Friday, August 14, 2009

What "Health Care/Insurance" Reform WILL Include


This is what it's gonna look like (from Michael Brenner, a "senior Fellow" at the "Trans-Atlantic Institute, on a Huff-Post today):
A quick review of what has survived an unbecoming process of deal making exposes the dismaying reality. For starters: no public plan; no wealth tax to help pay for cost incurred; no right for the government to bargain with Pharma on drug prices; no meaningful enforcement mechanisms to ensure that vested, for profit interests comply with whatever undertakings, explicit or tacit, that they have made. What do we gain? Not much. A commitment that everyone must be insured, yet with a much weakened employer mandate to accomplish it. An elimination of the most egregious practices of insurance companies re. e.g. pre-existing conditions, arbitrary termination of coverage. Some small subsidies for the working poor. These last are minimal. Someone earning $20,000 a year will get no subsidy unless insurance premiums reach $2,400 -- according to the Finance Committee bill. Good luck all you folks who work for $10 an hour -- you'll need it.
Obama tubed the pooch--though why anyone would ever have expected him to do otherwise is completely and totally B E Y O N D me--and this 'historic opportunity' to actually fix the problem of health care for average Americans is rapidly lapsing--as anyone with a brain and qa sense of history could and should have predicted.

The big mistake was always thinking that Obama (or anyone, really) would buck the Owners. They like things as they are: Status Quo. Change is bad--that is, expensive.

2 comments:

Mark said...

Are you surprised that anything coming from Washington called "reform" is anything but? We need to have a free market in health care and in everything else.

Woody (Tokin Librul/Rogue Scholar/ Helluvafella!) said...

All the ills of the current situation can be traced back to the "free market," you blithering, drooling, feculent fool...Did yo mama have any baby dat live?