Why would we want a government sponsored public healthcare option, when we have corporations like Wellpoint competing with each other to look after our interests?
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Goldy giving people a choice is unamerican, go back to Russia you commie =)
The first thing you’ve got to do to have a public option is to make the public option the only option. That means getting the insurance companies to abandon the market and tightly controlling doctors and medical workers salaries and wages and increasing the supply of those folks through increases government-funded training. The AMA’s and insurance companies’ stranglehold must be broken. It means getting the legal profession out of the medical lawsuit business, too.
It’s a tall order, but it can be done over several years with a determined program to take-over and manage the medical system in this country.
@2 What a load of crap from a wingnut crock. How many prunes did you have to eat to squirt this much diarrhea?
Anyone wondering why GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe cooperates with Democrats on health care reform? The answer is she represents a state with only one health insurer (Blue Cross) that charges monopoly prices.
Although Snowe doesn’t support a public option, she does support the concept of high prices triggering the formation of nonprofit coops to compete with private insurers to force prices down.
In short, “free market” principles haven’t worked in her state, and lack of competition has made health insurance unaffordable for many Maine residents and businesses — a problem she can’t ignore, regardless of her party’s ideology, if she wants to be reelected.
Republicans don’t want a public option because they don’t want competition. They want to enrich themselves by charging monopoly prices. It’s that simple.
Speaking of Wellpoint, what goes around comes around.
http://www.healthcarefinancene.....mbursement
4 – Interesting. You’d think Snowe would be all for that “selling insurance across state lines” crapola but that would only mean younger, healthier beneficiaries would be fought over and the older, less healthier cruelly excluded in a cruelly efficient market-driven manner.
No sale.
In other news, Bush administration officials were lying when they told the public that $700 billion of bailout money was going to “healthy” banks and would boost lending.
http://247wallst.com/2009/10/0.....hite-lie/#
Have other people seen the “What’s the Real Cost?” bill boards? There’s one in SODO and another in Fremont, both on Hwy 99.
I checked out the website [*]. It’s Regence. It’s a very slick flash game. Starting out, your rank is an insulting “Lemming”. Your rank raises the more you conform to Regence’s worldview.
The basic premise is that high healthcare costs are completely your own fault. Regence preaches that healthcare costs would go down if patients would just stop getting sick (and getting healthcare).
I estimate a pretty web site like this costs at least $200k (3 devs, 1 graphics artist, 1 marketing, 3 months effort). Not much compared to the nearly $400m the insurance companies have paid to make sure they continue to profit while people die. But every little bit counts.
([*] I won’t link to their URL. Trogs can afford to pay for their own traffic.)
@7 Oh…you mean making it legal for insurers to collude across state lines?
@8 Well, a big fat Duhhhhhhhh….
http://www.americablog.com/200.....price.html
So let’s have the shitheads explain this one away.
No bullshit, no twisting, no obfuscation…just a logical explanation.
Who’s first? (Frist??? LOLOL)
And skirting responsible and/or consumer-supportive state insurance regulations at the same time.
Add in tort reform, and you’ve hit the trifecta!
For someone who often has his head up his ass, you finally got one totally right. (As in correct, since this concept would drive the Right nuts).
Next you’ll be suggesting that the AMA should abandon the random killing of patients by the “Tradition” of making residents pull duty shifts that last so long they can no longer possibly make intelligent decisions, because, “I did it when I was in rotation and it was good. Teaches ’em to be men!”
Because Public Housing, like Grove Parc, has worked out SO well…
@16 Yeah…like Mike Mastro’s and Kerry Killinger’s gigs?
I posted this at another blog the other day, but now with more of this Wellpoint stuff coming out, I can see it looks even more ominous. Look who Baucas has writing his health plan:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl.....are-reform
Revealed: millions spent by lobby firms fighting Obama health reforms
..snipped..
“The health industry permeates the process in other ways. At Baucus’s side, drafting much of the wording of the reform, was Liz Fowler, a senate committee counsel whose last position was vice-president of the country’s largest health insurer, Wellpoint, which stands to be a principal beneficiary of the new law. ..snipped..
Wow @18, not paying attention to the facts we who think right have posted here OVER AND OVER AND OVER even when it’s the HuffPo, huh?
Big Pharma/Insurance quietly met with the whitey house they struck a $80 Billion deal and the HuffPo pointed it out. There were meetings with Big Pharma/Insurance in the whitey house since March 2009 and it was April 2009 when Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm. Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm gang told Republicans they weren’t needed to help draft the law. All this mess is on your guys shoulders and it’s finally coming to light. Of course the leftist leaning Guardian had to finally discuss the K-Street lobbyist gang you all love to diss (remember Abramoff?) are doing with Democrats since the liberal MSM is mute.
So pox on your house fools, this Bud’s for You!
@2,
It’s not a load of crap, rodent: the only way to have a public option is to make a system where the only option IS the public option. In other words, government must take full control of the health care system. I say let’s give it a whirl and see what happens.
@20: We have “given” your system a whirl….it doesn’t work.
Health care is not a widget-making business. The rest of the civilized world has some form of government control because the profit motive for insurance companies is to pay less and make more…the insurance companies have over a 20% overhead/profit. Medicare has a 3% overhead.
We pay more than any other country (almost double the nearest nation) and get worse results including over 47 million uninsured. Even the insured are not safe – the majority of bankruptcies inthis country are related to health and the vast majority of health bankruptcies are to people who are insured.
How could it be any worse? We don’t cover huge numbers of people, the people we do cover are not protected, we pay more, get less and your band-aid solutions won’t help (Do I have to cite the study again that shows that tort reforms will yeild less than 1% in savings?).
How will you control costs? And don’t say competition – because it doesn’t work. The reason the states have regulated insurance companies is that they were scamming people with cheap rates that covered nothing.
Puddy spews:
Umm, except that Obama is promoting the government option that is vehemently opposed by the insurance industry…so much for idiot Puddy fairy tale.
Maybe you should actually read the paper Puddy…instead of trying to invent conspiracies that blow apart when confronted with the facts:
.
Read it an weep Puddy – public option to control heralth care costs and keep the insurance companies honest.
Once again, you are wrong, irrelevant and out of touch. Thanks for playing, fool.
Oh, and it ain’t the whitey house no more…that was under Bush.