Tag: Betrayal

Healthcare: A Blast From the Past

December 7, 1964  from a newspaper in the national archives

Says Medicare Bill Will Be Passed

Newark – Speaking at a meeting of the New Jersey Association of Health Underwriters at the Military Park Hotel here Friday, Joseph J. Sear, president and chairman of the board of the Progressive Life Insurance Company of Red Bank, said the outcome of the recent election makes it virtually certain that the 89th Congress, meeting in January, will pass a Medicare bill, and that it will be signed by the President.

“We, in the accident and health insurance business,” he said, “should have no fears that the passage of such a bill will hurt our business unless it becomes the opening wedge for a socialized medicine program such as in Great Britain, which includes everyone from cradle to the grave. The bill before Congress is generally restricted to providing medical aid for persons 65 years of age and older under the Social Security Program, and we are still insuring primarily persons below the age of 65.

“Since I last spoke to you 13 years ago, (note: 1951) the people cared for by hospital expense policies increased from $85 million to $145 million and the people cared for by medical expense policies increased from $28 million to $102 million, and the trend is still upward.”

Forty Six Years Later

March 23, 2010. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), aka Dole/Nixon/RomneyObamaCare, signed into law by “Democratic” President.   2009 Bill passed by Senate still lacks universal coverage and the option of purchasing government insurance, but contains universally loathed tax mandate and excise tax pushed by “Democratic” Senator from Massachusetts and WH “Economist” consultant from MIT.  Bill not designed to add more Medicaid coverage until 2014.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P…

September 17, 2010. Number of uninsured Americans now rises to 50.7 million, or 1 out of 6, or 16%.   Workers now paying 47% more for family health insurance coverage than in 2005, while employers pay 20% more.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/n…

January 3, 2011 New Republican Majority leader Eric Cantor introduces bill to rules committee called “Repealing the Job Killing Health Care Law Act”   “Effective as of the enactment of Public Law 111- 148, such act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such act had not been enacted.”

pdf download text here: http://rules-republicans.house…

January 4, 2011  from Kaiser Health News-

House Republicans have scheduled a Jan. 12 vote to repeal the health care law. While the measure is expected to pass the House, Democrats in the Senate have pledged to stop the bill.

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.or…

January 5, 2011 Shuffle the Deck Chairs on the Titanic


The Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, created just after the law passed, is about to be folded into the federal Medicare agency, signaling a major organizational shift just months after the office was created, administration officials said.

In addition, Michael Hash, who has been serving as a top White House health adviser, has taken the reins of the Office of Health Reform at the Department of Health and Human Services. Hash succeeds Jeanne Lambrew,  who has been director of the office since May 2009 and has played a central role on the health law. Lambrew, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, will stay on at HHS as an adviser to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

The insurance oversight office was headed by Jay Angoff, who battled with insurance companies both as a Missouri official and a class-action litigator. He’ll become a senior adviser to Sebelius.

The office will become part of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and will be managed by Marilyn Tavenner, deputy administrator of CMS.

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.or…

January 5, 2011.   Blue Shield of CA seeks rate increases of up to 59% for customers by March 1st. They blame costs of hospitals

http://www.latimes.com/health/…

Hospitals treat the un insured when their health descends into the most expensive crisis mode,  and pass the markup, make it up prices along to the insured, while charging the uninsured the highest rates, so they can still have their debts “sold.”

And nothing has changed the basic dynamic of leaving a portion of the population uncovered to act as a price lever on the rest.

Nothing.

A million and a half people filed for bankruptcy last year.  The leading cause is uncontrolled medical debt.

Blue Shield spent $16 million on federal lobbyists in 2010.  The top recipient was “Democrat” There Will Be No Public Option Blanche, the former Sen. Lincoln of Arkansas.  Eric Cantor got $22,500.

http://www.opensecrets.org/org…

They have a PAC, too, for their executives to use.

http://www.campaignmoney.com/p…

There’s more – each of those executives will be making other, individual donations.

But in CA, the real action is at the state level.  How they loved Schwarzenegger, the ex governator.  And the Republicans. And the Democrats.  Last year’s money bomb:

http://cal-access.ss.ca.gov/Ca…

http://cal-access.ss.ca.gov/Ca…

most complete list of donations in 2009 – 2010 election cycle:

http://cal-access.ss.ca.gov/Ca…

Poor Jerry Brown only got $2,500 out of all of that ?  

 

I pledge to DESTROY the Blue Dogs & ConservaDems over this sh!t

Crossposted at Daily Kos and progressiveelectorate.com

    First of all, I’d like to say thank you to all of those who have written a Health Care Horror Story diary, and I’d like to encourage others to do the same and write their personal horror stories for others to see. The more of these articles we can post on teh toobz, the more we can reveal the true national horror that our for-profit Murder By Spreadsheet industry inflicts onn our nation.

   Now, on to the real story.

    FACT:      Without Blue Dog/ConservaDem opposition, HCR would have been passed with a public option already

   Despite the public debate, the fact is that the Republicans are not killing health care reform despite the screamers/teabaggers/ets. No, the Blue Dogs/ConservaDems are killing this reform.

   So, I hereby pledge to make it my personal business to DESTROY the fake Democrats in the House and Senate, and I hope you will make the same pledge with me.

    More and a call to action below the fold

The Verdict

Summation



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The following are excerpts from comments at RawStory today

on Jeremey Gantz’s story It’s official: No U.S. prosecution of Bush officials

The Official Obama Apologetics

It has taken a few days, but a new great wall of Obama apologetics has been laboriously constructed at the great orange fortress of wishful thinking called DKos. Let us bask in the freedom of Democratic incorrectness that Docudharma provides to summarize the official apologetics. Here they are in Q&A form:

Q: Why did Obama appoint Summers and Geithner, men deeply implicated in the undermining of the financial system for years, to “clean up” this huge mess?

A: No progressive economist (e.g., Stiglitz or Krugman) could possibly have passed the guard dogs of the plutocracy in the US Senate. Dangerous Socialists like Nobel-prize-winning Princeton economist Krugman could never have been confirmed.

Q: Why is Obama allowing Geithner to shovel trillions in taxpayer money into the bottomless pit of Wall Street?

A: Geithner believes that an overpaid and rapacious elite can manage the US economy far better than colorless bureaucrats who are merely public servants. Thus, Geithner needs to give Wall Street’s predators another chance to gamble away the future financial resources of the republic. Obama hopes that Geithner may get lucky, but he can replace him with another plutocratic guardian if he “fails.”

Q: Why is the government not aggressively investigating the quality of the dubious “toxic” assets so as to have a sound basis for estimating the magnitude of the damage and properly guiding the recovery policy?

A: Obama believes that it is his highest duty to manage public perceptions for the greater good of America, and if that management task requires concealing the magnitude of underlying cause of the current financial disaster, then it is a patriotic act to conceal the truth. The less the public knows about the magnitude of the toxic bubble, the better.

Q: Why won’t Obama simply nationalize failed banks, fire the bad management, and rebuild the banking system in a manner that serves the public interest.

A: Presidents who attempt to discipline the plutocracy don’t finish their term in office. Obama’s job is to give the people hope by slightly reducing the scale of looting of public funds.

Q: How can the people maintain their confidence in Obama?

A: Every time Obama betrays the public trust and fails to honor his campaign pledges, the people will be reminded of how much worse a McCain administration would have been.

So there we have it. Obama, our national savior, is protecting the rich from the poor and the powerful from the weak, and all the while he is making us all feel better about having change we can believe in: the pocket change that is all most of us will own when this is over.

I burned through all my outrage in ’06, sorry

. . . all I got left is cynicism, snark and recycled outrage.

See, it was easy back in ’06 – when things were soooo bad. I mean, outrage was running, what – buck-and-a-quarter, maybe six bits a gallon back then, right? I was livin’ large, drivin’ the Escalade of outrage – we all were. And it was easy back then to figure out who our collective outrage should be aimed at:


Those filthy, nasty Republicans

– who, after all, were actually running things, so blaming everything on them was totally legitimate.

And I was committed to taking Congress away from those cretinous bastards so we could put a stop to the occupation of Iraq, and to warrantless wiretapping of Americans, and to the whole idea of the President as king. You know, like we did 230 years ago, right?  

The Great Betrayal

For 40 years I have been told be patient, work within the system, elect more Democrats.  In all that time I have seen few victories and most of those merely symbolic (ooh, they increased the minimum rage by 15 cents an hour), and these anemic victories have been overwhelmed by the horrendous losses the American people have suffered time and time again.  There has been a steady erosion of our Constitutional rights, economic inequality has increased, the working poor and the middleclass have been robbed at every turn by the filthy rich and our government has become more corrupt, more warlike and more evil.  We now openly torture our prisoners and publicly argue that it is our right to do so.

0_61_dems_pelosi_reid

What Ever Became of Democracy?

In looking back at the Bush debacle, one thing stands out.  It would never have happened, at least not so blatantly and egregiously, had there been a healthy opposition party in America.  Up until 2000 there was at least the illusion of the Democrats as a party in opposition to the Republicans, however ineffective.  And the Republicans, though always venal, have never been so nakedly predatory, never so in-your-face ‘I’m going to take your shit and you’re going to like it’, never so openly disdainful of the Constitution and the law.  Somewhere along the line, the notion of the Democrats as the voice of sanity counter-balancing Republican lunacy has become just so much political vaporware.  What happened?    

Rotting-Corpse-of-the-Democratic-Party

Sens. Feinstein, Clinton, Webb: Exactly whom do you represent?

The passage of the Senate version of the FISA bill today – a bill which includes, amazingly, retroactive immunity from civil damages for repeated felonious violations of the Constitution – is a low point for the “Democratic” Senate of the 110th Congress.

And it leaves me wondering, just like the passage of the odious bankruptcy bill before it: Exactly WHICH constituency of those senators who voted in favor of it was clamoring for its passage?

The Soft Under-Belly of the Bush-Loving Democrats

bush_lieberman_clinton

The Democrats in congress are almost all alienated from us bloggers.

They think we’re crazy and only good for use as an ATM during elections.

The incumbents don’t give a rat’s ass what we say.

They are alternately ignoring or insulting us while giving Bush everything he wants.

This gift to Bush includes at least thirteen more months of hell for our military and the people of Iraq and many billions more of our cash.

alex-ross_bush-liberty credit: http://www.alexrossart.com

How can we damage these arrogant, constitution-shredding, Bush-loving DINOs?

They have three dumb candidates hanging out in the open, just begging for our wrath.