Look, I'm totally sure that paying to bail out the insurance companies by cutting Medicare won't have any real effects on old people who are going to die soon anyhow. Especially given this great news:
Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.
Sens. Conrad, Gregg, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) publicly vowed to vote against raising the debt ceiling if a budget reform commission bill doesn't come along with it.
Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation.
“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” [shock doctrine!] said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.
Yay!
Of course, these clowns would rather die than mention single payer, which would save a highly "sustainable" $400 billion a year, let alone handing over $22 trillion to the banksters or ending the empire.
NOTE I'm betting that, since women live longer, the effects of the latest effort by the Dems to service their bankster clients by stealing our money will be borne disproportionately by, you guessed it, widows. Snidely Whiplash, here we come.
UPDATE Note that this is the second unaccountable commission on the table, the first being IMAC for Medicare. Looks to me like this is the real game, and not the health insurance bailout and its accompanying public option kabuki.
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from the department of
don't say you weren't warned
conrad, gregg, feinstein, domineci, voinovich, and wolf have been working on their various proposals for 'entitlement reform commissions' since at least 2007.
don't you feel vindicated?
I've been warning about this forever, and then some, as well.
Yet, people like Ian Welsh are convinced that this was all about screwing young people to give seniors more.
No, it's about screwing everyone.
Yes, it's about screwing everybody...
.. except for a few collaborators and overseers.
What I should have asked Ian at the time was how it would all net out. I can well believe that looking only at health care there's going to be an intergenerational transfer -- how not? The young are a lot less likely to get sick! But that's only one move in the game, which includes "entitlements" generally -- by which I mean entitlements for the banksters and the Pentagon. Not.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
ian is right
in a purely technical sense.
in an insurance market with community rating [everybody pays the same premium] and to some extent even with modified community rating [high-risk people pay slightly more, low-risk people pay slightly less], the healthy subsidize the sick.
and since the young are more likely to be healthy and the older more likely to get sick, yes younger folks will be subsidizing older folks [to some extent].
but, as you say, the legislation is ultimately designed for the little people to subsidize some fatcats.
yabbut,
the basic idea is the young don't stay young forever. Why do ppl keep making an issue out of younger/healthier "subsidizing" older/unhealthy? That's the least of what's bad about the bill.
Young and Healthy?
About 35% of people 17-24 are unfit for military service. The military is rejecting 3 out of 4 people who apply for service for physical, medical, criminal, or educational problems.
The "young and healthy" model may no longer be as true as it was, and young people may need health care a good deal sooner than the older generations did.
This is the problem with trying to generalize from your own experience, every generation has its own, unique experience. The world changes whether or not we notice.
Unterbussen, Unite! This divide and conquer (old Repub trick) as
used by Obamacrats is terrible governing, bad tactics, and will lead to further degredation of the Democratic Brand.
People need to work together for the good of all--and that is not being facilitated by Obama et al.
I go back to primary time when I kept wondering if Obama were actually trying to destroy the Democratic Party. I'm not getting good vibes about how he feels about real Dems--but he does himself those Golden Sackian Dems.
Elderly, women, the middle class--who's he got any compassion for? Oh, right. Golden Sacks, which he sees coming his way from the boards he'll sit on ex post presidency.
Parties are dynamic
There is no "destroying" the Democratic Party. It has just changed its priorities. The longer liberals cling to the idea that political parties are static structures, the longer we will be stuck playing by the lopsided rules that continue to allow Dems to fuck us over because a long time ago LBJ and FDR supported liberal policies. Going back further than FDR, Dems were a bunch of fucking racists who wanted to keep and expand slavery. Parties change. We could just as easily use that legacy to describe the Democratic Party. The Dems have changed. Its time to move on.
Yes, yes, yes.
"I go back to primary time when I kept wondering if Obama were actually trying to destroy the Democratic Party."
Yes. Somewhere, Karl Rove is smiling.
Karl Rove is an idiot
Lest we forget that he knew "the" math.
He's given way too much credit.