What? A goverment run system would be less expensive and cover more people? Who knew?

Oh, yeah. Progressives knew. Hello, Congress!?

yeah.. perhaps because it omits $400 billion in payoffs to insurers (which, in effect, it kind of does – if I understand what’s going on, its effectively the markup in the incremental cost of providing private coverage to those who would elect the public option should it be available) ;P

.. which begs the question: just how corrupt is this country, where $400 billion in theft (related to the provision of what is or would be a public good) is viewed as necessary to assure the thieves don’t obstruct the provision of the public good in the first place!!????

With respect to Senator Joseph Lieberman, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Officially.

Prick.

Clearly, our leaders believe that dismantling the health insurance industry will cause chaos. Unlike dismantling the auto industry, which only throws a bunch of blue collar schmucks out of work and weakens our country’s industrial capacity. Asshats.

Excellent links. Thanks.

One thing kinda sticks in my craw. Heard Obama sauy yesterday about how in US employers provide health insurance to most people. We keep hearing how employers provide or even “give” this to us. So nice. Shit. We work for it. Wish more people out there would acknowledge the role unions played in this, another benefit so many take for granted. Yeah. Right. Might happen. My mini-rant for theh day.

yeah.. perhaps because it omits $400 billion in payoffs to insurers (which, in effect, it kind of does) ;P

But has it taken into account how much $ is involved in payoff from the insurers to Congressmen and women and Senators? I take Dick Durbin literally when he says special interests own the US Senate. Shows how frustrating it’s getting for all of us. If a health care bill including a public option does not pass this term, it will be due to Special Interest forces basically bribing our Representatives and Senators; we can no longer afford to fool ourselves about this. No more Ms. Nice Constituent!

T’would be nice if instead of prattling on about how “we can’t afford” single payer, asshats like Lieberwhore would just say, “Hey, these rich bastards provide me the luxuries in life to which I have become accustomed,” and just be done with it. Sheesh.

in that case, it seems me that there’s a simple solution to this: tell the private insurers that they must match the cost (and effectiveness) of the public option if they want it to go away.. they’ll jump on board. If having no public option means ‘cost of subsidized private insurance + $400 billion bribe’ then it seems to me that the answer should be a no brainer.

There’s another term for all this, of course – highway robbery – in the most literal, historical sense of Procrustes’ Bed. To let a national healthcare system happen at all, on their terms, the insurance cabal is demanding that the government bribe them through the nose for every incremental dollar of service provided. Its outright extortion. Procrustean robbery.

i just looked at the report and unless there is more, this looks like another bogus cbo report (as was the previous one) as it looks ONLY at the cost to federal budget and not TOTAL healthcare costs which include costs to states, employers, households, etc.

some background here:

A Note on Healthcare Costs
DrSteveB: The CBO Analysis We Really Need

note: this comment is in no way a comment on the HELP draft itself. i have no idea yet about it — my point is only that the CBO scoring is woefully incomplete (and that’s being charitable) and as a result we have to be careful not to fall into the msm error of thinking that this report tells the cost of healthcare with this proposed legislation.

The Pentagon budget is over $500 billion per year, and we’ve spent, since 2001, more than $870 billion above and beyond the Pentagon budget on war.

Talking about this program in terms of costs over ten years is such an infuriating corporatist frame. It is constructed to hobble the public option. You can’t evaluate equal access to affordable healthcare as an open market commodity–and economists over a 50-year span will back me up on this–public health is more like an investment in infrastructure. It is not $ in to a pot, $ out of a post, it is a program that will reap benefits in a million ways, only some measurable in direct dollars.

Those that argue that the US government should not be in the insurance business are trying to force just such a structure. The federal gov’t. is not in the insurance business, it is in the business of guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–and that, in 21st Century terms, includes quality affordable health care. The US should not be forced to run this program just like a private insurer–that is the model that has caused the current crisis.

blub – that $400 billion PER YEAR. so, for the time frame of this discussion (10 years) we’re talking about $4 trillion dollars to private insurers. but that’s under status quo — i’d like to know how this reform proposals affects those numbers (for all i know, they go up!).

The nonsense that the public option, really single payer, would cause chaos and be fiscally irresponsible, is nothing more than misdirection. The only chaos would be the big insurance corps would have to work to earn their money. If you look at Florida where insurance companies have designed options to cover the gap between Medicare and the patient responsibility you can see that the corps can adjust. In fact, the insurance corps are the ones that ration the medical care to the people on Medicare, not Medicare; it is the corps that require the patient to get permission to see a specialist.

yikes sorry about all the typos (more even than usual!).

I can’t remember if it was GM or Chrysler that was said to be the third largest employer in the US.

Wish more people out there would acknowledge the role unions played in this, another benefit so many take for granted.

I remember hearing earlier this year about another union benefit most of us take for granted.

The Weekend.

Never thought about that before.

Thanks, unions, for the only oasis of sanity many of us get to have.

Yes, this does not include the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, which will be added by the Finance Committee.

heck of a bribe isn’t it? Just think, if this doesn’t happen at all, they would’ve found a way to extract that much (if not more) from your pockets and mine, directly (which is how it works today) – for a service that’s a public entitlement in every other industrial country in the world. Gosh.. the more I think about this, the more I think that the only fair way to deal with these evil SOBs is to nationalize their whole industry – and I was one of those who didn’t even want to nationalize the banks or the car companies, so when I say that I want to see the insurers nationalized, I hope that expresses just what I think of them…

Well we have to talk about Social Security in a 70 year frame so we can get out from under the burden of the next decades where it will take in more than it pays out and get to the point where it is in “crisis.”

Here’s an idea:

How ’bout the government just takes over all the health insurance companies who’ve been fleecing billions from the system, liquidates all their assets, and shuts them down. Then all of the money that used to be spent on health insurance can instead be spent on health CARE, for everyone.

Hows that sound to Mr. Buffett and puppet?

in a manner of speaking that’s exactly the stick our hapless rulers should be using. The present system, even with the public option, gives them a chance to stay in business. The threat for their cooperation should be that if they don’t get in board, we will design a system in which they won’t stay in business – a new, comprehensive public option that wipes them out utterly, and saves us all money to boot… not bribing them with the carrot of more costly bells and whistles (or engaging in this whole straw man debate over whether or not the modest public option, as we are currently proposing, will hurt them at the margins or not), to get them to lay off pulling the strings of all the senators and congressmen they own.

If there was any justice out there, the public option they SHOULD be facing is one in which every healthcare professional is a civil servant and the insurers are, by regulation, limited to underwriting car insurance and household possessions.

Amen, and give that man a piece of American pie.

the public option is NOT single payer. this is a really important point. the public option is an element of a multi payer system that keeps the private insurance companies so that more people have health insurance (a good thing!). single payer gets rid of the private insurance companies (health care providers are private and compete for your business) for one big national “insurance” program. because of the cost savings (about $400 billion a year in unnecessary administrative overhead in the multi payer system) it is comprehensive universal healthCARE (everybody in and no one out, no copays, coinsurance or deductibles) for the same TOTAL national healthcare costs.

some more here:

Single-Payer National Health Insurance

Important Public Message: Public Option is NOT Single Payer

Looking at the bill itself, it seems that the 50 state (if they opt to participate) exchanges or gateways will charge a 4% fee on premiums of any health plan listed in the exchange. But there will be other state costs associated with setting up and operating the exchange. Given the fact that at least seven states are facing fiscal emergencies, could this be a deal-breaker from the point of view of states?

Also, the bill is written as an amendment to existing law; without knowing that existing law it is very difficult to follow some sections of the bill.

And someone who knows how these things are written should scan the bill for possible serious loopholes or points at which loopholes could be inserted. A watch list of the details as it were.

Christy has a new post along the same lines on the front page: “Health Care: HELP Bill Released During Public Option Call With Sens. Dodd, Brown and Whitehouse”

Just shows you how much they’re making killing us off.

no jane, not just that – it doesn’t include the costs to households or employers or states! (unless i’m missing something?)

that’s why we need to know what this bill is expected to do TOTAL healthcare costs — what if the costs to households goes way up under this or any other proposal? this is the kind of analysis that has previously been done. it’s not unusual, in fact it’s absolutely critical.

the federal dollar component is only a fraction of our healthcare costs (less than half). without total (and component) cost projects (instead of fed budget only) we can’t tell the difference between cost shifting and cost saving.

http://www.cms.hhs.gov/Nationa…..jected.asp

I 100% agree!! Put these dam insurance companies out of the health insurance business period! As we all know it was their greed that has caused this us all this misery for the American citizens while the owners of these companies have been getting fat off our dollars!!
Single Payer, no co-pays, no deductibles. Every working citizen pays according to their income into the fund.

Many, many thanks. I’m in total disagreement on the policy, but I do l-o-o-o-v-e the tools!

And single payer would save $350 billion a year. Too bad we can’t get HR676, the single payer bill, whipped and scored so there’d be a proven, science-based solution to use as a baseline for HEAP. Especially now that we have a smoking gun on how the health care debate is being managed.

Selise, you write:

we can’t tell the difference between cost shifting and cost saving.

Is that a bug? Or a feature?

hahahaha!

of course it’s a fucking feature. we’re being fed sound bites, campaign slogans and a few talking points.

evidence based policy? even evidence based policy debate? — nowhere to be found.

My school district family policy costs 17 grand, of which the district pays 90 percent. And there are denials of certain procedures and drugs and drug copays and NO vision coverage.

Under this proposal nothing changes. Oh, wait, the cost of my plan will continue to rise.

Oh, and I can’t participate in the public option. And stop calling it “strong”. The only strong public option is single payer.

selise, you are right. I did not phrase it very well. The public option is not single payer, but what I think is that the public option will drive the insurance toward single payer because the insurance companies and their Congressional minions are already admitting that they really can’t compete with a good public option that the government runs. The ability of the government to do medical insurance well is causing the corps to scream that the government can’t do a good job, and, simultaneously, they are saying that the government run public option would put them out of business. obama is giving them cover by saying that we can’t move to a better system because we are not starting from scratch so we have to design the system to give the insurance companies payoffs that will far exceed anything they could have dreamed of when this started.