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 Insurance Reform

InfiniteWarrior
post Mar 29 2010, 11:54 PM
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Reality is still hard to see through the fog of partisan rhetoric. The Republicans continue to claim socialism and a government takeover of health care, when the law is neither. And, the Democrats have been high-fiving each other and claiming they've achieved the equivalent of Social Security, the Civil Rights Acts, and Medicare - none of that is true either.

When the rhetorical fog lifts, we will see the system has not changed much. Health care will still be dominated by profit-driven insurance companies. More public money will go to executive salaries and private industry profits. Tens of millions of people will remain uninsured and costs will continue to increase. The challenge for the future is how to get public dollars to go to the nation's public health and not to corporations that serve as middlemen that do not provide health care. ~ Where Do We Go From Here?


Hedges is bordering on fatalistic; Moyers and Winship consult The Devil's Dictionary for help; Kuccinich is on the 'hoping it's a first step' bandwagon; and Big Pharma is dancing in the streets.

On the bright side, there are a few good things in the bill...but not many.
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JayBaen
post Apr 2 2010, 07:31 AM
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This plan led by this guy gives me hope about what was just passed.

On a recent episode of Bill Maher he champions the similarities of Obama's plan to his city's own - that it works - and is speaking from a position of reality, not speculation.

I, too am skeptical. Can this happen on the grander scale of the entire US? Of course, only time will tell.


--------------------
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"There's nothing in this universe that can't be explained. Eventually." -- House, M.D.
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InfiniteWarrior
post Apr 8 2010, 11:04 AM
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Can this happen on the grander scale of the entire US? Of course, only time will tell.

The thing about the future is that it's ripe with infinite possibilities, so anything posited about it is speculative. What we can know is that insurance reform (using the term lightly) is a far cry from health care reform, but given the enormous power of industrial complexes to call all the shots nationally, the band-aid solution to every problem appears to be about the only thing we can expect. (Of course, if the states had any sense, local/regional transformations would have occurred long ago and "trickled up" rather than "market corrections" and decidedly Authoritarian mandates trickling down.)

I'm sure everyone noticed insurance rates shot up 36-40% as this bill was being hammered out to get a jump on the industry's profit windfall. And the hottest commodity in the insurance racket -- I mean, market -- at the moment is the HSA (Healthcare Savings Account), the ownership of which (if one follows the dancing mergers) can be traced to the Umbrella Corporation ... I mean, one or another gi-normous financial institution such as Bank of America. (!) (Do you know who owns your health care funding?)

Hedges' fatalism is apparently contagious. Korten has given up on any substantial transformations occurring at the top as well. On the bright side, the life-affirming "shadow system" is alive and well, perhaps even poised to make up for some of the cascading failures and deficiencies of the "too big to fail".
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