by David Safier Oh wait. . . . by virtually all measures of cost, access to care and ease of dealing with insurance problems, Americans fared poorly compared with people in other advanced countries. . . . The United States spends far more than [10 other industrialized countries] on a per capita basis and as … Read more
by David Safier Oh wait. That was the bursting of the housing bubble in September, 2008. Never mind.
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
My apologies to Alfred Hitchcock for the wordplay on his brilliant adaption of "The 39 Steps."
No apologies are owed, however, to the 39 Democratic "squishes" in the House who voted for Rep. Fred Upton’s “Keep Your Health Plan Act.” Their defections were pointless. This Tea-Publican messaging bill will not get a hearing in the Senate, and even if it did somehow get a vote, President Obama has promised to veto it.
As Steve Benen observed, "[W]hat was the point of all of this effort? It boils down to Republican 'messaging' goals, which some party leaders consider more important than anything else."
So 39 Democratic squishes simply aided and abetted GOP messaging goals. With friends like these . . .
Andrew Rosenthal at the New York Times was unsparing in his criticism of the 39 squishes. Cutting the Heart Out of Health Reform:
It’s easy to be mad at President Obama over health care reform – the broken website, the confusing choices, his false promise that everyone could keep their current plans.
But it’s still hard to fathom why 39 Democrats voted for a bill in the House that would allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. (You have to wonder, to start, whether they actually read the act before they voted for it, the same question I’d like to ask of Mr. Obama and his team. The changed requirements were in that law.)
Perhaps it was just a protest vote, a freebie based on the lawmakers’ certainty that the Senate will never take up or pass this ridiculous bill. But did those Democrats know what they were voting for this time around?
by David Safier Oh wait. That was 9/11. Never mind.
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The recent media hysteria over "if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it" is all about ignoring sound public policy for "gotcha" political gamesmanship. That's all the Beltway media villagers and pundits care about. It's always a political game of meaningless polls and election speculation for these effin' idiots, they are too damned ignorant to comprehend complex public policy. The corporate media is complicit in the failure of effective government, and aids and abets those who seek to undermine government.
Let's be clear: the elimination of substandard health insurance policies that provide no real coverage and leave the insured vulnerable to medical costs in the event of a serious injury or illness that can leave them bankrupt is not a bug but a feature of the ACA. The policy was designed to eliminate these fraudulent insurance policies from predator insurers. The "grandfather" clause for these substandard policies gave these predator insurers until 2015 to sell their fraudulent product, but many of them used the ACA as a ready excuse to cancel these fraudulent policies now, blame it on "ObamaCare," and upsell their policy holders into more expensive policies without advising them that a less expensive policy may be available from that insurer, or available on the Marketplace insurance exchange. Predators do not inform their marks, or send them to their competitors.
All the media hysteria in favor of predatory insurers and the broken health care system status quo that existed prior to the ACA has created so much background noise that it encouraged Tea-Publicans to engage in further sabotage of the ACA, and made Democratic squishes go soft on sound public policy.