CorrenteCeci n'est pas une caption.
|
|
"Why should KitchenAid make blenders and health care coverage decisions? Why should lumber companies cut trees and create hospital networks?"
Ezra Klein asks and gives some reasons why , and the New Republic too: Why CEOs Don't Get It on Health Care
... keep the heat on!
Subscribe to make a monthly payment and keep the hamsters who keep the mighty servers turning in kibble.
No PayPal Account required! Thank you!
Per capita health care spending (2007):
United States: $7290
Switzerland: $4417
France: $3601
United Kingdom: $2992
Average of OECD developed nations: $2964
Italy: $2686
Japan: $2581
-- Bob Somerby
The text of HR676 (Medicare For All) as PDF (30 pages). The FAQ. Compare HR3200 with HR676.
Medicare for All would save $350 billion a year (study in New England Journal of Medicine).
In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, "I am a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare program*." -- Bill Moyers.
* Medicare For All.
Contact lambert_strether [dot] corrente [at] yahoo [dot] com (lambert strether) for all your pony needs. Overt and covert displays of realism ("cynicism") available at customer option.
"What Obama Really Meant
" -- a rationalization for a controversial statement by Barack Obama.
Originally, a fictitious game show where such rationalizations are put forth.
Front page
Comments
Trade Associations
They bear major responsibility for our health neglect system. Almost all are controlled by extreme right wing elements (not always the case, but true of the last 30 years). Also, many want to attract members and make money by selling health insurance policies. I have been meaning to post about this. Unless someone else wants to. I keep saying this, I don't own this subject.
do--esp AARP--please!
also on how they changed medicare/aid and purposely weakened them, which meant "supplemental" private programs and more profit even from recipients of public health.
i'm trying to assist, DCb--it's important and valulable to all of us even if everyone doesn't always participate -- i for one can't thank you enough.
: >
AARP being the behemoth, here
It's all about the fees and commission and salaries and bonuses. Exactly the same as Wall Street, and with the people who can't afford to bear the risks paying for it all.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
Fighting since 1948
Back in the late '40s Walter Reuther, of the UAW, was pushing for universal health care (although I think it was called national health care then). He proposed that all businesses participate in a national health plan and a pension plan, that risk be distributed. The auto makers shot this down. They wanted to control employee benefits. And, of course, there was the whole threat of encroaching communism in any kind of cooperative effort.
So, Reuther negotiated good deals for his union members. And it worked for awhile, for union members. Then, of course, we all know what happened to the American manufacturing base and labor unions. Gosh, if GM had listened to Reuther, and they weren't so dragged down by health care and pension benefits obligations, do you think they would be in better shape today?
on pensions--
people weren't living 20-30 years after retirement back then--you'd think pension costs alone would make companies want healthcare to be someone else's responsibility (but then again, they've found ways to stop covering retirees)
Anybody that says
Small business people are against universal health care doesn't run a small business.
Period. Exclamation point. End of line.
-----------------------------
Around these parts we call cucumber slices circle bites
-----------------------------
I'm not such a bad guy once you get to know me.
To which I say
Amen. And exactly. And:
We can't afford not to have single payer!
---------------
We can't afford not to have single-payer!
One more thing
Where the fuck does Ezra Fucking Klein get off with this regurgitated, data-free talking point? CEOs don't know this, CEOs don't know that, CEOs dont know what they are doing or their best interests. Fucking why doesn't Ezra Klein ASK CEOs what they think rather than zone out to the Dave Matthews tour poster on his wall until a column idea coagulates in his brain? I guess that would entail doing something us "little people" call "Work", and that is just not done, Darlings. Not when we can just "conjecture".
I can't say why other businesses may not want UHC, but for me and my company, I am a human being with a family just like everybody else, I need health care: if I buy it through my company I have to provide it to all my employees. I can't afford that yet (and no start up can!), but it is very damaging to my employees that they have to get their own on the private market or through their spouses. Luckily our state has a good program (which the Feds want to punish) and that my employees have spouses with good insurance. But this current situation isn't sustainable, not personally, not nationally and not economically.
I would gladly pay the extra taxes (which I imagine would also be split somehow with employee withholding), to get UHC.
-----------------------------
Around these parts we call cucumber slices circle bites
-----------------------------
I'm not such a bad guy once you get to know me.