Since Bobby Jindal has about as much hope of being POTUS as I have of being Pope, I hope the insurance industry gave him a good tip for the pack of lies Jindal published in the Wall Street Journal today. He writes,
The left in Washington has concluded that honesty will not yield its desired policy result. So it resorts to a fundamentally dishonest approach to reform. I say this because the marketing of the Democrats’ plans as presented in the House of Representatives and endorsed heartily by President Obama rests on three falsehoods.
However, what Jindal doesn’t tell you is that he gets his “facts” about the Democrats’ plans from UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company. Yep, the Lewin Group, which Jindal cites as the “study” claiming the public option will drive private insurance out of business, is a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, a fact Jindal does not disclose. The study was commissioned by the Heritage Foundation.
Jindal is especially pathetic, considering that the Lewin Group was outed by McClatchy as an insurance company front a couple of days ago.
Congressman Pete Stark of California fired back (page very slow to load):
“The Lewin Group is paid to produce estimates favorable to each client’s position. As a wholly owned subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, the country’s largest private insurance company, the Lewin Group’s so-called ‘analysis’ is suspect. The Heritage Foundation got the study they paid for, but it is pure fiction.
“The Congressional Budget Office found that H.R. 3200 increases employer-sponsored insurance and less than 10 million people would choose the public health insurance option by 2019.”
Here’s a point-by-point comparison of the Lewin Group claims versus the CBO estimates.
The rest of Jindal’s carnival pitch is the usual right-wing blah blah blah — giving the poor “help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit,” for example. His solution for motivating insurance companies to provide more coverage for people with pre-existing conditions is “Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick.” Segregating people into high-risk pools is going to help them get affordable insurance, how?
Basically, Jindal’s op ed is all word salad; lots of the right buzzwords, but nothing that you could string together to make a coherent policy.
Update: see “Health Insurance Industry Spins Data in Fight Against Public Plan.”
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P.S. Jindal is a tool. And not a useful one.
"Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection"
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Yeah, LOL, it worked really well for Wall Street, 'eh?
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The people I am crying for, are the poor white folks who have the least health coverage, while they eke out a living in the Trailer Park and Country areas, they get poisoned by Rush Limbaugh and FOXNEWS everyday.
They are chained , like an abused child to a cage, they cannot get away from the GOP and try to catch up with the rest of America.
All over Texas for example, they are languishing , with other ethnic groups in "angry" poverty and will never get to hear the President's message, tonight, on Health Care Reform, as it affects them directly,because FOXNEWS will be showing 'Can you Dance'?
There should be a law against keeping people stagnated in backwardness.
Look, the British created a national health service right after their capital and a lot of other cities had been firebombed by the Nazis, and THAT was immediately following the Great Depression, and as much as they complain about taxes and the NHS, virtually NONE of them want to abolish it in favor of a U.S.-style private system.
Pretty much every decent country in the world has national health care, and all the systems are slightly different. Why the hell can't we look at the different ones and steal the best ideas from ALL of them?
(Yeah, my taxes might go up a bit under a national system...but then, I wouldn't have that $96.30 monthly bill from United in order to say that I have insurance. And I speak from experience when I say that dealing with United's customer service dept. is much much worse than dealing with the IRS, the Social Security office, or the DMV.)
Obama needs to just say damn the torpedoes on this one.
I'm the biggest misty-eyed-watching-the-inauguration Obama supporter on the block, but I have to admit that my adoration is waning a bit. I want him to be bold, to grab the reins, to wrestle this one to the ground and damn the stupid insurance companies. Are insurance companies GOOD for people? Obama seems wishy-washy and I want him to NOT be. Dammit, give us a plan and fight for it! I'll fight with him all the way. But I haven't seen a clear plan from him that he's behind. I know he's trying hard not to do a Hillary Clinton style mistake (here's my plan and you will like it), but I want to see his plan.
The AME kills people by the dozen, if not thousands, every year, and operates for profit, which is why all those who "run for the cure" are wasting their time. The AME is not about to find a cure for its most profitable disease, not to mention there are cures for cancer, anyway, outside the AME. Too bad Americans are so brainwashed and stupid and listen only to the AME. On the other hand, those who believe the AME will save or cure them need to check the facts. The AME has a stranglehold on health care, yet the USA is 16th in the world in terms of infant mortality.....just for starters!
Soap Box Amy
July 22, 2009 05:46 PMWELL DONE!
Now, there is a novel idea.
That's garbage, but then I'm a lot closer to 60 than 6.
FYI: All the other nations with national health care are not putting the old folks on ice floes to die. They get the same quality care as everyone else.
The important point about rationing is that HEALTH CARE IS RATIONED NOW IN THE US. It is rationed by ability to pay. If you can pay for it, you get it. If not, you don't, even if it means your life. Anyone who opposes a national health care plan because it will require rationing has got to be brain dead.
It's not about "my" claim, it's the fact that several dozen nations have workable, government-paid national health care programs, almost all of which are getting better health results for less money per capita than we are, and none are rationing health care by age.
Let me repeat, none are rationing health care by age.
There are all kinds of wasteful things our system is doing that throws a lot of money after marginal results, and these present multiple opportunities for economy, but none of these wasteful things is purely age-related.
However, talk like yours is just the sort of thing the Right likes to hear, so that they can use it to scare people away from reform. Troll much?
Look, people of all ages are dying in America for lack of health care. People are losing their homes because of medical bills. People are stuck in dead-end jobs they can't leave because they're afraid of losing their insurance. If we fail one more time to reform health care, how many more will die prematurely? How many more lives will be screwed up? How many more years will we have to wait before we get another chance?
The last thing we need right now is some idiot talking about rationing health care to let old people die to save younger people. Britain doesn't do that. No industrialized democracy is doing that. Please, try to be responsible and STFU. Thanks much.
Isn't that the same silliness that fueled the sub-prime mortgage industry?
Not to jump into the midst of other people's debate, but you are wrong about certain aspects of your argument with neilpaul. You're making absolute statements such as, "Let me repeat, none are [sic] rationing health care by age." But you don't have first-hand knowledge of this; you're just making a blanket statement based on the same sort of propaganda (in this case, the leftward-deviated kind) upon which Jindal relies.
You see, I'm a neurosurgery resident. As part of my training, we spend several months working in an EU member nation with a nationalized health service. While there, we learn a particular type of triage that very much has to do with age. You see, age is an instant disqualifying factor for many neurosurgical procedures: a craniotomy for an acute subdural hematoma, for instance, will not be performed on anyone over the age of 75 (I have personally been involved on such cases for patients as old as 94 with good outcomes, and the literature reports cases on patients as old as 102 with impressive results: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17320648?ordinalpos=10&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum). This is blatant age-based rationing, but there are sound economic arguments to support it. The key is that rationing of some kind must occur if we are to reduce healthcare costs, and that the elderly will disproportionately lose out on care if rationing occurs according to a rational, economically-based method.
I realize that you're heavily invested in healthcare reform, and that you've perhaps become somewhat blind to the negative aspects that it must, by necessity, entail. We can't have it all--there will have to be sacrifices. This entire dialogue, though, will proceed much more smoothly if our vehement claims are made on the basis of actual knowledge, and if our more reserved claims pertain to those issues about which we have less first-hand knowledge.
And let me say it is immature and irresponsible of you to insist on using the inflammatory word "rationing." It's cheap and easy to say that other people have to sacrifice for the greater good, and you can't even bother to practice responsible speech.
noun
a fixed amount of a commodity officially allowed to each person during a time of shortage, as in wartime : 1918 saw the bread ration reduced on two occasions.
• (usu. rations) an amount of food supplied on a regular basis, esp. to members of the armed forces during a war.
• ( rations) food; provisions : their emergency rations ran out.
• figurative a fixed amount of a particular thing : their daily ration of fresh air.
verb [ trans. ] (usu. be rationed)
allow each person to have only a fixed amount of (a particular commodity) : shoes were rationed from 1943.
• ( ration someone to) allow someone to have only (a fixed amount of a certain commodity) : they were requested to ration themselves to one glass of wine each.
Sounds like an appropriate term to me. But we can look to a thesaurus for alternatives:
ration
noun
1 allowance, allocation, quota, quantum, share, portion, helping; amount, quantity, measure, proportion, percentage.
I suppose we can give each person his/her healthcare allowance. Allocate them each a quota, or provide them their portion. One helping for you, and one for you. Measure for measure, the proportion of healthcare afforded to some of us will decrease--by an as yet unspecified percentage--should the current incarnation of the healthcare reform bill pass. For the disadvantaged, the share will increase, as you have described; but the insurance-carrying consumer will by necessity wind up with fewer healthcare options in a constricted healthcare environment.
http://www.mahablog.com/2009/07/22/lets-talk-about-rationing/
http://www.mahablog.com/2009/07/22/lets-talk-about-rationing/
P.S. Gawande's well-written but far-from-comprehensive article in the New Yorker should not be used to impugn the entire medical profession, as you have *irresponsibly* done.
"98% of physicians in this country who make medical decisions on the basis of what they think will help their patients, rather than because of what will make the most money?"
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You got a link for that stat, doc?
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Nope, no link--that was an estimate. Much better to assume that all physicians are money-grubbing ingrates than to assume the vast majority of them are trying to do their best, huh? Might as well vilify one of the few segments of the population that actually cares for people. Exitus acta probat -- whatever gets your reform bill passed.
Please check my open letter to President Obama on health care,
http://open.salon.com/blog/henryk_a_kowalczyk/2009/07/22/where_is_the_concept
http://www.maacenter.org
I'll call that irony, b/c hypocrisy is too inflammatory.
"Might as well vilify one of the few segments of the population that actually cares for people. Exitus acta probat -- whatever gets your reform bill passed."
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Doc, you need to self-Rx something for your nerves, and get over your little Martyr thingy. The public approbation is overwhelmingly, deservedly directed at the multimillionaire Big Insurance and Big Pharma execs. Not physicians. C'mon, get serious, if you care to be taken seriously.
I'd find all this screaming about the "cost" of this and than propopsed by Obama more convincing if they hadn't cheerfully wasted billions on an unneeded war, first. Health care reform will cost less than the Iraq war and might actually BENEFIT people.
Glory be, we can't have that! People benefitting from socialized medicine? The horror, the horror!
Insurance companies make money by selling insurance policies that cover people when bad things happen. By definition, the insurance company makes the most profit on a person who spends a lifetime paying premiums, and never makes a successful claim. As such, and for-profit insurer has a vested interest in denying as many claims as possible, regardless of the health requirements of that claim.
For-profit insurance companies don't make money on people who make successful claims against their policies. They make money on people who pay premiums, but never collect benefits. That's why a for-profit model is fundamentally flawed when discussing health insurance ... in a for-profit model, the insurer has no incentive to pay out on ANY claim, and they have every incentive to deny as many claims as they possibly can. That's never going to produce good health care.
Many, if not most, health insurance companies ration health care, too. Many health insurance schemes require that you get approval before an outpatient procedure -- that's so they have a chance of denying something they don't think you need.
Very few people have health insurance that will pay for whatever health care they want, with no questions asked. Many people do have health insurance that pays for the health care they need.
Comparing an idealized or demonized versions of our or other countries' systems is not productive.
What about your claim re: "None are [sic] rationing care?" That didn't come from your ass? B/c it didn't come from reality.
And your conflict of interest--never mind that point.
@BobbyG
I'm not striving to be taken seriously. People can take me seriously or not. I'm just wasting time reading and commenting on blogs on an overwhelmingly liberal site.
Not only is Bobby’s star falling… it seems he is in the pocket of UnitedHealthCare and other insurance companies. Great post!
- rated
In this corrupt atmosphere of misinformation made dominant by the insurance companies supported by the Republican congressmen, in favor of maintaining the Status Quo, on American Health care. We have to establish the friendly gesture , before there is injury by friendly fire.
We in America has for some time developed a negative posture when arguing a positive view. A word or comma, or period placed in the wrong place that suggest a counter argument, is jumped on unhesitatingly.
The Republicans with their negative and exclusively pro corporate solutions to all our problems has turned us into nervous wrecks trying to SAVE AMERCA and ourselves from becoming slaves, minnions, industralised 'peasants' to the onslaught for a total CORPORATE AMERICA.
As much as I agree with many commenters that the President should unleash his prized "audacity" . It may come at a price that we can't afford to pay.
In 1868 the ancestors of these present anti progressive , anti people Congressmen unleashed a mind numbing terror in the Southern States when Frederick Douglas and the Post civil war progressives tried to inject new economic and social plans. They created the KKK and Jim Crowe as counter measures.
You want to see fire, let's say President Obama gets funky and declares , that if he can't get support for his reform, then he will propose a " NO FOR PROFIT HEALTH CARE PLAN". Barbara and Neil, what will you think will the reaction? The word "Socialism" , "fascism", and other inflammatory words like "coup" will surely be used by Republicans.
A question that worries me. Do many of the readers and commenters in this forum think that:
1. The base of the main supporters of the GOP are to poor to be friends with the GOP?
2. Do you think that many attacks and criticism of the President is racial prejudice laced aimed at undermining and attacking him racially.
3. If so, why is'nt more white progressives returning fire to expose this kind of attack.
Why are you leaving all the response to minorities ??
FYI -- I thought everyone knew this -- google ads pick up keywords from whatever is on a page and runs ads that match it. My posts on Mark Sanford were accompanied by divorce lawyer ads.
I don't know how much money I've made with the google ads, but last time I checked I was up to about $1.37.