This is the worst imaginable outcome—all of us forced into shoveling money into the worthless private insurance industry, with no possible escape into a public-run program:
Democratic senators say they have a tentative deal to drop a government-run insurance option from health care legislation. No further details were immediately available.
But liberals and moderates have been discussing an alternative, including a private insurance arrangement to be supervised by the federal agency that oversees the system through which lawmakers purchase coverage. Additionally, talks centered on opening up Medicare to uninsured Americans beginning at age 55, a significant expansion of the large government health care program that currently serves the over-65 population.
This is as Dan reported earlier. A brief reminder: All of the data has shown that public run programs cost less, and provide better health outcomes than private insurers.
I don’t say this lightly: I hope the entire bill fails now. Without a public option, it’s worse than the status quo.
Assholes.
F.c. the old people.
No public option – no peace.
I would be happy to just be able to buy insurance from a not-for-profit insurance company.
Opening Medicare to those age 55 and up is good! Hopefully this can lead to opening it up to everybody.
Having a mandate to buy insurance without a public option is fucking criminal. Forcing us to buy insurance from private corporations is a serious fuck-up. The Democrats are cutting their throat. But lets be serious, most centrist Dems are really pro-corporate politicians who write law to benefit corporations and take from people- this includes Obama and Bill Clinton. Until we elect real progressives, this will continue to happen.
OK, so I’m not being facetious here…what is the point if there is no public option? How is it reform? Again, I’m really truly asking.
Fuckity fuck fuck.
People 55 and over already have all the money in the country. SCREW THEM.
This is an outrage. The bill must die.
Corporate socialism. This is so f-cked up. We’re being forced into becoming obligate consumers of one of the most loathsome sectors of industry.
What did you numbskulls expect?
What is the number one legislative agendy for Libs:
Welfare for Millionaires
As in
TAARP
Stimulus
Propping up GM
This is the biggest gift to top feeders in the history of our country.
Yep. Canada, here I come.
I’m living this reality. I’m seven months pregnant, have no insurance, and am paying cash for everything. My midwife charges a fair price for cash customers, but heaven help me if anything goes wrong and I don’t get to have the baby at home. Once I step foot in a hospital, it’ll be, “Hello, bankruptcy.” What the fuck kind of country decides this is an acceptable way to treat its citizens?
Next up: Dems cave on health care reform – new bill will spend several billion dollars on little pins with pictures of fetuses on them that spacey-eyed people can wear while they stand outside of Planned Parenthood and shriek like banshees.
Glenn Beck has entirely new reason to cry.
I’m not sure it’s that bad. I was gung-ho about the public option until reading the ron brownstein article mentioned in TPM:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/…
We knew all along that Obama is drawn to behavioral economics, as evidenced by his close relationship with Cass Sunstein. He believes that government should manipulate incentives but allow the market to allocate resources. A good example is the Cars-for-Clunkers program.
Based on Brownstein’s article, it sounds like the health care bill is packed with these sorts of tweaks, even though all the debate has been focused on the public option, which was already watered down.
In any case, the overall thrust of Obama’s economic policy has been to manipulate the markets rather than replacing them. This approach sometimes looks a lot like Greenspan et al, but actually stems from Obama’s bias (as a former community organizer) for bottom-up rather than top-down solutions.
For anyone who’s interested, a nice theoretical defense of bottom-up economics is James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998).
I AGREE WITH EVERYONE THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND SELF ACTUALIZED QUEERS AND DYKES OF SIZE WILL BE THE ONES TO SUFFER THE MOST OBAMA HAS THROWN ALL OF US UNDER THE BUS NOT ONLY MEMBERS OF THE FQTBLG COMMUNITY THANK YOU DAN SAVAGE AND ALL YOU SHEEP WHO VOTED FOR HIM
Survey data shows that a majority of Americans are against a single payer system. What most people don’t grasp is that the public option will ultimately result in a single payer system. This is not because a government-run plan could out-compete private industry in a legitimate marketplace. Rather, as it does with Medicare, the government can act as a price setter and reimburse providers at lower rates than private insurance. As it stands, your private insurance already is much more expensive than it would be because the government already underpays for medicare, and healthcare providers cost shift to the private sector. I’m not necessarily against a single payer system, I think it has merits, but creating a public plan that will ultimately result in a single payer system that most Americans don’t want seems kind of like, I don’t know, leading us into a war with Iraq under blatantly false or at best woefully misguided pretenses.
I wanna throw up.
Sorry here’s the full link:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/
11/rahm-orders-health-care-article-be-
must-read-for-staffers.php
I see nobody knows what this means, including me.
1.) Lower Medicare eligibility to 55
2.) Open Medicaid up to 300% of the poverty level
3.) Redifine the poverty level to reflect reality.
4.) Open Medicare up to everyone because all of the insurance companies have transitioned themselves to other lines of business.
No need for hysteria…. Unless that is something you enjoy.
Hear hear, @19. The Medicaid expansion alone is enough reason to support this bill even without the public option (which would have made it that much better).
Cry me a river, Golob.
From Huffpo: And people within 300 percent of poverty would be eligible for a program pushed by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) modeled on her state’s Basic Health. Cantwell is not one of the ten in the meetings but has stopped by to brief negotiators.
Call her office Jon. Maybe you’ll get more info than I can.
Are you sure it’s worse than the status quo? That’s a pretty big claim to make without any support. I would love a public option, but I’ll take incremental improvement over no improvement at all any day.
You’re being hysterical, Science. The public option makes health insurance cheaper and raises efficiency, and it’ll remain on the table a decade or so in the future when the post-passage trajectory proves too expensive and too low-quality.
In the meantime, I’d be able to entertain the possibility of getting health insurance as an individual, without getting killed on preexisting conditions. That alone makes this bill gigantically better than the status quo — reform makes possible what is currently not possible, at any price.
If this bill fails, the alternative is not that we come together and get a better deal in Obama’s second term (the likelihood of which would also decline). This isn’t light rail. We’d have the current system for decades. Public option or not, the bill is necessary. Take out your anger on Lieberman in 2012.
TVDinner, if you’re not currently eligible for medical benefits through DSHS because of your income, it may be a good idea to look into going part-time so that you do qualify. I took my son to one pediatric appointment when I was between insurers and it cost me $400, and even healthy infants need to see a doctor a bunch of times in their first year of life. Washington State is pretty good about trying to get health care to pregnant women and young children, the budget crunch not withstanding.
from TPM:
“As you know, the AP and NYT reported tonight that the new deal dumped the Public Option. Our Brian Beutler, up their on the Hill was not so sure. And Sen. Reid said definitively this was not true. And now the Times seems to be backing off their report. And we’re getting hints that those reports may have been premature.”
so let’s unbunch them panties, at least for now?
quelle suprise.
fuck the senate sideways. they’re not afraid of you, obama. make them afraid. rahm should know how by now.
The house bill still has the public option, it’s not entirely impossible for it to be salvaged in reconciliation.
Maybe. I still feel like the Baby Boom is just sticking it to the Millenials, as usual. Chalk one up for the “me” generation: they get Medicare early, we get forced into expensive plans that might not even fully cover us, courtesy the private insurance lobby. Thanks guys, I’ll buy that once I’m done paying for your debt and fixing your scorched earth car-dependent landscape and oh, yeah, finishing your stupid wars.
Meanwhile every other industrialized country not only has the “public option,” but an actual government health care system that works. How come we can only outsource the teabagger’s jobs, and not the teabaggers themselves?
teabaggers’ *
DAMN IT.
Yes, when Hillarycare failed in 1993, we got a much much better system to replace it.
I guess there aren’t many people here concerned that Washington is about to give up Basic Health because the state can’t afford it, and now they’re willing to tell millions of poor people to fuck themselves because the bill that emerges from this Senate (which represents an incredible number of teabagger-majority states) isn’t *just* perfect.
Well, I’m willing to settle for a victory. And then get another victory next year, and another one the year after that.
I’m sure as hell not willing to go back to 1993.
It took 25 years, then three separate laws in three consecutive years and a referendum to get civil rights for domestic partnerships. It’s going to take at least that much effort to get a single-payer system.
So celebrate the wins and keep pressing for more!
On Monday, when amendments were to be voted on, Reid stated that he would get to them in “numeric order,” but skipped over 2837, otherwise known as “Medicare for all.”
It was even on CSPAN.
Any argument that the constituency doesn’t want single payer is a load of crap, because none of those weasels were willing to risk being seen voting against it.
How to stop this:
PHONE your US Senators – and your US Representative -right now.
And then phone the DNC and tell them if there is no public option – a good one – they’ll never get a dime from you – ever.
Don’t just email.
From TPM, as well:
“Reid wouldn’t elaborate further–and it’s worth noting that in recent days, aides and members have tried to characterize some of the ideas on the table as a form of “public option” when in fact none of them are. But it looks like we’ll know definitively by the end of the week–and maybe sooner.”
I’ll try to get someone from Cantwell’s office to talk to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was still carrying water for group health.
Yes, we need a public option. And we’ll get there eventually… But not by torpedoing every reform attempt that doesn’t include a public option.
If you want perfection or nothing, you will always end up with nothing.
@28: I can’t blame the ’68 generation after all the good they accomplished, against all the odds. Even Joan Didion mistrusted reform in the mid-1960’s. When have we had reform since that crest? Just rightwing backlash.
@28: In fact, maybe a key question would be how do we prevent our hippies from becoming nihilist weasels 20 years later (viz. the 1980’s)? Like the 1848 revolution, the 1968 revolution happened around the world although most countries tend to talk about it as if theirs was the only one. In Germany, the 1968 kids challenged their nazi parents for the first time, plus other issues such as developers’ destruction of medieval neighborhoods that had miraculously survived the WWII bombing. (E.g. Joschka Fischer.) In the 1980’s in Germany, these same people vehemently protested the nuclear arms race. In the US, meanwhile, you had Bonfire of the Vanities and PJ O’Rourke.
Haha I agree Amelia. It wasn’t that the ol ’68 generation wasn’t capable of great things, and they started off their lives with the same kind of energy and idealism that has been characteristic of so many generations of Americans.
But at some point they stalled out. In America. Maybe around 1980, when they were called to sacrifice by the end of home-grown energy? If more inspiring, Carter could have been the voice for building a new America, one that moved beyond fossil fuels and the sticky geopolitical obligations that comes with them (such as those inconveniences in Iran, for example). It was a chance to build an America that didn’t spend its way into debt servitude with China and bondholders that we must now crawl our way out of.
In the late 1970s, starting up the “green economy” would have been that world leadership our country is historically famous for. A great epilogue to defeating fascism and landing a man on the moon, the next chapter in the story of a diverse and inspiring nation…
Instead, Carter was busy diagnosing the “malaise” and Reagan came around and told everybody in his best acting gig yet that it was just fine to forgo investing in America’s future, to continue government programs on deficit, and to continue to think of yourself as your own personal metal box-driving, fast food-eating, trinket-importing, tax-cutting human island. Pathetic.
Now it’s up to their children not to lead the world, but to catch up to it; we’re left hoping we can stave off collapse just long enough we might close in on Slovenia or Bulgaria.
There’s a LOT of reform besides the public option or Medicare – the health insurance industry is practically unregulated right now. I have health insurance but it’s worthless because they deny me for anything that they don’t deem “necessary” – which is practically anything. There’s no mental health parity. There are ridiculously high deductibles. Health insurance is practically worthless right now except for buying drugs – unless you have a union job or a super-rich employer (like Microsoft) that will buy you super-premium insurance.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get what you can now. Keep making it better.
Jonathan, what are your thoughts on the financial insolvency of Medicare (and Medicaid)?
Your assertion that the government can do it cheaper better is not supported by the facts.
EVERY taxpayer pays to support Medicare, only a small minority use it and it is still bankrupt. Who will pay to add more people to it (or a similar government plan)?
Obama claims he can squeeze hundreds of billion out of Medicare to fund coverage for uninsured- why doesn’t he squeeze the waste and fraud out and build confidence before obligating the taxpayers for new programs.
If, in fact, he can actually do it.
Don’t give up, girls- there’s still time to get some Tort Reform with teeth passed.
@20: The real question is how the pre-debate “compromise” which watered-down a true single-payor system into a toothless, feeble “public option” became the new ideal. Expanding our effective single-payors and adding extra programs to include more people in exchange for the nominal “public option” seems a heartwarming result.
Of note, the median income in 2007 was around $50,000 (and—if memory serves—real wages haven’t been rising all that fast). That’s pretty close to 300% of the federal poverty line for a family of 3 ($54,930) and way under for a family of 4 ($66,150). This suggests that close 50% of the single-earner families of 3 will qualify for this federal basic health plan. Add that to the additional number that would be eligible for Medicaid (133% of FPL = $24,413) and those over 55 now eligible for a Medicare buy-in and this would seem a major expansion.
That seems, to me, a very good thing and a more than worthy trade for the “yeah, we might get 1% covered at higher premiums and states can opt-out” public option.
@24: Thank you. I already work part-time. I’ve explored every option under every rock, and the upshot is we make about $20 too much to qualify for help with anything.
When the baby comes, I think we’ll just get her an individual catastrophic plan and pay through the nose. I also will be taking her to the local farm workers clinic, which charges a sane amount for services. I also always negotiate a cash discount before seeing a physician.
I’m just fucking sick of playing this game. It’s wholly unnecessary and a byproduct of our collective insanity. I want off this carousel.
I was fooled into thinking Obama wasn’t the lesser of two evils, for once. I have nightmares about where we would be under McCain or Palin, but am losing faith that Obama is more than just-not-as-bad.
Fuck. I wish Jesse Ventura were President. I was in MN. We didn’t have this sort of milquetoast leadership for a few glorious years and it was nice.
@44: TVDinner: Sorry to be so callous, but maybe some contraception would be a good idea. It’s rather irresponsible and possibly a bit cruel to bring a child into the world when you are unable to afford to care for it.
@46, you are not one bit sorry to be so callous. You are a dick.
TVDinner, I’ll be thinking good thoughts for you as you welcome your beautiful new baby, circumstances aside.
@47: I apologized for seeming callous. I feel sorry for the child who will likely be born into a situation without adequate medical care. I feel sorry for those who conceived and will have to make the agonizing decision to parent the child without adequate resources, or find adoptive parents who are in the position to care for a child.
Tough financial times are a horrible time to decide to become a parent. Accidents happen. Abortions are available to avoid carrying to term. Adoptions are available to avoid parenting a child you carried to term. And people absolutely have the right to suck it up and parent a child without health care or to declare bankruptcy and let the people to whom they owe money pay for their and their child’s expenses.
I don’t know anything about this person’s background, and I suspect that if I knew him or her, my emotions would win out over my sense of logic, and I’d feel more sympathetic. But looking at the situation on a semi-anonymous Web forum, I’m mostly bothered by someone who chooses to become a parent, then complains of inability to afford medical care for the child. No one has to be a parent. Kids are expensive.