1) Start by getting behind HR 676 which had been introduced into the House in January prior to his inauguration, and make it clear that this is just a better version of existing Medicare for everyone. Trumpet all the advantages over the present system

1a) Insist that he wouldn’t sign any bill passed by Congress that produced an economic deficit for the nation. All bills being seriously considered by Congress would be scored by OMB to see whether they produced a National Economic Surplus, or a National Economic deficit, in order to determine whether a bill fit this criterion.

2) Get Pelosi and Reed to accept his marching orders

3) Get Reid to threaten the nuclear option in the Senate if anyone filibustered the bill

4) Held Town Halls in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and France, using Hillary Clinton and himself to get the experience of people there

5) Made it clear that Medicare for All would result in roughly 33% less expenditure on health care immediately

6) Made it clear that the US would gain 2.5 million jobs if Medicare for All were passed

7) Made it clear that 45,000 people per year were dying and that this would be cut down to nothing

8) Made it clear that more than one million people per year were bankrupt per year and that this would be cut to nothing

9) Make it clear that hundreds of thousands of foreclosures due to Medical would also be cut to nothing and that this would raise housing values

10) Let progressives in Congress know that the President needed their help which they could give by firming up the backbone of their caucus so that everyone took a pledge to support nothing else except HR 676

11) Get his veal pen movement apparatus moving to back HR 676 and mobilize all progressives outside of Congress

12) Get Reid and Pelosi to emphasize that anyone at odds with the leadership on this core Democratic bill would get thrown out of the caucus immediately

There are other things also, that I won’t take the time to think up. But the point is that thios country is not a “center-right” country on health care. It wants the problem of health insurance solved, period. Obama could have sold this as the solution to the health insurance problem and the first essential step in keeping costs under control for the future.

The combo of mandates and Medicaid is a mechanism designed to clear the uninsured ground and feed the most cost effective remainders into the health insurance machine. (slowereastside)

BINGO!

By and large, despite a few seemingly “good” features (like no denials based on pre-existing but this is disingenuous — how else can they have mandates forcing everyone to buy their products but to disallow denials based on pre-existing?), we are being had in this bill — and not just by GOP and insurers but by our own party and prez. Rather than solidify a corporate HI system with a few very weak consumer protections, using public Treasury funds to subsidize private insurance premiums to fatten Wall Street coffers (what a racket!), come back next year, legislate a few bits like banning rescissions, institute premium caps but by and large let the current commercial system show itself for what a disaster it is and cause an electoral uprising that renews the Dem Party and elects a prez like Howard Dean and we institute single payer/Medicare for All. Maybe it’s a pipe-dream but this Baucus-generated boondoggle with a pissant PO is a wet-dream for insurers and a nightmare for us, essentially turning healthcare into a massive welfare system when, in fact, we can pay for ourselves if we have a non-profit human-priority single payer system with efficient adminstration — Medicare for All — that will largely support itself (better than current Medicare for seniors because a younger/healthier subscriber pool) without sandbagging the Treasury except for the extremely disabled individuals we have taken care of for generations.

The insurance lobby in cahoots with corrupted/cowardly Dems and cowardly prez (who wants a trigger for crissake) will never let us expand the PO to a broad enough risk pool and money pool to be effective, get real.

Let’s not settle for this lame bill. We can do better.

Of course you all will blame Obama for putting through a weak bill. But, the fact is it is better than what you want and it is, unlike what you want, achievable. The U.S. is not a progressive country. It is a center to center right country. Obama has pushed it as hard as possible without politically and personally imploding. This is as close as you’re going to get. Perhaps you think it will get better under Huckabee or Romney?

One of the worst things about this is the degree to which the Democrats in Congress are out of touch with how people feel. They were celebrating last night as if they’d created a monumental achievement, instead of a sell-out to the insurance companies. What planet are these people living on?

But if we keep acting like the veal pen folks who say it’s OK, it’s moving in the right direction, we’ll get rolled every time. Watch out for getting rolled again. This bill will come out of the Senate with no PO, because that’s what’s necessary to get 60 votes. Never mind that there’s no law that says they have to have 60 votes, and can use reconciliation or the nuclear option to pass what we need. And then, when the bill comes out of the Seante that way, Reid and other Dems will be crowing about how they did the greatest thing in 60 years, even though it’s imperfect, and still will kill another 108,000 Americans before the 2013.

In politics, pragmatism only goes so far, and while the perfect is the enemy of the good, the timid is also the enemy of the good. This reform has been timid from the beginning and that’s why it has failed.

Medicaid is not perfect but it will expand coverage to 15 million Americans who would not have otherwise had health insurance. That is millions of Americans this bill unequivocally help.

When Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna, launches into his spiel about the 45M uninsured in America, he says something like: 15M of these uninsured should probably be in Medicaid; everyone else should be in the private health insurance system.

Translation: Aetna does not want to cover 15M of the uninsured, so we’ll happily dump those costly untouchables into the government’s anti-competitive, single-payer lap. And –surprise, surprise– HR 3962 stretches Medicaid to cover the 15M Americans that the private health insurance industry was never interested in serving.

The motive is important here. While some of America’s neediest will benefit from the bill, that’s almost an accident –a side effect of the selection process. The combo of mandates and Medicaid is a mechanism designed to clear the uninsured ground and feed the most cost effective remainders into the health insurance machine. Naive stuff like compassion and justice weren’t written into this bill.

Medicare For All / HR 676: the only option designed for the American public

Brian Baird (Wash. 3rd): “The most important of these [reasons] is the simple fact that we do not yet have reliable estimates of how this legislation will impact the premiums paid by people who already have insurance.”

Scott Murphy (NY 20th): “As a small businessman, I am also concerned that H.R. 3962 falls short of making health insurance affordable for the small businesses of the 20th District; it fails to reform the fundamentally flawed incentives in the system, which continue to drive costs upward; and it fails to restrain the monopolistic practices of private insurers, which allow them to continue to increase premiums already weighing on families and small businesses.”

There are many more…