WaPo:
At stake is a plan to expand the Pell Grant program, making it an entitlement akin to Medicare [So why not Medicare for all?] and Social Security. Key to the effort is a consolidation of student lending that would give the U.S. Department of Education a near monopoly over the practice [in other words, a single payer. Why not in health care?] -- a proposal that has mobilized the private loan industry, which lent $55.3 billion to 6.4 million students in the 2007-2008 school year.
Great policy choice. I'm for it! Why doesn't all the same logic in its favor apply to health care?
Obama said, of his proposals to let health insurance parasites continue to live and thrive: "It may not be the best system if we were designing it from scratch, but that's what everybody's accustomed to."
Well, Obama just decided to design a new student loan system from scratch, and it's single payer. And yet people are "accustomed to" sucky student loans just as much as they're "accustomed to" sucky health insurance companies, so why not cut out the sucky, value-subtracting middleman they're "accustomed to" in both cases, and deliver value for money?
Especially since people don't die if they don't get into college, but will die when they don't get health care?
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Accustomed to?
There are some 46,000,000 people who are most definitely not accustomed to health insurance any way at all, and an uncounted multitude of others who would delighted to become accustomed to something else. It could not be more obvious that this is only the choice because it's a campaign finance cash cow. As Dick Durban said in a different context, the Senate is owned by its large donors. If moments of honesty were not so rare, we would hear the same about the House.
I think Obama means that Big Insurance execs are accustomed
to a system which results in massive compensation packages for them, no?
I have a friend who's bought the idea that Obama won't go for single payer bcz he's worried about all the jobs that will be lost if Big Insurers lose market share. I don't know where she got that idea. Are Obama's people putting that out there? Anyone know anything about that?
I know Obama's said it...
.., but it's been in the air.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Talk
Unaccustomed is just an excuse. It's Obama's nature not to go to into the major fights; he is a microscopic version of Roosevelt. The students loan industry fits his size. Also, a single payer will lose in the senate; he doesn't have even a simple majority with all the Kvislings such as the Nelsons, Specter, Bennet, etc.
KoshemBos
Um, memories are short, aren't they?
Pell Grants (and Perkins Loans, fmr. National Defense Student Loans) were solely administered by the government. It was only after Reagan forced us into deficit spending did the hungry financiers bite into those government programs until they got nearly full control of them, with all the rent-seeking behaviors they could stomach.
Obama's plan simply restores those programs to their original intent -- to support undergraduate and post-graduate education for the good of the country.
Yes, memories are indeed short. Which the MCM and Repubs
have relied on for lo these many years.
I vaguely recall a time when articles would have some reference to what had gone before. Not every article, but the past which was pertinent would be referenced as part of coverage.
News articles used to have those 5 W's, and often in the Why section there would be some brief historical recap, if called for. But I may be remembering through rose colored glasses....
I didn't recall all the names of the programs, but, thank you, cg.eye, for your facts, for context.