Updated: Diary by Kirk James Murphy MD, "Without a public option, Obama's health plan must die." More below.
Yahoo posts AP article about Obama administration seeming to capitulate on public plan. Will accept cooperatives. I'm not quoting from this article. There will be others. But you can read it.
She said cooperatives would provide the necessary "competition" for Big Insurance Parasites (BIP). Well, she didn't use the word parasite....
Note that Sen. Jay Rockefeller has asked the GAO to study health cooperatives since there are so few extant in the US: under 100, with only 2 0r 3 large ones and only the the large ones are licensed
HuffPo has a headline which may say it all (not directly about today's news):
Has Obama Dropped "Health" and "Care" from Health Care Plan?
In an effort to pass a bi-partisan bill with a Republican party that wouldn't give him a glass of water if his tie were on fire, President Obama plans to take a diluted health care plan that was already pre-approved by the insurance industry and eliminate "health" and "care" from it.
Having abandoned the idea of a public option, and planning to abandon the idea of non-profit cooperatives, the next step will be abandoning health care altogether, according to a spokesman.
"Some will be upset that we didn't get everything we wanted, or anything, even," said the spokesman. "But we've worked hard to come up with a compromise that both Republicans AND the insurance companies find acceptable, and still they hate us like we ran over their family pet."
Gotta laugh to keep from cryin'...
And, lest we forget, Grassley did say in July that Obama had told him "privately" that he would be willing to drop a robust public option.
...it would have been good if he had said to the entire country what he said to me privately — that he would look to alternatives for that. And we have a very good alternative by going with cooperatives because we’ve known them for 150 years in America. And allowing them to sell health insurance for more competition.
HUNT: Do you think the President could support that?
GRASSLEY: All I can tell you is — but he didn’t say this that night and he should have said it — that he’s looking for reasonable alternatives. And I think we have a reasonable bipartisan alternative in co-ops.
Not coming as any shock to people here....
Update: Dr. Murphy's diary nails the health and economic castastrophe approaching us through Obama and the Finance Chicago Boyz.
Without the public option, consumers will be left with a choice between purchasing insurance from the for-profits...or purchasing insurance from Kent Conrad's imaginary friend, the co-ops....which are intended from the start to be unable to compete effectively against the for-profits we've all come to know and despise.
Of course, under Obama's health plan we'll all be under a Federal mandate to purchase insurance. Which means that, after the co-ops complete their auto-destruct sequences a few years out, we'll all be chained to a lifetime of Federally enforced obligation to buy insurance from the same megacorps that make billions by denying us health care.
This outcome - a massive mandatory transfer of wealth from Americans to a few monopoly megacorps - is just what the doctor ordered....if the Dr's Jack Kervorkian.
This was predicted, but hoped against....
Update: NYTimes article on Sebelius's comments. I wonder when this will be WORMed? IF it will be WORMed, since Sebelius was backed up by Gibbs.
“I think there will be a competitor to private insurers,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “That’s really the essential part, is you don’t turn over the whole new marketplace to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition.”
Her less-than-forceful insistence on a government insurance organization was paralleled by Robert Gibbs, the president’s press secretary.
“What I am saying is the bottom line for this for the president is, what we have to have is choice and competition in the insurance market,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
It's the Big Insurance Parasites, stupid. Not the care of Americans' health.
For this we elected a "Democratic" president? I can't tell if it's his Inner Republican, his Inner Corporatist
, or his Inner Wannaberich. I think we can see why certain monied groups were his early backers. Massive transfers of wealth from the barely making it and middle class to the already wealthy and Uberwealthy.
Fee FI* Fo Fum, I smell the blood sucking of a vampire squid....
*FI--Finance and Insurance
Update: According to Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic, Sebelius has been WORMed by not one, not two, but three WH spokespeople. However, the third one says it's the MCM*'s fault. First said she "misspoke," second that President Obama believed that:
...a public option was the best way to reduce costs and promote competition among insurance companies, that he had not backed away from that belief, and that he still wanted to see a public option in the final bill.
Trial balloon as lead balloon? Stay tuned.
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Comments
It's not like the health insurers are...
hostage-takers, or anything.
defeat the Baucus bailout
time to declare this the Baucus bail out of insurance parasites and start working to defeat it. It is classic University of Chicago Disaster Capitalism. Use a crisis to give even more money and power to those who have too much.
i second that
It is classic University of Chicago Disaster Capitalism. Use a crisis to give even more money and power to those who have too much.
Ah, yes.
Bailout indeed. Why I was so heartened to read what my union paper has to say on these bills - see my comment below.
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
I wish
we had a rating system here simply so i could give you five stars for that comment.
*****
i personally hate rating systems, but you could always put a bunch of stars in your subject line.
I hate
rating systems generally too because they are ripe for abuse. However sometimes it's nice to rate someone who does a great post so you dont have to write it all out yourself.
defeat the Baucus bailout
Are we all gonna be racist Nazi thugs now, opposing Obamacare?
they've been saying this for months
in fact, they've been saying it all along, from the beginning.
and they're right about 2 things...
a public option is NOT essential. a properly regulated market of entirely private insurance would work just fine [cf germany]. the problem of course is that they're NOT proposing ANY of the regulations that would be needed to actually keep such a system working sustainably. the list of needed regulations they're leaving out is long, but i'll mention a couple of them. in germany supplemental insurance can be for-profit, but the rest of the insurance market is non-profit. by law. in germany, the entire industry is regulated heavily, not just the portions of it that voluntarily elect to enroll in 'exchanges'.
co-ops would be terrific. this is very close to how medical insurance got started in the first place in this country. the problem here is that in order to work in our modern-day system, co-ops would have to be generously funded by the govt for an appreciable length of time during and after start-up, and they would need to be protected FROM competition [read: predation] by the insurance industry. forever, not just for a few years during start-up.
the reason these ideas have traction, even among liberals and progressives, is that [1] we have actual, real, working, sane examples to point to, and [2] how many people [including legislators] have the time and fortitude and arcane knowledge to wade through the thousand+ pages of proposed legislation to look for what's being left out?
Those joksters at Daily Kos....
On this same subject - just make me want to burst out.....in tears.
How pathetic! What are these people smoking?
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"Totally on target. (18+ / 0-)
Sebellius was basically referring to the public option as just one piece of the puzzle in the big picture. Let's not get all aroused here. The Prez knows how to negotiate and get his way in the end. We saw this guy do the impossible and win a historic nomination. How quickly we forget.
Don't throw rocks if you live in a glass house? Trust me, I live behind bullet proof Glass.
by occult777 on Sun Aug 16, 2009 at 08:13:11 AM PDT
[ Parent ]
*
But he needs to know that we've got his back. n/t (6+ / 0-)
by ciganka on Sun Aug 16, 2009 at 08:29:30 AM PDT
Shainzona
Hopium?
Has this result on people.
PSC-CUNY (finally) weighs in on the debate
Apparently I was right that there is still a lot of support for single-payer in my Union. PSC-CUNY is the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, a local of the AFT, and has long been on the record supporting HR 676. There is an excellent analysis in the current issue of the Clarion [pdf], by Leonard Rodberg of Queens College/CUNY, who is a member of our Health Care Reform committee. The article takes nearly a full tabloid page in the paper and is followed by a shorter article entitled "Tiny steps for single-payer" which discusses the plan to allow a vote on HR 676 (or whatever) in the full House, as well as the Kucinich amendment.
In Rodberg's article he analyzes the contents of the bills which we have seen so far, and points out, among other things:
- "The plans being developed in Congress amount, in effect, to a bailout of the private insurance industry." This is in a long section arguing that sinlge-payer would be a better way to go and pointing out that Obama had declared his support for single-payer back in 2003.
- The public option which remains in the bills in Congress is but a "pale shadow" of what was originally proposed, "open to relatively few people and operating with little or no backing from the federal government."
- Final paragraph:
All of this is familiar to us here, but I am mightily heartened to see it in the official publication of such a large union. (After being mightily disappointed by our parent union, AFT!)
One criticism I have of Rodberg's analysis is that he does not point out the very long time frame that is in the bills: for example, that although "Employer-based insurance plans would continue as they are now, but they would have to meet some conditions," those conditions would not be imposed until 2018 (according to the House bills: I have not been able to find where and if the similar requirement is in the Senate HELP bill). People would not realize how very little these bills were doing to solve the real problems in our health-care system until so far down the road: how do we keep agitating for reform in the meanwhile?
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
The bruising battle to maintain benefits
Another article in the same issue of the Clarion (on p. 9; the healthcare reform analysis in on p. 11) describes the bruising battle the Municipal Labor Committee underwent as it negotiated the healthcare benefits package on behalf of City unions. (This includes all unions of CIty workers including PSC-CUNY.) The fight is just to maintain the level of benefits and to keep members' costs more or less at the same level. (As it is, there will be some benefit reductions to members who are in HIP or Senior Care.)
As I am sure Randi Weingarten is aware, while it is indeed true that "Our unions negotiated these plans, often in lieu of salary increases.," this isn't something the unions relish fighting over year after year, just to try to maintain something like the status quo. Why is AFT so willing to go along with the claim that the employer-based system needs to remain in place? It is indeed a puzzlement.
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
the rank and file have always been pro single payer
At the national conventions there are all these pro-HR 676 resolutions that get passed, then the leadership sells out the membership. Sound familiar?
The leadership of our local
is VERY pro-single-payer. (I've heard them described as "Communists", hee hee.)
And this local represents about 20,000 people.
I think the problem here (with the AFT message) is partly that Randi has political ambitions. She was named as a serious possibility for Clinton's senate seat (now held by Gillibrand) for example.
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We can't afford not to have single-payer!
President Tom Daschle
Is that not what we have now with Obama? I'm talking about caving in general since Daschle, surprisingly, seems stronger than Obama on health insurance reform.
Daschle urged dropping the Federa public plan on June 18th--
In favor of Kent Conrad's "imaginary friends," the millions of health co-ops.
Oops, that tinyurl link. And it goes to HuffPo. the actual article and real link.
Ha! I thought Daschle was the worst of the worst
I just hadn't remembered if he had done anything recently on health insurance since I read that TP link, so I chose to be safe. Thanks for the link, Jawbone.
Yes, we have president Tom Daschle. That is our face of "Change we can believe in!"
Daschle! Daschle!
shorter Daschle
we will have to give up on systematic change if we want systematic change.
CBS writes up Face the Nation as Gibbs sayng Obama still
for public plan. Huh? Link for article and video. Well, make that "still in favor [of] a government-sponsored health insurance plan." Insurance, not care...and "in favor of": No indication he'll fight for it.
This does muddy the waters, but that's an Obama feature.
What's with this administration-wide Post Office dissing?
And this option would be...what, exactly?
I can't locate a transcript for today's Face the Nation; here's the link for program transcripts.
kirk james murphy, political yes but,
is the same one who was using emotional blackmail to get us single payer advocates to support the public option not too long ago.
i'm glad to see he's willing to draw a line in the sand, but i wish he'd been using his considerable passion and writing talents to whip for single payer all this time.