pulled before it came to a vote.

One year later to the day, I am standing in the snow with hundreds of people, my arms linked behind the bars of the fence in front of the White House. Inside, the President is holding a press conference to report the progress being made in Afghanistan which we know is based on lies. Outside, we are protesting to end the wars in the largest veteran led act of civil disobedience since the beginning of the war on Afghanistan. In all, 131 people were arrested.

We can make some progress working within Congress, but we will never achieve our goals of peace and social and economic justice this way. There are a few like Senator Sanders who are willing to speak out against injustice, but their voices are mere whimpers against the giant winds of the corporate political and media machines. No politician, no matter how strong their understanding of and desire for real social change, can succeed in this hostile environment.

To succeed in creating the social change that we desperately need will require acts of protest and civil disobedience, a new culture of resistance as called for by leaders such as Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace. It is time to recognize that our advocacy for peace, jobs, education, health, housing, human rights and environmental and economic justice is insufficient. We face the same fundamental obstacle: corporate control of our country.

Together we have the strength and the resources to shift power away from the rich corporations to the people and we can demand social justice. We have the solutions, but they are not being heard. We must cause enough disruption that our voices and our solutions cannot be ignored. And we must organize actions of nonviolent civil resistance. Otherwise growing public discontent in this nation may turn to violent means.

That is why I stood in solidarity with the veterans on December 16th, 2010 and joined them in the action that led to our arrest. As I sat that day in handcuffs on the cold concrete floor of a holding area in Anacostia, a veteran turned to me and said, “It means a lot to me that you are here doctor because you don’t have to do this.”

The truth is that I do have to do this. For me it is a matter of professional integrity to refuse to cooperate with the current system that results in the growing wealth of a few at the cost of great human suffering and death at home and around the world. I call on you, if you love your country, if you want a peaceful and healthy future for your children and grandchildren, to join in the culture of resistance.

Speak out about injustice wherever you see it. Join or organize actions of nonviolent protest to demand the change that we require. Speak out against the wars that cause so much human suffering and undermine our economic and national security. You can fight foreclosures, the closing of health centers, the closing of schools and poisoning of our air, land and water by factories and power plants. There is much to do. Your voice is needed.

Single Payer Later

Duck-and-Cover Politics
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER

What’s happening in California is the best argument to dump the Democrats.

Forever.

And start anew.

It’s the only option.

The state legislature in California has twice passed the California single payer bill.

And twice, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed it.

Earlier this year, the Senate passed it for a third time.

And the Assembly was about to pass it for a third time.

But the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly pulled the bill at the last minute.

Why?

Because it’s an election year.

Jerry Brown, who’s in a dead heat race for Governor, doesn’t want to face the music.

And the California Nurses Association, which supports Brown for Governor, has told single payer activists — back off.

Don’t pressure Brown to make a public statement on single payer.

If the Democrats would have passed single payer for a third time, the Terminator would have vetoed single payer for a third time.

This is exactly what single payer activists want.

Keep the pressure on.

But the Dems — and their union backers — want to play hide and seek.

“The Democrats should have put it up for a vote in the Assembly,” said Don Bechler of Single Payer Now. “California has been the wind in the
sails of the single payer movement. Each time the legislature passes it, we get stronger. We have more people in our movement than ever before. Passing it for a third time would have built the momentum.”

“The California legislature has twice before said that they are for having a universal health care system minus the insurance companies,” Bechler says. “We can be proud of winning that little battle.”

Brown was overheard earlier this year telling someone that if he is elected Governor, he will sign the single payer bill into law.

But he refuses to lead on the issue.

“Brown is saying — if everybody else is for it, I’ll be for it,” Bechler says. “But if you are a leader, you have to lead the troops, not follow.”

“Brown’s strategy so far in this campaign has been to say nothing about the issues, to run with duct tape over his mouth,” Bechler says.

Bechler is not convinced that with this follower strategy, Brown can win the Governorship.

Nor is Bechler convinced that even if he becomes Governor, Brown will sign the single payer bill into law.

Even if he does sign it, it’s only the beginning of the fight for single payer in California.

Bechler says the minute Brown signs it, the insurance industry will begin gathering signatures for an initiative to overturn it.

“And they’ll spend more to get it passed than Barack Obama spent to become President,” Bechler says.

And even if the single payer forces win that initiative fight, the legislature will have to fund the single payer law — with a two-thirds vote of both houses.

Right now, single payer forces have about 25 out of 40 Senators (62 percent) and about 45 out of 80 members of the Assembly (56 percent).

So, it’s an uphill battle.

Especially with Democrats playing duck and cover.

Single-Payer is Inevitable (?)

Progressives and Conservatives Agree ...
By ROB STONE, MD

“The new health care legislation is a step toward elimination, by slow strangulation, of private health insurance and establishment of government as the ‘single payer.’”

- George Will, in his weekly newspaper column, Sunday July 11, 2010

Everyone loves to pick on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and well they should. This 2,000+ page contraption, this heap of handouts to the special interest lobbyists with a few shiny baubles thrown in to placate the common folk, was not only written by the for-profit health insurance industry but now will be implemented by former WellPoint/Anthem Vice President Liz Fowler who actually penned much of the law in her role as Max Baucus’ chief healthcare counsel for the Senate Finance Committee. You don’t have to make this stuff up, as Sam Stein reported in the Huffington Post July 16, titled “Obama Administration Defends Hiring Of Ex-Health Insurance Exec To Oversee Reform”

But what about George Will’s fine whine that the insurance industry faces strangling regulation? Robert Pear wrote in the New York Times on August 2 that the new law will lead to more regulation of the industry, and “the transition is full of risks and uncertainty for all involved.” If the Obama administration is going to "regulate the industry for the benefit of consumers," he noted, then “they can't help but destabilize or disrupt the existing market.”

Wall Street doesn’t like uncertainty. It detests being destabilized. Stock analysts are not missing out on this. The brokerage firm Edward Jones “downgraded the ratings on the stocks of the three health insurers it covers - UnitedHealth Group, WellPoint and Aetna -- to ‘sell’ from ‘hold’ late on Friday [7/30]. Those companies are the three largest U.S. health insurers.” (Reuters 8/2/10)

This new blow comes after legendary investor Warren Buffett pulled the plug on WellPoint, selling all Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings in the insurance giant during the first quarter of 2010 (“Buffett bails on WellPoint)

Speaking in Virginia, former House Speaker and presumed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said on May 14, "The employer-based system will collapse because [the ACA] encourages businesses to drop health care coverage and incur the fine. When employees realize the high costs of the health care exchanges, they will demand a nationalized health care system," according to the Washington Post.

It only gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective. According to Gingrich, the business community is going to lead the call for single payer Medicare for All.

And well they should. Gingrich wasn’t making this up. On May 6, CNN Money released documents showing that “many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government… AT&T revealed that it spends $2.4 billion a year on coverage for its almost 300,000 active employees, a number that would fall to $600 million if AT&T stopped providing health care coverage and paid the penalty option.”

Is the Affordable Care Act unaffordable? Isn’t it at least a step in the right direction?

Those questions can only be answered by considering whether the ACA ends up strengthening or weakening the health insurance corporations. Progressive critics of the bill point out that the new legislation hands over $350 billion in government subsidies to the private insurers while mandating consumers to buy the industry's shoddy products. That, combined with a lack of price controls means the ACA could prove to be a bonanza for the corporate stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex.

On the other hand, the changing marketplace is full of perils, even if the conservative icons quoted above are exaggerating them to stir up fear of Socialized Medicine (and maybe scare up some donations).

If we stand back and rest on our laurels, believing that the ACA will save us, then we are doomed. The industry lobbyists are working overtime to take the best parts of the bill and weaken them, while destroying any good that is in the bill (see Wendell Potter in the Huffington Post on July 27, Health Insurers Leaning on State Insurance Commissioners to "Reform" Reform).

“We believe that Medicare for All is inevitable in the United States. It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”

- Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), John Conyers (D-Mich.), and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), statement for Medicare’s birthday, July 29, 2010

If you’re not inclined to believe George and Newt, then how about Dennis, John, and Bernie: “It is up to all of us to determine when the inevitable becomes the reality.”

The reality is that single payer, Medicare for All, is not inevitable, nor is there any guarantee the ACA won’t bankrupt us while enriching the corporations that lobbied for it.

It reminds me of a slogan we have in Indiana, “Healthcare Reform: We’re Still For It, and We’re Not Done Yet!”

From California to Vermont, Medicare for All advocates are working for bills to create state single payer systems. The grassroots are pushing up thru the disappointment of the Affordable Care Act.

Nationally, with the growing recognition that the health insurance giants stand as the greatest barrier to affordable healthcare for all, investors are beginning to see that this is not an industry socially responsible stockholders should be in (Huffington Post May 12, Napalm, Big Health Insurance, and Divestment).

I went to medical school to take care of sick people. The insurance companies fulfill their fiduciary responsibility to their investors by finding ways not to pay for the care of the sick. All their innovation and creativity go to this goal of not paying for care. No other sector in our crazy healthcare system operates under this incentive.

It will take a mass movement, like those for women’s suffrage and civil rights. It will take a divestment campaign like the one against apartheid in South Africa. We must keep the pressure up, shine a light on their nefarious deeds, drive down their stock prices, and expose them for what they are: parasitic middlemen who add no value while sucking billions out of our economy.

CBO: New Robust Public option could save $68 billion by 2020

By Ezra Klein | July 23, 2010

When people think of deficit reduction, they tend to think about spending cuts and tax increases. They don't think as much about saving money by putting more effective policies into place. But as the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of a new public option proposal from Pete Stark suggests, maybe they should.

Stark wants to add a public option to the exchanges that would start by paying doctors the rates Medicare pays plus 5 percent, and then grow with the cost of physicians' services. According to the CBO, this plan's premiums "would be 5 percent to 7 percent lower, on average, than the premiums of private plans offered in the exchanges." But that's not all!

"The proposal would reduce federal budget deficits through 2019 by about $53 billion," CBO says. And because the public plan is saving more money as time goes on, if you extend that out to 2020, the savings to the government are $68 billion. That implies a savings of $200 billion or so in the second decade. That's a lot of money, and it's in addition to the savings for consumers.

In theory, this town is going to have a serious conversation about deficits pretty soon. And a lot of it will focus on how we can reduce services or raise taxes. That's going to be ugly. So the few opportunities we have to save large amounts of money while also making life better for people shouldn't be missed.

Robust Public Option Health Care Bill with 121 Co-Sponsors Introduced in Congress

Bill offers consumers a choice between pricey private health plans and a "robust" public plan in the health insurance exchanges set up by the law.
By Sahil Kapur, Raw Story, July 23, 2010

What, did you think the fight for health care reform was over?

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), co-chair of the progressive caucus, is making good on her promise to continue pushing for a public health insurance option after the enactment of sweeping reform legislation.

On Thursday afternoon, the Northern California congresswoman announced the introduction of a bill offering consumers a choice between private plans and a "robust" public plan in the health insurance exchanges set up by the law.

"The robust public option offers lower-cost competition to private insurance companies," Woolsey told Raw Story. "This will make insurance more affordable for those who do not have it and keep insurance affordable for those who do. We are introducing the public option now so is will be available as a ready-made off set or deficit reducer in this or the next Congress."

In an email, she promised it would "rein in the spiraling costs of premiums" and "save billions of dollars and improve health care while doing it."

The bill currently has 121 co-sponsors in the House, Woolsey said, and has won strong praise from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

"I am very pleased that Congresswoman Woolsey and 120 of her colleagues in the House are introducing a bill to create a strong public option operating in every state exchange," Sanders told Raw Story. "I have long been in favor of a Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care system, but in the post-Affordable Care Act world I think the very least we can do is to offer every person the option of choosing a government-run health insurance plan over a private one."

While the insurance industry fears competition from the government, polls have suggested that a large majority of Americans support a public option, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that such a provision would help reduce the deficit.

"It comes as no surprise to me that the CBO continues to recognize that such a public option will save significant amounts of money for the federal taxpayer," Sanders said.

Progressives are enthusiastic about the provision, for which there is strong support in the House. But it could be a nonstarter in the Senate this year, due to the busy calendar and fast approaching November midterm elections.

Woolsey was a vocal supporter of a public plan during the grueling yearlong debate. Though she voted for the bill even after it was removed, she told Raw Story in February she wouldn’t stop fighting for the provision.

In an op-ed for The Hill last week, Woolsey called the Affordable Care Act a "historic first step," but argued that the law enacted in March must be followed by "an even longer stride into history by establishing a robust public option."

An Historic Confirmation of Corporate Power

Closing Time

By CHRIS FLOYD

It looks like heaven but it feels like death;
It's something in between, I guess:
It's closing time.

-- Leonard Cohen

Official transcript of remarks by President Barack Obama after the March 21 vote in the House of Representatives on H.R.3590: Motion to Concur in Senate Amendments to Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

My fellow Americans. As many of our more serious commentators have noted, Democrats and progressives have sought genuine reform of our broken, bloated, unjust health care system for almost a hundred years. Today, I am proud to say that we have brought that century-long struggle to a close. Together with our visionary partners in the House and the Senate, we have finally killed genuine health care reform for many years to come -- perhaps even for another century!

The struggle is over, the deal is done, the fix is in, and corporate power -- unbridled, unchallenged, coddled, protected, and larded with the endless pork of government-guaranteed profit -- has triumphed at last. This is an historic achievement. This is a mighty legacy we will bequeath to future generations.

This, my friends, is what change looks like.

Now, you know and I know that such change never comes easily. It never comes without opposition. It never comes without controversy. Even in this hour of victory, we know that the doom-sayers will be out in force.

And I'm not speaking here of the Republicans, whose opposition has simply been a lurid, baseless "Red Dawn" fantasy about "communism" coming to America. "Communism" -- in a bill that has been written by our visionary partners in the corporate community, by our hyper-capitalist friends and patrons on Wall Street, by the lobbyists and bagmen of Big Money! It's true there is a tinge of socialism in the bill, but it is, of course, the only kind of socialism that is tolerated in America: socialism for the rich, where the masses shoulder the risks -- and the costs -- while the wealthy reap the profits for themselves. The health-care barons, the bailed-out banks, the farm-devouring agriconglomerates, the war profiteers ... we've got plenty of boardroom bolsheviki out there -- but it sure ain't "communism" like Castro used to make! So let them hoot and holler down this false trail all they like; for as I learned back in my Senate days, when I was considered part of the "anti-war" faction, opposition without substance only entrenches the status quo.

No, what we must look out for are all those -- or rather, those very few -- nattering nabobs of negativism who have opposed our historic corporate empowerment bill out of -- get this -- principle. Like barnacles hanging onto the butt of the Titanic, they have clung to the idea of truly universal, equal, single-payer health care, a system that is less expensive, more efficient, more secure, more democratic, more popular and more effective than the heroic measure we have passed here today.

These poor wretches -- who now must face the wrath of Kos and the wroth of Rahm for their tragic apostasy -- are simply not savvy enough to see that our 2,000-page boondogglepalooza, riddled with fine-print exceptions, toothless regulations (which we will 'enforce' every bit as rigorously as Wall Street has been regulated all these years), impenetrable phase-in and phase-out schedules, and mild benefits that won't even begin kicking in for years -- and that even after a decade will still leave millions of people uncovered -- is much better than a simple, streamlined system that could be implemented by the end of this year, bringing genuine relief from intolerable, life-degrading financial burdens and medical problems to millions and millions of people in dire need right away.

Or as that avatar of negativity, Ralph Nader put it:

"The health insurance legislation is a major political symbol wrapped around a shredded substance. It does not provide coverage that is universal, comprehensive or affordable. It is a remnant even of its own initially compromised self — bereft of any public option, any safeguard for states desiring a single payer approach, any adequate antitrust protections, any shift of power toward consumers to defend themselves, any regulation of insurance prices, any authority for Uncle Sam to bargain with drug companies, and any reimportation of lower-priced drugs."

Hey, Ralph, thanks for reciting my credits! All those "berefts" you cited were the result of my own super- savvy negotiations! It's 11-dimensional chess, man, a really heavy-duty Matrix Zen Jedi Master use-the-Force kind of thing, where you win the game by giving away everything you have in the opening move! But you're too much a dinosaur to understand. 'Anti-trust protections!' Hey, Teddy Roosevelt -- your horse-and-buggy is waiting! Just listen to this guy:

"Most of the health insurance coverage mandated by this legislation does not come into effect until 2014, by which time 180,000 Americans will die because they were unable to afford health insurance to cover treatment and diagnosis, according to Harvard Medical School researchers."

Well, what can I say? 180,000 is a lot of dead people. This is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.

Then there's this Chris Hedges guy. He used to be a "serious" journalist, reporting on the imperial wars for our corporate partners in the stovepiping community -- what old-timers and barnacles still like to call the "news media." But he went off the rails a long time ago and joined the carpers and cranks on the sidelines, those malcontents who, unlike so many of our progressive partners today, have never imbibed the timeless wisdom of Warren G. Harding: "Don't knock, boost!"

Just get a load of Hedges here, making the big-whoop observation that our historic bill is just a bloated version of the already-failed, Republican-created Massachusetts plan:

"Take a look at the health care debacle in Massachusetts, a model for what we will get nationwide. One in six people there who have the mandated insurance say they cannot afford care, and tens of thousands of people have been evicted from the state program because of budget cuts. The 45,000 Americans who die each year because they cannot afford coverage will not be saved under the federal legislation. Half of all personal bankruptcies will still be caused by an inability to pay astronomical medical bills. The only good news is that health care stocks and bonuses for the heads of these corporations are shooting upward. ..."

Again with the credits! Stocks going up, corporate heads filling their pockets, pols gorging on backroom baksheesh, Big Money controlling the debate ... Earth to Hedges: That's what we're here for! That's the whole point! You're an old Seventies guy, aren't you, Chris? You remember ZZ Top? "Jesus Just Left Chicago"? (If you'll pardon the immodesty.) What do they say? "Taking care of business is his name." They got that right.

So who cares if the plan "fails"? Who cares, if, as you say,

"[the plan] will not expand coverage to 30 million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors."

Listen, Hedgie: If the plan was to reform the health care system for the benefit of the people, then we would have, like, reformed the health care system for the benefit of the people. You follow? The plan was, is, and will always be to appear to be reforming the system -- to make the rubes believe that something is being done to alleviate their pain -- precisely to avoid really reforming the system, which is just too good and greasy for too many of us at the top of the imperial pyramid.

And when this plan fails -- as it will, as it will -- then you rig up another boondoggle, another "great debate" full of sound and fury, signifying zilch, to keep the rubes at bay. Meanwhile, we can get on to the real job our corporate colleagues and patrons want us to do -- bringing that other old dream of social amelioration for the common folk to an end at last: Social Security. Scalpel, Nurse! The doctor is in!

The Democrats' Health Care Bill

Defeat in Victory

By SHAMUS COOKE

What looks like a big victory for Obama and the Democrats may be their greatest undoing. It’s true that the passage of Obama’s health care bill represents a significant political victory for the Democrats. But sometimes a battle won could equal a lost war.

It’s telling that Obama had so much trouble in getting his own party to pass the bill on a simple majority basis: the bill was so blatantly watered down with the corporate hose that anyone with their name attached to it feared future electoral doom.

This kept the Democrat’s left wing — the so-called progressive wing — from initially giving their seal of approval. It must be remembered that some of the left Democrats initially claimed support for single payer health care. After being scolded by the Party leadership that this demand was “off the table,” the lefts moved to the right and demanded a “strong public option.”

The public option grew weaker and weaker as the health care bill evolved. The left Democrats pinned all their hopes on it; they ignored the rest of the health care bill, which slashed Medicare and taxed the “Cadillac” health care plans of union workers, all in the hopes that a miniscule public option would give the lefts some political cover.

It wasn’t meant to be. The final health care vision is the brainchild of the monopoly corporations who dominate health care in America. Their power will remain untouched. Indeed, it will only grow.

Dennis Kucinich, the most “radical” of the progressive Democrats, waited until the last round before he threw in the towel to the health care industry. His capitulation is especially symbolic, as many progressive activists around the country remained in the Democratic Party solely because he was there. His inglorious surrender signals what many progressives already knew: the Democrats are a corporate dominated party, where liberal ideas are tolerated so long as they have no actual effect on policy.

With Kucinich and the other left Democrats now fully discredited, the Democratic Party has further undermined its credibility — what little remained. Those who hoped that the party could be reformed— that the corporate wing could somehow be out-muscled— will be duped no longer.

Also, the bill’s taxing of “Cadillac” health care plans will further alienate organized labor from the Democrats. What little faith the unions had in the Democrats will be badly shaken.

More significantly, those millions of people who are soon to be mandated to buy shoddy, corporate insurance will vent their rage solely at the Democrats. A significant portion of the currently uninsured will remain without insurance, and be penalized at tax time for not buying into the corporate healthcare scam. These millions will be never vote Democrat again.

The Democrats have a won a congressional battle against the Republicans, while sawing off the branches of support on which they are perched. The party that was once “the lesser of two evils” is now competing on equal footing with the Republicans.

With both political parties dominated by the big banks and corporations, there is ever growing political vacuum to the left (the vacuum to the right is being filled by the tea partiers).

There have been countless attempts to organize a mass third party. The numerous progressive political parties that currently exist do so on an insignificant scale.

What remains missing is the support of labor unions, which represent millions of working members. Labor is the only social force that currently exists on the left capable of creating a mass-based party with the resources capable of competing with the two parties of big business.

What the unions lack in funds they make up for with potentially millions of volunteers — door-knockers, phone bankers, fund raisers, community organizers, etc.

If labor were to finally declare its independence from the Democrats, and announce the drive to create an independent labor led party representing the majority of working people in this country, the “fractured left” would find instant cohesion.

If this labor based party were based on a progressive platform —including Jobs, Peace and Medicare for All — not only would the country’s millions of union members join and vote for it, but the tens of millions of working people disenfranchised by the Democrats would instantly jump on board.

The political void to the left needs to be filled quickly. Tea Partiers and Ron Paul Republicans are benefiting from this political black hole: many people who are progressive at heart are being tricked by these right-wing populists. A bold showing from America’s Labor Movement would stop this trend dead in its tracks and open the way for true majority rule.

Single-payer by attrition

So, I found an interesting article that alludes to how we might eventually wind up having single payer healthcare reform by way of the Supreme Court. I watched some political talking head show that said if health care reform were passed, the Republicans would challenge the constitutionality of its mandate in the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court.

According to this article from this past January, that would probably backfire on the Republicans, because the court would agree that the mandate was unconstitutional, but they would rule that a single payer form of health care would have to take its place. Read on:

Conservatives should embrace the health-insurance mandate
Jan 15th 2010
by The Economist

I'VE posted before on the perverse results that would be generated by a Supreme Court ruling that a mandate to buy health insurance would be unconstitutional. Yesterday Ezra Klein made the same point. Basically, a lot of Democrats would love to establish a single-payer system for universal health insurance, like Canada's, or a single-payer system for basic insurance with private supplementary insurance, like France's. They've shied away from attempting such a reform because it's agreed that America's private insurance industry is too powerful, and American political culture makes it easy to demagogue any national centralised system (though this rests on a mighty rock of cognitive dissonance—Americans like their Medicare and Social Security just fine).

Hence, Democrats have spent the past two years working out a private-sector universal health-insurance reform plan that's similar to those of Switzerland and the Netherlands: private health insurance with community rating and a buyer mandate. But that kind of system is impossible without a mandate; it would get ripped apart in a vortex of adverse selection. A Supreme Court ruling that the mandate is unconstitutional would mean that the only kind of universal health insurance America can have is the British, Canadian or French kind, where the government runs the whole show (for basic insurance, anyway). It seems perverse that America's constitution would mandate a more socialist approach to universal health care than the Netherlands has. It's also, as Mr Klein says, a disaster for free-market conservatives, in the long run.

But it's also worth thinking about exactly how this would play out. The clearest way to explain it is that right now, what we have already is a system that's getting ripped apart in a vortex of adverse selection. Health spending is rising at 8% per year. PriceWaterhouseCooper says medical costs will grow 9% in 2010; health insurance premiums generally rise even faster than costs. Premiums now amount to 18% of the average household's income, up from 11% in 1999. As insurance costs rise far faster than wages, unsurprisingly, the number of uninsured keeps rising too, to 46.3m in 2008. And those who aren't uninsured are increasingly insured by the government. Medicaid added 3m people to its rolls in 2008. The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) picked up another 1.5m. As this process continues, federal spending on health insurance keeps climbing; it grew 10.4% in 2008. Sick people, poor people, and older people are increasingly unable to afford insurance, and many are winding up on the government's dime. As premiums rise, people at higher and higher income strata find they cannot afford them, drop out of private insurance, and end up being covered by the government or not covered at all.

This is single-payer by attrition. The health reform measure in Congress now proposes to use tax subsidies to get America's working poor into private insurance plans. If it is ruled unconstitutional, the country will face a choice: allow the numbers of uninsured to continue shooting up, or enroll more and more people directly in taxpayer-funded government insurance plans. It's not impossible that America will choose the former, and become an increasingly bimodal two-class society where the working class simply doesn't get adequate health care. But it seems more likely that, after whatever number of years elapses between health-care reform efforts, universal health insurance will be back on the agenda of some future Democratic president. And this time, it will be single-payer, because nothing else will be constitutional.

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So, is it possible Obama's plan is that he is counting on the current health care reform bill to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, thus setting up a single payer system administered by the govt. because since it is closest to what exists in limited form currently (only for poverty level Americans too poor and/or too sick to afford to provide their own insurance), the court would have to revert back to the current plan and increase its enrollment for all those who could not afford the mandate? Wow, that's ingenious! It is the epitome of the back door plan. I will be impressed if that was the overall plan. It seems very conniving and dishonest, so it must be politics 101. Wow...

Democrats to dodge accountability on public option

Democrats to dodge accountability on public option

By Sahil Kapur
Friday, March 19th, 2010

They say they're for it, but it's likely we'll never know.

The last hope for an up-or-down vote on a public health insurance option faded on Friday, when one of its most outspoken backers scrapped his plans to force a vote on the provision.

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) told The Plum Line's Greg Sargent he'd "certainly be prepared to" introduce it in amendment, demanding that senators codify their stances.

But the self-described democratic socialist has since backed off, having "concluded that offering a public option amendment now could undermine the entire process," his spokesman told the Burlington Free Press.

The provision, which would provide consumers the choice of buying into a government-run insurance plan, has consistently polled well among the general public and is overwhelmingly favored by progressives. Staunchly opposed by the influential insurance industry, however, it has been subject to intense quarrels in Congress and was ultimately jettisoned from the Senate bill.

President Obama has repeatedly proclaimed his support for the public plan, only to exclude from his first-ever reform proposal, released just weeks ago. The House of Representatives passed it in its November bill, a month before Senate Democrats concluded they did not have 60 votes for cloture.

But now, under reconciliation, they need 51 votes, and at least 51 senators have suggested -- if not officially declared -- in statements or public appearances that they support the provision, according to unofficial whip counts conducted by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the liberal Firedoglake.

Tallying up its supposedly strong support among Senate Democrats, the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim concluded its passage was "a matter of will, not votes." Yet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced the provision's death last Friday, declaring that it's "not in reconciliation."

"This is what the Democratic Party does; it's who they are," said Salon's Glenn Greenwald, surmising that party leaders are too afraid to take on insurance companies. "They're willing to feign support for anything their voters want just as long as there's no chance that they can pass it."

So important is the public plan to progressive activists that a number of them, such as Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, have campaigned to scuttle the current bill and reprimand Democrats who vote for a package without it.

"This is an incredibly disappointing moment," wrote Hamsher on her blog. "I just wish our representatives would have the decency not to lie to their supporters about what they will do, and not make promises they quickly break."

If we can't get single-payer...

We'll settle for the public option. Um, Mr. President, didn't you support that in your campaign?

BY TOM TOMORROW

Kucinich flips to ‘yes’ on health bill

After months of opposition, Kucinich flips to ‘yes’ on health bill with no public option

By Sahil Kapur
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Under intense fire from Democratic leaders and some reform activists, the sole remaining progressive against the health care bill has reluctantly reversed his opposition, bringing his party one crucial vote closer to its passage.

"This is not the bill I want to support," Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) said at a press conference Wednesday morning. "I do not think it's a step toward anything I've supported in the past." But "after careful discussions with President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, my wife Elizabeth and close friends, I've decided to cast a vote in favor of the legislation."

Kucinich's announcement comes after months of staunch opposition to the current package. In January, he told Raw Story his party's concessions to insurance and pharmaceutical companies were acts of "madness." Last week, he said he'd be willing to cast the deciding vote against it.

His refusal to support any bill that didn't contain at least a robust public option was well-received by some progressives. The liberal Web site FireDogLake reportedly raised over $17,000 for his campaign chest. Founder Jane Hamsher now says, "We’ll be asking him to return it."

Kucinich reiterated his many concerns with the bill, primarily that it does not reign in problematic insurance company practices he has persistently assailed. "I do not retract those criticisms," he said.

While maintaining his belief that a single payer system is best way to reform the system, the congressman said he'll "support it in the hopes that we can move towards a more comprehensive approach."

"I know I have to make a decision not on the bill as I would to see it, but as it is," he lamented, acknowledging the "historic" nature of the fight for universal health care in the United States.

In response to a question, the Ohio congressman alleged he received "no Nebraska or Louisiana type deal" in return for his vote. He said his support "wasn't about the kind of deal-making that is essentially self-defeating."

"I take this vote with the utmost seriousness," a somber Kucinich said before reporters, adding that "the president's visit to my district [on Monday] underscored the urgency of this moment."

CNN notes that the congressman's announcement "has reduced the bill's opponents in the House to 204, now 12 votes shy of the 216 needed to prevent President Obama from scoring a major victory on his top domestic priority."

he’ll revisit public option after bill passes, Obama promises progressives

But can anyone still believe him? He hasn't been very good at keeping promises...

Obama promises progressives he’ll revisit public option after bill passes

Progressives may be denied their overriding health care priority this time around, but according to President Barack Obama, it won't be over with this bill.

Obama urged leading progressive Democrats in a closed-door meeting Thursday evening to back the health care bill, placating their concerns about the public option and warning them that the liberal agenda was at stake.

Obama told the group of House members he thought the public plan didn't have the votes this time, but reportedly assured them he'll revisit it after the bill's passage, warning that failure would imperil the issue for a generation.

Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said after the meeting that Obama's message was, "If this opportunity passes, much of our agenda, on the progressive side...it would be difficult, if not impossible for a generation to get back to this issue," according to Talking Points Memo.

"To maintain a strong presidency we need to pass this bill," Grijalva summarized Obama's remarks.

The congressman noted in a statement to reporters he was "encouraged" after Obama "personally committed to pursue a public option after passage of the current bill."

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) added, "He encouraged us to understand that this is the beginning of health care reform, not the end of it — and that we will fix it later, as we have with Social Security and Medicare," in an interview with The Plum Line's Greg Sargent.

"He doesn’t believe the Senate has 51 votes for the public option," Woolsey said. She added that Obama "thanked" the assembled, telling them their advocacy made the bill much stronger and that this wouldn't be the end for health reform.

Grijalva and Woolsey, the two co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have lately withheld their support for the bill but sounded sold on it by last night.

Sargent reported that Woolsey said "she's now a definite Yes on the Senate bill" even if it excludes the public option. The congresswoman last week told Raw Story that if the public option fails she would introduce it in a separate package soon after its enactment.

"It's pretty compelling," said Grijalva, who on Wednesday told Salon he's leaning toward voting no, of Obama's remarks.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Obama told them in the meeting that "31 million people will have health insurance as a result of this bill."

"I think [this] resonates for a lot of people," Lee added.

A progressive health reform priority, the public option was approved by the House in its November bill. But liberals grew uneasy about the Senate bill in December, mainly because of the provision's removal.

The meeting came one day after Obama urged Congress in a televised speech to "get it done," even if it means using reconciliation to amend the Senate bill before calling for one final motion.

According to Huffington Post's  senior congressional correspondent Ryan Grim, other attendees included CPC Health Care Task Force co-chair Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA), Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus chair Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA), and Reps. Danny Davis (D-IL), Dennis Kucinich (OH), Madeleine Bordallo (Guam) and Donna Christensen (Virgin Islands).