Saw the segment myself. Overreaching seemed the issue. How much President Obama and Congress can do with healthcare reform for the long term benefit of the American people and the republic. But the American people do not have access to the policymakers as do the corporate interests!! The 20% not realized will give to the insurance industry the servitude of Americans to corporate scum. Mark my word corporations want it all their way in the lust for profit and people are just means a to that end!!

well, thank goodness that single payer was taken off the table last summer. pre-capitulation early makes total capitulation later soooo much easier.

Great Blog. I reacted the same way when I saw McMahon’s little performance yesterday. I call this “giving the game away;” and I blogged about the historical pattern of this sort of Democratic Party behavior going back to the Carter Administration, here:

http://kmci.org/alllifeisprobl…..game-away/

The news you share today is so disgusting to the pitiable folks like me who have vague hopes and understandings of all the mess that is the sausage making of legislation that fills me with disgust. I’m so tired of the Dem’s lack of intelligence, backbone, and failure to give a damn about ordinary folks who continue to be screwed by all the corporate dictators that pass for “reform” whether it has to do with transparency on any issue, the financial system, health care, environment. That article about DHS refusing to publish the list of hundreds of coal ash pollution because the truth is too scary to handle and gee whiz, maybe if folks knew, maybe someone might have to do something to rectify the crisis. I hate continually coming back to a place of having only disgust for any persons/institutions who I long to have “righteous” (for lack of a better word) responses to the total messes we are all in because of greed and stupidity.

Nevertheless, blessings to all at FDL

This just frustrates me to no end! The whole purpose of health care reform is to reform health care, not to keep some totalitarians happy. Whether or not the Republicans approve is completely irrelevant. What is important is to get a functioning health care delivery system. Why is this so difficult for people to understand???

One thing is for sure, something has to be done. The present system can’t be sustained.

I run a small firm. Yesterday I received my firm’s health insurance quote for the coming year. The premium increase was 33.47%! Family coverage for each of my employees will be considerably more per hour than the minimum wage.

See, you know how the dim mind works. When confronted by the tough rethugs, the dims know their place. The elections of ‘06 and ‘08 don’t mean anything. All they worry about is placating the rethugs.

Fuck! Welcome to the third world country that is completely owned and operated by Corporations. Nothing will happen without their seal of approval. I have no idea why I continue to believe something will change. And who gives a fuck what the repulitards think, they are the ones who led this country into the shithole it now sits in.

wow. and i was worried that my individual policy (which i just signed up for another year) is up about 20% from last june. i guess i should be thankful?

yikes.

I liked it better in the “old” days when politicians took a little graft from individuals and not corporations.
That way they owed fairly small favors to a lot of people. Now the corps just outright buy them and they
aren’t even ashamed of it. A pox on all of them.

i think the Rs are the excuse, not the reason for pro-corporate policy.

just my WAG, but it looks to me as if the Ds in deecee are trying to make policy for their corporate backers while marketing it as something it’s not to the voter. insurance boondoggle sold as progressive reform. the Ds are in a tough spot now, trying to please both the source of the their $$$ and the source of their votes when the interests of the two groups are so very mal-aligned, at least in the short run.

edit to add: something similar also seems to be happening with the energy legislation.

And what’s left? Well, we’d have a mandate to force everyone who could afford it to purchase insurance from private insurers, and we’d have government subsidies to help those who couldn’t afford to purchase insurance from private insurers. Consumers would not have a public option, so they’d have no meaningful choice, because the private industry is too highly concentrated to provide meaningful competition.

This is what you do if you really want to piss hordes of people off, big time.

Book Salon up at the Mothership with Dave Cullen’s Columbine hosted by Chad Lassiter

Um, the public health insurance option is what 80% of Americans want. It’s not part of the 20% that can readily be left off the table owing to the left and right’s failure happily to agree on what’s “good for America”. Apart from its intrinsic good, imagine the electoral advantage the Democrats would earn by giving 80% of Americans the thing they want most of all. That’s why the right doesn’t want it, not because we can’t afford it.

Among the reasons the right hates unions is that they are standard setters for workers’ rights and benefits. Undercutting them undercuts the legitimacy and availability of those rights and benefits. In today’s perverse American economy, health care is a sometime job related benefited, hard to get otherwise.

Union workforces are a major reason vehemently non-union Wal-Mart has medical benefits – even though as a retailer, few of its employees stick around long enough to use them. It would rather incur the low marginal cost of modest health care insurance than the higher longer term cost of a continuing, effective union. Not because it would burden Wal-Mart with costs too excessive to pay and remain profitable, but because it wants to be extremely highly profitable. You can’t spread the wealth among too many people if you run a general store and still want to be one of the wealthiest families on earth.

The force ‘em into the private sector insurance market does nothing to deal with cost of health care, the availability of health care, or the availability of health insurance. It still means the sick are left uninsured for what ails them most, even if the government is willing to subsidize the cost of the insurance itself.

It is throwing billions more tax dollars into fat insurance company pockets and – as he did with the banksters – demanding and receiving nothing in return except paltry concessions. Doing so would reform nothing, except make it more lucrative to sell insurance, insuring that the next reformer who comes along will have an even harder time.

Improving access to health care is the important first step, access that now runs into the bottleneck of insurance company profits and an insurance delivery system that overwhelming depends on employers. It will lower the net overall economic cost of sickness to America. Improving incentives to improve health, rather than to improve incomes of doctors, drugs companies and hospitals should be next steps.

You guys must not have heard Matthews (almost sotto voce) say that McMahon has clients in the Medical Industrial Complex.

Typical of Matthews, he rarely holds someone’s feet to the fire, and often the wrong people and the wrong issues. Or never shuts up and asks the longest questions on cable, which is very hard to do.

Hardball has become slow pitch for Republicans. Matthews is usually out of touch. He and his show are terminal.

And that, my friends, is exactly how Democrats lose on policy, betray and dismay their supporters and lose the American peoples’ trust.

and that, firepups and (D) captured faithful, is exactly what they do whenever they get a generational opportunity to fix the dysfunctional health care system.

Hillary-care was a similar attempt to square the circle and keep the insurance industry happy, and Bill Moyers even recalls a similar botched undertaking in the administration of Jimmy Carter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi1acHg3mhw

so, there seems to be a little pattern there, hmmmm?

oh well, just keep voting for Democrats, no matter what, and maybe they won’t pull that football away from you every time, Charlie Brown.

The key here is that it appears that Obama is going to cave on the most important reform points in an attempt to get GOoPers to sign on.

He apparently hasn’t learned from the bailout and the budget that the GOoPers won’t vote for anything he’s pushing. It’s not happening.

As Theodore Roosevelt said (in a very slightly different context), “You can no more negotiate with those people than you can nail currant jelly to the wall.”

You are absolutely right on.These were the clowns, McMahon & others who were & are still getting on TV & destabilizing the progressive agendas.Let’s face it,anything Corporate owned will put these jokers on the tube as representing Dem agendas.We must not let this happen.I wish I were sophisticated enough to organize folks to hold a rally or event for health care reform.Thank you Scarecrow for watching Hardball,I couldn’t support Matthews’ show with my viewership.Matthews is pure jackassery.

Sooner or later people will have no option but to go without health care insurance. I say make it sooner. Let’s all drop out of the system, but for those who are already ill or in treatment. Let’s see how long the private health insurers and hospitals and physicians can stay in business then. And when it all falls apart a la the banking system, there won’t be enough taxpayer money to bail out the private health insurers who, if they were bailed out, would return to the same health care model that is unsustainable.

Fuck them all.

I’m so glad that Steve McMahon doesn’t have any trouble paying for his health care. I do have, so I say screw him.

It sounds like they’re playing the same old games (the IBM discount, where you jack prices up hundreds of percentage and then offer a 20% “deep” discount to the rubes). They must figure there will be cost-cutting reforms and they want to get the jacked-up prices into effect now. Then they can comfortably reduce them later (with a nice p.r. campaign) and not lose a dime over their present economics.

In other words…idiots.