I suspect my senators would rather have their prostates removed with red-hot pincers than jump off the insurance company gravy train.

I’d rather have them get us a good healthcare system, but if they absolutely won’t then that does sound like a fair alternative.

Betty, did you run this post by okanogen first?

Betty, did you run this post by okanogen first?

Comment by Kevin K. on 06/26/09 at 10:54 AM

Nah. I expect that bunch has the wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth angle covered. With approximately the same net-effect as the pray-in people.

With approximately the same net-effect as the pray-in people.

FTW!

Betty, I couldn’t bear to watch it since it was on the flag-pin network, so I settled for following liveblogs of the event.  Did you know that people are concerned about the government taking over health-care? 

I know, that was news to me as well, especially since that’s not what the Obama administration is proposing.  But apparently the record inside Charlie Gibson that plays when you pull his string was stuck on that particular track…

And something about being in the presence of Obama, and his refusal to agree with what Charlie’s record was saying, makes Charlie really angry.

A five year old walking through the living room during the event would have asked her parent, “Mommy, why is that old man so angry at Obama?  Does he have a sad because McCain lost?”

Betty, this is probably my weakest issue, even though I don’t have insurance and I should probably be paying more attention.

I know it’s been done before, but I have no concept of the mechanics entailed in transitioning millions of existing and highly variable insurance products to government administration, what happens to any accumulated private cash pools the current insurers have created using revenues from premiums, how you deal with all the redundant displaced insurance company employees, or how you compensate the companies for the capital costs of layoffs, idled facilities and systems, voided investments and lost future profits.

In the very brief overviews I’ve read, that part always gets treated like “Step 2” in the Underpants Gnomes’ “Profit” formula. 

Just wondering if you can point me to an online primer or a decent issue resource in print. I don’t have any gripe with single-payer, but clearly it’s the mechanics, the secondary impacts and the purely financial implications that are being fought over, under the camouflage of a debate about quality of care and capitalism vs. socialism.

As for lobbying the legislative level, well it might be useless, depending on where you live.

To be perfectly serious for .5 seconds, this is where it has to start. The only thing you can do at the executive level is encorage or discourage the pres. from signing a bill. Your congresscritters are responsible for what arrives on the president’s desk. I say again, when summer recess begins, take a trip to their local office and at least bug the hell out of their staff.

And now, back to poking fun at the GOP:

According to a local GOPer, Obama is Hitler because ... public health care = socialism = invading Poland.

Thomann’s original statement read, in part: “Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common in my view. ...
Obama is systematically destroying the American economy and with it AMERICA. First the banking/investment industry, next private enterprise (GM and Chrysler) and now HEALTH CARE.”

And another helmet-haired granny runs face-first into Godwin’s Law.

You know what’s like Hitler, bitch?

HITLER.

Just wondering if you can point me to an online primer or a decent issue resource in print. I don’t have any gripe with single-payer, but clearly it’s the mechanics, the secondary impacts and the purely financial implications that are being fought over, under the camouflage of a debate about quality of care and capitalism vs. socialism.

You’re absolutely right about that. I don’t think we can accomplish a single payer plan by decree for all the reasons you mentioned. My hope is that a public option (along the lines of Medicare) provides a lifeboat for the uninsured and that eventually, with its bargaining power and efficiency savings, it will drive the population into a single payer system.

Thanks, Betty. Shifting to single-payer in one shot would require an act of economic terraforming vastly more complicated than swapping out the CEO at GM, and I feel incompetent to weigh in on the discussion until I see the gears behind the clock-face.

I’ll check out your link.

I totally agree with StrangeAppar8us on this.

I was pleased to see your more reasoned response, Betty, when you replied to his points thus:

You’re absolutely right about that. I don’t think we can accomplish a single payer plan by decree for all the reasons you mentioned. My hope is that a public option (along the lines of Medicare) provides a lifeboat for the uninsured and that eventually, with its bargaining power and efficiency savings, it will drive the population into a single payer system.

Which is why I would like to implore all those “screaming” for single payer/universal, whatever to stop getting so hopping mad and the push for a Public Health option.  The only way you are going to have any realistic chance of going from here to there in this country is if you support the Public Health option and then let the “market” and “people” validate whichever is better and preferred. 

If government run health care is the better solution, then the public option allows this argument to be made and put in affect by “proof”. 

If it isn’t, then we should still get more competitive pricing and inclusive coverage from the private insurers as a result of having to compete with the private option.

However, for those who are too zealous to accept rational steps towards fixing the problem and want to “block” Obama’s public option plan just because it is “not enough” for them, all I have to say is *YOU* are now the biggest threat standing in the way of reforming health care in the country and I hold this group of spoilers more accountable if we fail to see frutiful action and improvement in this long-neglected important issue!  I’m getting really sick of the whole “cut off the nose to spite the face” crowd.

Betty:

New Labour and its fauxialism can die in a fire

Sounds like our shitty Democratic Leadership Council, which can also go get bent.

If I can wax nostalgic a moment, I remember being so excited on the 1st May 1997.  There was an air of excitement, amongst most people, in the media, about the election results.  We all knew it was going to be a landslide, but it was more than that - the Tories had been in power for literally my entire life at that point (Thatcher started her wrecking machine in 1979; I was born in 1980), and they’d really begun to get desperate and flailing with Major.

There was this expectation that this new, dynamic Labour Party would bring in real change, that it might actually do something for social justice and goodness… And then it turned out to be worse.  The period since 97 has seen the biggest expansion of unbridled government power and right-wing politics dressed in the raiments of the left since… I don’t know when.

Labour betrayed me and everyone else who ever trusted them to be different and live up to their principles.