Ablogination

HR 3200 “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act", is now before Congress. But as the name might indicate, it’s only “affordable” to those who can afford it.

President Obama, in an unfortunate attempt to be unnecessarily “pragmatic", recently made a deal with Insurance Companies apparently believing that this industry could somehow be trusted to do the right thing for country and people.
This is the Obama naivety that we mentioned in the ‘08 primary.
We said they couldn’t be trusted. The President thought differently. He was wrong.

The story so far: on May 11 the White House called a news conference to announce that major players in health care, including the American Hospital Association and the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, had come together to support a national effort to control health care costs.

The fact sheet on the meeting, one has to say, was classic Obama in its message of post-partisanship and, um, hope. “For too long, politics and point-scoring have prevented our country from tackling this growing crisis,” it said, adding, “The American people are eager to put the old Washington ways behind them.”

But just three days later the hospital association insisted that it had not, in fact, promised what the president said it had promised — that it had made no commitment to the administration’s goal of reducing the rate at which health care costs are rising by 1.5 percentage points a year. And the head of the insurance lobby said that the idea was merely to “ramp up” savings, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry is busily lobbying Congress to block one crucial element of health care reform, the public option — that is, offering Americans the right to buy insurance directly from the government as well as from private insurance companies. And at least some insurers are gearing up for a major smear campaign. - Paul Krugman

These Insurance Companies reneged because increasing premiums, copays and deductibles is their real path to payday.
That’s why Obama, as our leader, should take and not ask. You don’t ask termites to stop eating your house, you fumigate.
According to the great Congressman from Ohio, Dennis Kucinich, HR 3200 is not as affordable to taxpayers as it’s being represented as.

…Of $2.4 trillion spent annually for health care in America, fully $800 billion goes for the activities of the for-profit insurer-based system. This means one of every three health care dollars is siphoned off for corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing and the cost of paper work, (which can be anywhere between 15 - 35% in the private sector as compared to Medicare, the single payer plan which has only 3% administrative costs).

50 million Americans are uninsured and another 50 million are under insured while for-profit insurance companies divert precious health care dollars to non-health care purposes. Eliminate the for-profit health care system and its extraordinary overhead, put the money into healthcare and everyone will be covered, everyone will be able to afford health care.

HR 676 is simply the best choice for the people of this country when it comes to health care.
It may not be all that great for the corporate whores in the big offices, but then again, why should we care? Our well being certainly isn’t the first priority on their list. Or the second, third, etc.
We’re their watering trough and if we happen to be dry, they pass us up.
They don’t care if your kid dies, or you die, or whoever. They care about profits and because they joyfully put money before people, they have no right to make a dime beyond what we the people allow them to make.

Unlike HR 3200, HR 676 demands universal, single-payer health care in America. Essentially Medicare for all Americans. HR 676 now boasts 93 Cosponsors in congress and the highly impassioned support of physicians and nurses across the nation. HR-676 controls costs and covers all of us. Much like a good, old fashioned neighborhood drug deal, it cuts out the middle man ( a massive chunk of the cost) and hooks up health care directly to you. Medicare acts as the “single payer” of all costs.
This is the perfect system. As close as we’ll ever get anyway.

Time to lean hard on those ridiculous lops (prison yard terminology for Loss of Privileges) we vote for and demand they support the best path to help us care for our selves and our families.
Time to let them all know, especially our President, that just because we voted for them, or are even fond of them, that they work for us and we will have what we want or they will suffer career wise.

HR 676: Single Payer Health Care.
93 Congressional Cosponsors and growing.

Send the mail and make the calls. Let’s get this job done once and for all. Anything less is what we’ll be stuck with and there’s nothing worse than a bad job. And that’s exactly what HR 3200 is, a bad job of lookin’ out.