AP provides a fine example:
Obama wants legislation that would hold down costs, guarantee choice and extend coverage to the 50 million Americans who don't have it now.
This is nuts.
Obama's talking like people want a choice of insurance companies. That's nuts.
What people want is their choice of doctors.
Single payer provides that. That's why it's called -- work with me, here -- single payer. All the administration -- the CEO salaries, the excess profits, the call centers working to deny you care -- goes away under single payer. Since those costs eat up 30% of every health care dollar, versus 3% under single payer, you save $350 billion a year under single payer, and that's how you pay for coverage for everyone (and not, as the FKD insanely wants to do, by taxing people who think they've covered because they have insurance from their employer*).
Why does the FKD sound like their working for the marketing division of a large "health" "insurance" company? I'd say it's because they are.
NOTE * Talk about "divisive"!
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Perhaps this is old stuff, but ...
The New Yorker article (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/...) provides an interesting "yes but ..." to the health care reform debate. The argument is that single payer alone will not be sufficient to overcome a culture of entrepreneurial medicine. Some of the statements the author records from doctors seeking to maximize their revenues are all too consistent with the struggles I see my doctor siblings have. I see that Orzag has been reading this too - although I hope that he recognizes that it is too anecdotal to use as a basis for national policy. It makes me wonder what Orzag thinks are the "game changers, ' if not single payer. I also wonder why he is declaring the goal to be a deficit neutral health care policy when the effect of any meaningful change from the insurance based model so spectacularly failing will be a change in federal expenditures.
No, not old stuff
It's been making the rounds. I guess I think, well, it could be true, but/and if we want the Mayo Clinic to prevail, the surest way to do that is single payer, since so much of the profit is in games between providers about billing, where everybody gets a kickback or a commission on something or other. Not saying entrepreneurs won't commit fraud, but there can't be a lot of it, or else the insurance companies would be profiting from taking it on, instead of profiting by denying us care.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi
"Guarantee choice" is just Obama bamboozling the public--they
want "choice" to mean choice of doctors; they think it's so obvious that when he uses the words they believe he means what they mean. Obama knows that as well and just plays the public.
Just words. Until he's called on something and then it's "Why weren't you listening, rubes?".
The other choice people want is an affordable, comprehensive healthcare plan with freedom to choose docs. That requires choice between paying the parasites and a single payer type government plan. Which Obama says he won't even put on the table.
It's not "doable" for the Hope and Change president. Someone kind of shocked me with the commenter name Samebo, which just sounds too much like "Sambo," but it's also a portmanteau word of the phrase "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." It's stuck in my mind. So sad. I was wary, worried about Obama, but I still had this tiny hope he would be more liberal than his history, actions, and those nagging warnings which did get out threatened.