Tag: Health Insurance Reform

The Zombie Healthcare Bill Has Passed The House

The House has passed the latest version of a trillion dollar tax cut disguised as a healthcare bill. The text of the bill only became public last night and has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Why the rush? Besides the fact that Little Donnie needs a win, the House is going …

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The Republican Healthcare Scam Keeps Getting Worse

The struggle by the House Republicans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been a scam to cut one trillion dollars from health care programs. The GOP bill will not lower premiums or deductibles or improve access to affordable healthcare. It will also cut Medicaid by $800 billion. By effectively ending the …

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Trumpcare or Ryancare: Pick Your Poison

The Republicans have released their plan to supposedly provide Americans with affordable health care. The bottom line: it won’t. Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money cuts to the chase with this summery of the proposal: The proposal defunds Planned Parenthood. No federal funding can be made, either directly or indirectly, by Medicaid to a …

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about that holy war against health insurers

PhotobucketDoing some reading before bed last night and opened nyceve’s diary over at dKos titled In 2011, these people will launch holy war against the health insurance Industry.

I get here, where she writes:


As insurers continue to raise premiums and cut benefits, Health and Human Services is relegated to pleading, cajoling and threatening, but in the end, can do little to control them. This is an uncontrollable industry.

… and my head explodes: they can’t they be controlled???? Why is that?????? Isn’t that what we should focus on???

nyceve… she’s great, heroic even… out there fighting to make things better. But there’s this one little thing: we are engulfed in lawlessness and lack of accountability. Nobody… nobody… is enforcing the law or holding the powerful accountable.

What does this have to do with health insurance?

Just . . . everything.

cross-posted at writing in the rAw and at dKos

GOP Pledges to Replace Health Care Reform with more Health Care Reform

Link

GOP’s ‘Pledge To America’ Replaces Affordable Care Act With Provisions From Affordable Care Act

By Igor Volsky, ThinkProgress.org — Sept 22, 2010

Ironically, today Republicans are also unveiling a new “Pledge To America,” an agenda that promises to “repeal” all of these benefits — as well as the entire health care law — and replace it with “reforms that lower costs for families and small businesses, increase access to affordable, high-quality care and strengthen the doctor-patient relationship.”

The document provides almost no specifics about what the [GOP] party would do to control health care spending, improve quality, or pay for its reforms.

And at least 7 of the GOP’s ideas on health care are already included in the health care law:

Insurance Across State Lines

High-Risk Insurance Pools

Pre-Existing Conditions

Lifetime and Annual Caps

Recissions

State Innovation

Conscience Protections

WTF!  What Kind of Pledge is that?

If Republicans got their Way …

If Republicans got their Way … there would be no more Medicare.

If Republicans got their Way … you couldn’t Retire until 70.

If Republicans got their Way … they’d privatize Social Security.

If Republicans got their Way … there would be no more Corporate income tax.

If Republicans got their Way … they’d eliminate taxes on Capital gains.

If Republicans got their Way … they’d cut in half the taxes of the richest 1 percent.

If Republicans got their Way … the Bush Tax Cut for the Rich would never end.

Factlets from The Republican’s Roadmap for America’s Future:

The Ryan Budget’s Radical Priorities

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

By Paul N. Van de Water — July 7, 2010

If Republicans got their Way … Christine O’Donnell would be their new Class Treasurer!

Some thoughts on “lesser of two evils” voting

Of all of the voting strategies commonly circulating in public discourse, the “lesser of two evils” voting strategy is best adapted to the two-party, majoritarian democracy which prevails in almost all electoral contests in the United States.  This is a very brief look at the rationality of the “lesser of two evils” voting rationale.

(crossposted at Orange and at Firedoglake)

Political economy in free-fall

In a previous diary I discussed the notion of progressive ideology, which suggests that basic tenets of “progressivism” prevent it from articulating any sort of meaningful political resistance to neoliberalism, which in this era is the one ideology which has triumphed over all of the others, and thus the one ideology which matters.

In today’s discussion I will put forth the political meaning of this ideological formation: political economy in free-fall.

(Crossposted at Orange)

Moyers w Angell & Potter on Health Reform

Oh I missed it again last night, but I did catch part of it. Thank goodness it’s all online. The full transcipt is here. And the link to the video is here.

Photobucket

(for Nada Lemming)

MARCIA ANGELL: And what do you think they’re going to do? If you were an insurance company, you would say, “Well, thank you, Santa Claus. I’ve got all of these captive customers. Young ones are healthy. They probably won’t even use the insurance. There’s nothing to stop me from raising my premiums. I have all of these subsidies coming in.” Don’t you think that the prices would go up? I think it would be remarkable if they didn’t.

Rescuing the Constitutional Framework from the Senate

Rachel Maddow tells us that “filibuster” is a boring word, even if it originally meant private adventurers going off risking life and limb trying to make themselves President of some Central American country.

So I will use the other common English language phrase for it, “Talking a Bill to Death”.

The ability to Talk a Bill to Death was introduced by mistake when Aaron Burr in 1806 argued for removal of the motion to “move the previous question”. This is a motion that can be used to postpone debate, when a measure does not yet have a majority, and can of course also be used to bring a measure to a vote, if it has a majority. Aaron Burr appealed to the fact that it had only passed once in the previous four years – but then again, the Senate did not at that time have a filibuster tradition.

So, restoration of the original rule is one fix to the filibuster problem. However, that is not what I am focusing on today. Rather, I am focusing on the Unconstitutionality of filibustering one type of bill, which was the real flaw in Aaron Burr’s Blunder.

A question for the “realists”:

Why not aim for disaster?

It’s the most “realistic” possibility, after all.

Or, more specifically:

How minimal are your aspirations?

How static is your picture of the future?

(Crossposted at Orange)

Earth to Dems: It’s the Mandate Stupid.

Beltway smartguy Nate Silver has posted a chart of results from the latest Kaiser Health tracking poll (PDF).

Nate uses this chart to argue that the lack of support for HCR is due to people not knowing how great it really is.

What we see is that most individual components of the bill are popular — in some cases, quite popular. But awareness lags behind. Only 61 percent are aware that the bill bans denials of coverage for pre-existing conditions. Only 42 percent know that it bans lifetime coverage limits. Only 58 percent are aware that it set up insurance exchanges. Just 44 percent know that it closes the Medicare donut hole — and so on and so forth.

Nate says that the Dems should pass HCR, teabaggers be damned, because once passed, the program’s benefits will become apparent.

Obviously, it’s not as though this is going to do much to help the bill’s popularity in the immediate term. But in the long term, once people actually see the go bill into effect, their perceptions are liable to improve, in ways that might help the Democratic party. Although there are a few things like the individual mandate which the public obviously does not like, most of the other components of the bill are things they are liable to be quite pleased with and to find quite reasonable.

Now, everybody knows Nate’s a smart guy, so one would think he would apply his vaunted statistical sense to make the obvious case that HCR stands a far better chance of being a popular program if the individual mandate is jettisoned.

After all, under Nate’s logic, if the individual mandate is already at minus 40% net favorability  (62% against: 22% for), just wait until the bill passes and everyone not only knows about it, but is forced, under pain of IRS audit, to buy overpriced, underperforming, for-profit health insurance.

But Nate won’t go that far.  Instead of advising Dems to fold on the mandate, he’d rather them take a blind gamble that the popularity of the benefits of HCR will outweigh the unpopularity of the individual mandate – and thus essentially repeat a strategy that has already contributed to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat to a teabagger.

Truly, the establishment Dems’ studied denial of the individual mandate’s political liabilities, even by its most respected analysts, borders on the absurd.



(x-post @ Big O)

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