Jane,

am assuming you saw this last night

Reid & Rahm made “hundreds of phone calls” to move Baucus bill

Someone recently left a very helpful link in comments.

If accurate.. the French numbers in contrast to what the Senate robber-barons are proposing today.. are simply astonishing.

Health Insurance Around the World: Just the Facts, Man…

France

According to many measures, the French health care system is considered to be among the best in the world. The health insurance system is funded through taxes. French workers pay 20% of their gross pay into the Social Security System, with the self-employed paying a little more.

Now, that may sound like a lot, but the Social Security tax includes health insurance, retirement support, unemployment and welfare. For the sake of comparison, workers in the United States pay nearly 9% of our gross pay just to Medicare and Social Security alone. When you include employer contributions for those programs, those programs cost us almost 16%. Add in the unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation payroll taxes paid on a worker’s behalf, and we pay roughly the same amount as the French, and even more to cover welfare and Medicaid. And we have to buy health insurance on top of that.

snip

[my bold added]

a little AR o/t

did you see CREW filed complaint against Mike Ross with DOJ/Public Integrity unit ?

link

I did.. Ross has lawyered up too…)

Certainly might explain his rush to the AR Chamber of Commerce for sympathy cash earlier this week.

Just shoot me now… We won’t have money left to buy the bullets if they pass anymore corporate welfare.

This is WHY the WH is so desperate to get Snowe… as outlined by Reich earlier this week on HuffPo… getting her onboard strengthens the hopes for the Baucus bill, weakens the Senate HELP committee bill, and by default the House HELP committe bill… and ultimately the PO…

REICH TOTALLY LAYS OUT THE WH STRATEGY FOR GETTING SNOWE ON BOARD IN ORDER TO ULTIMATELY WEAKEN CHANCES FOR THE PO… THAT’S WHY THEY WANT HER SO BADLY…. and it is not good for us… surPRISE, surPRISE, surPRISE.

His basic premise is that the reason the WH is pushing for approval of the Baucus bill (vs reconciliation) is that getting the Baucus bill approved will get it on the floor and will weaken the House bill with a PO (assuming a PO makes it in the House bill.)…. read this and weep… (itlaics are my comments)

Pls read the entire Reich post… it explains everything very clearly.

“This Senate vote (if the HELP bill wins), moreover, gives more momentum and legitimacy to the House version of health care — which also includes the public option, employer mandate, broader Medicaid coverage, and more generous subsidies to the lower middle class. That Senate vote thereby reduces the power of House Blue Dogs and conservative Dems to influence the bill that goes to the House floor. It also enables Pelosi to say to them: It’s either this or nothing. If you vote against this bill you’re voting against health care reform. The more progressive Senate bill, plus the stark choice Pelosi poses, garners enough votes from the conservative and Blue Dog Dems to pass a strong bill.
The White House doesn’t like this scenario because the use of a reconciliation bill in the Senate poisons relations with Republicans and risks their support for financial reform and cap-and-trade. It may even make it more difficult for Obama to rely on Republican support for more troops in Afghanistan. But as we move into the gravitational pull of the 2010 midterms, congressional Republicans won’t support Obama anyway, on anything. And remember, George W. Bush used reconciliation early in his first term to enact his huge tax cuts, mostly for the very wealthy. It’s a tried-and-true strategy.
I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping the Senator from Maine votes no next week. If she does, America has a fighting chance of getting real healthcare reform.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..90287.html

And you know what ultimately pisses me off about the “healthcare” rhetoric?

The “must not add a dime to the deficit”…

So they take OUR money and give TRILLIONS to the banking industry who caused teh fucking recession in the first place and are STILL making money hand over fist (yet heaven forbid if we would make THEM accountable), hundreds of billions to the MIC for unwarranted wars, millions (if not billions) to farmer to grow corn that we then use to feed to cattle who can’t digest it and add to food to fuck up our children…

Oh, yes… no problem using our tax dollars for those items…

But use OUR tax dollars to benefit ACTUAL REAL LIVE AMERICANS!

Oh Lordy…. who could even think of such a thing! Why, that would be MORE ENTITLEMENTS!!

And you know we can’t have the taxpayers getting to determine how their money is spent.

Only the fucking corporations can do that.

Bastards.

The Democrats and President Obama already know. That is why the program will not take place until 2013, after two Congressional elections and one presidential election. The voters won’t be able to thank Congress until the election of 2014, when they will have had three election cycles to raise money and four years more to add to their already bloated pensions.

Of course, President Obama is so willing to take ownership of his “health care reform” he will not allow us to thank him.

This “reform” has all along been a way to increase profits for health insurance companies, who are going to be losing customers as the baby boomers move to Medicare. They can only replace these lost customers by forcing the only group available, the uninsured.

If there wasn’t going to be a surge in the number of seniors because of the baby boom, the health care debate in Congress would be about the illegal use of drugs among professional athletes.

Also, those geezers at the town halls were dead on accurate about “don’t touch my Medicare.” With so many people about to sign up, the only way to cut costs is to reduce how much it pays for services or to reduce the amount of services it covers. What do you think will happen? Instead of focusing on the perceived foolishness of the old folks, characterizing their comments as “confusion” over “public” and “private,” liberals should have been listening.

Remember, Medicare is not the greatest health insurance program ever created. Far from it. Most people supplement it by buying private insurance. Medicare does not include such basics as regular checkups (you get a one-time examination when you sign up). Most Europeans would storm their legislatures and capitals if presented with such a poor program.

Obama is one of the cagiest pols since Tricky Dick. Liberals have been greatly fooled by him. He is going to go after Social Security, too, which he often refers to as “insurance.” He is too smart not to know SS is not any such thing.

He needs to be a one-term president.