I guess the Obama administration has decided that rather than fight the moniker “Obamacare” they might as well embrace it. A smart move, I think. Calling it the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is long and clumsy, and its acronym PPACA is really no better.
And anyway, they could do worse than to be associated with caring. Is the opposition volunteering to oppose caring? Well, let them. It doesn't sound like a winning position to me. It also doesn't sound very compassionate. There's been nary a whisper by or about George Bush this primary season, as no Right-thinking Republican wants to be associated with him and his policies, so I guess they're running against compassion as well.
Speaking of compassion, the Supreme Court will today consider an unusual death penalty case. No, not for rape or murder. Those on trial today are just American citizens whose only crime is to be covered by Obamacare. Yet they may be penalized by losing critical coverage if the Supreme Court decides that's how we as a nation spell justice these days. And some of those penalized by any such Court action will die.
And why? Well, I hear it's about freedom. Somehow our freedom is enhanced if we're free to be at the mercy of individual insurance plans. Hey, if this works out, I've got an idea: Rather than debate whether lethal injection is humane or not, why don't we give convicted murderers a choice of how they'll be killed. Then when they complain they don't like it, we'll say: Hey, you chose it freely.
Funny (in a kind of sad way) that the GOP spends so much of its energy arguing that we have to “spare the lives of the unborn,” often babbling about how it's necessary compassion due to their religion, or how we might lose the next Einstein. But apparently they're pretty comfortable with little Albert, once born, losing his care. The government shouldn't be in the business of raising or educating Einsteins, just seeing they get born. I guess that's why they don't want birth control. If some of these up-and-coming Einsteins are going to plan poorly and die early, before they can crank out some useful formulas for us, we're going to need spares.
Oddly, it's the “mandate” that's being challenged. What's weird and ironic about that is that what many wanted was single-payer, universal care paid for out of taxes. There would be no Constitutional challenge to that. Taxes have clear Constitutional basis. What the Republicans don't like is the mandate, but the mandate is part of a market solution proposed by Republicans as an alternative to the Constitutionally-sound universal health care approach.
Not that the GOP would be happy with it even if it were seen as Constitutional. How offensive that people can be forced to buy something they don't want. We can be taxed, legally and Constitutionally, even to the point of nearly bankrupting the nation, to support wars we don't want. They're OK with that. But Heaven forbid we should be asked to pay for something that might save lives. That would be immoral.
And so, for reasons that seem utterly procedural, lives hang in the balance in this real life episode of Chopped. Whose insurance policies will be spared, and whose must be chopped? I guess we'll have to stay tuned.
But don't worry, if it turns out things go badly and some of us lose our health care, the others won't be forced to watch the aftermath on some sort of societal jumbotron ultrasound. Such in-your-face information is only good for individual abortions. If we end up instead casting out a large swath of society with the Constitutional bathwater, forcing the Court or the People to see the consequences of that action is not really something we'd ever want to mandate.
If you got value from this post, please "rate" it.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
RomanticPoetess
Sandra Stephens
old new lefty
marytkelly
oaxacangringa
CoyoteOldStyle
Salon.com
Comments
I cannot for the life of me understand the insanity of opposition to health care. Since my 'pre-existing condition' is Lupus, I had expected 'Obamacare' would be my ticket to finally getting some kind of coverage for health care.
Yet the naysayers and attack dogs are in full riot gear, braying away at how bad this new health care is going to be.
Amazing.
All out of words fit to print here.
Same goes for the "family values" conservatives who insist it is their responsibility to demand that every child be brought into this world, but that they have no responsibility for a child once born.
Jesus wept.
Tom, maybe if we did require the GOP to view the consequences of their action there'd be some hope. But this is America. And that would infringe their freedom to ignore.
Unfortunately, we've reverted back to the 1870s, with the 1880s not far behind -- massive popular and labor unrest, a corrupt and dysfunctional government, and no Indians to kill with new territory for us to use as a safety valve. Thus, the Kons have a major rear guard action problem on their hands. How do they preserve their power, which is more important to them than anything? And so we see the dilemma of the Supremes. Do they support their corporate masters, or the Federalist Society that is financially supporting the Justice Thomas family?
I'm very much looking forward to seeing what you have to say about my latest posting.
It's mostly about whether the government is in the business of mandating care of any kind. Most people would say not. Their care is a family-centric, church-centric kind and if you have neither, too bad.
Nikki, I agree. I also think it's about creating false senses of choice so that when it comes time to deny people stuff, we can blame any ill effects (pardon bad pun) on their choice rather than society's callousness. Lost in all of this that experience is the fact that in other countries with socialized health care, the costs are lower and the health outcomes better. The assumption is that complete care would be worse, but if it means more preventative care and better planning of costs/resources, that's not obviously true at all.
what most people don't realize is that if they like the feature that requires companies to cover pre-existing conditions, they they must also accept the mandate.
Here's why: the pre-existing condition coverage is called guaranteed issue. It's not the way a private health insurance company wants to operate to enhance it's bottom line. The private insurers have an incentive to deny coverage to people statistically likely to be expensive to cover.
Most people recognize that this incentive of private insurers is contrary to basic human decency and undermines the entire reason we want to have health insurance.
The answer to this fundamental failure of free-markets to provide fair health care to everyone is to require guaranteed issue. The problem with guaranteed issue alone is that it now gives health insurance customers the incentive to wait until they get sick before they buy insurance. This has an even worse impact on the bottom line of the insurers.
If we must have private for-profit companies providing insurance (and we seem to be stuck with that for now) then in order to avoid the pre-existing condition problem we MUST have BOTH the guaranteed issue and the individual mandate. The one doesn't work economically without the other.
Which just goes to show, the Republicans wanted to derail this whole thing, right from the start. Obama included their ideas, and now they are screwing him! Goes to show, that Liberals should never trust Conservatives. We are apples and oranges! There is no compromise.
What Obama needs to do, is get a better PR crew. Evidently the general public believes all the lies, in conservative ads. They obviously have a better advertising crew!
I think I'm agreeing with you.
rated with love
I don't know what will happen in the Supreme Court. What I do know is that the problem of unaffordable health insurance, and by extension unaffordable health care, is already a crisis and threatens to become a disaster. Addressing matters of such great importance is why we have a federal government and a congress in the first place. It is odd to me to think that the federal government would have no power to address such issues, and that instead we would have to rely on the "invisible hand" of the market to fix the problem, when the invisible hand is what has brought us to this place.
The health insurance issue is becoming the tail that wags the dog, affecting countless individual decisions and threatening the whole country. There are many thousands of people who would like to start their own businesses, but can't because they can't afford individual policies. Many thousands of other people would like to retire but can't, again for the same reason. The products of U.S. companies are becoming less competitive as the companies have to bear the cost of employee health insurance. Other thousands of people go bankrupt due to medical bills. Yet other thousands of people die from lack of affordable medical care. Other thousands of people are sucked dry by the high cost of buying individual or high-risk health insurance. The health insurance issue is like a python, wrapped around the entire country and increasingly squeezing the life out of it.
What you are all missing is that universal health care, regardless of the method through which it is delivered, would erode Corporate America's control over the working class since, if health care is universal, it no longer shackles employees to their work places.
Right now, employer managed health care is keeping millions of people in jobs they don't want, at salaries lower than they deserve, because - for one reason or another - they cannot afford to lose their health care coverage.
I have a long memory. I remember how my father got our health care through the Teamsters rather than through the companies he worked for, none of whom had health care plans....but the unions have been strangely silent about their historical role and how that role could be updated to help the present generation of workers....if there was a labor union left, which I doubt.
Sage, I agree. See my comments to Sheila above, which speak partly to your point as well. But you're right, too, on another point. I'll say it the way I think of it, though I think you touched on it using different words: I think The Market is at least two markets (maybe more). There is a Product Market, in which companies compete to sell their wares to consumers. There is much public debate on how to keep this a healthy market in terms of price and diversity. There is another market, which I call the Employment Market. This market is largely captured, including by Health Care. People stay at companies for reasons other than that they like the work they do, which means people who could do great things for an industry do not move to the companies best suited to them for product production because they are busy optimizing their health care instead of their work output. This is bad. It's spun as a greed issue (labor wanting more and more stuff) or at best an issue of benefits (which still I think makes it intentionally sound like gift-giving), but really it ought not be in the gift of an employer to offer health. What should get you to a company is their promise to use you efficiently and pay you well. If they don't offer that, you should be moving to another company that will. But these things act like superglue, holding you to companies for no good reason, and completely messing up the Employment Market while having a cascade effect of reducing the efficinecy of the Product Market. Approximately. I will write a blog about this sometime, trying to say it more clearly.
It doesn't even occur to some that there are two kinds of politicians—those trying to use broad powers to benefit some at the expense of others, and those just trying to create a fair system, even if it means some give and take. There really are both politicians of the second kind and citizens who elect them. Just sometimes the first category disguises itself as the second, or the first try to convince supporters that there are none of the second, so it's OK to be selfish. Sigh.
If the 10% or so of Americans directly affected by this bad legislation end up losing what little help it provides, they can split the blame between both sides of the aisle. And ultimately, we don't even know that having it struck down by the court would be the worse in the long-term. That's assuming (foolishly, perhaps) that the Dems might actually remember who they are SUPPOSED to represent and make some firm stands on principle instead of on badly judged political gamesmanship.
That was when I first met you.
I find it hard to lay down hope ... but ... as all of this goes on and on ... I hardly have the strength ... to pick it up. I have no logic left. I have only emotion ... and beginning edges of total fear ...
And so I try to find ... moments of calm ... and think about moments I ... we ... may all face ... when there is nothing to be done ... and no care to be had ... only waiting ... and hoping ... that when it comes ... death will ... come ... peacefully.
Thank you for watching and sharing your thoughts, Kent.