I’d advocate going for the latter. There will have to be some sort of transition offered to these companies. Or they’re going to lie, cheat, steal, threaten, and have a whole bunch of tantrums. And they’ll outspend us like you wouldn’t believe.
It is imperative that we give them a reason to surrender. If not, we will be facing scorched earth and neither party will like the result. We must give them something to live for.
Proponents of true health care reform have pointed out that these companies have lied, that their ability to even promise savings over whatever time period it was showed that the market wasn’t working, and that the only option was single payer or public insurance.
Opponents of both single payer and public option are coming flat out and saying that in either option private insurance cannot compete so these options shouldn’t be allowed onto the field.
It is true that they'll not be able to compete. Too bad. Standard econometric models break when you look at health care. Demand is infinite and is infinitely elastic. As supply grows demand growth always outpaces supply. That being the case prices inevitably go up and up and up. And that, my friends, is the crux of the matter.
This is not an economic argument. This is about delivering health care to people that need it, when they need it, and not having personal financial catastrophe as a result. Medical care doesn’t follow normal economic rules and it won’t ever do so.
The health care industry, but especially the insurance industry, continues to shovel money to health care lobbyists and stuff money into legislator’s pockets. This is something they’ve been doing for many years. In fact, many of the legal limitations the industry has championed over the years such as not allowing small businesses to join into larger risk pools and lower the cost of insurance for themselves and their employees is something that well may spell the end for them.
As they say on Wall Street, “Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered…” You could ask a lot of people on the left and right, in labor and management, in the stockroom or the board room—I doubt you’d find a lot of fans of the medical insurance industry. To say that they’ve been abusive with using their money to create political clout and get measures passed that have made health insurance more and more expensive is a serious understatement. But really, did they think this would forever?
Miscellaneous Goings On· Oddly (not really odd at all) enough we’ve had another group come out with Swift Boat type ads that claim that the Canadian and the UK National Health Care systems are fundamentally broken and that everyone that lives there hates their health care systems. For some reason they stayed the hell away from the French system which is apparently so good as to disinvite criticism.
According to infomercial I saw Canadians are stampeding across our borders to access the U.S. health care system which is “the best health care system in the world” (this begs the question...if it’s so damn good then why do we all hate it so much?). Then they interviewed real Canadians that had bad experiences with the Canadian Medicare system. These Canadians, all five of them, had nothing good to say. But they were not particularly compelling.
If you look at the basic, publicly available statistics on the Canadian health system and its popularity or lack thereof the argument falls apart. That these contentions are complete nonsense has did not dissuaded the Swift Boaters for Truth any more than it did the last time (basic logic cue—you can’t infer a general case from a list of disconnected specific case and no context).
Strangely enough the creator of this infomercial is the disgraced former CEO of the HCS hospital chain—Rick Scott. Old Rick buddy was forced to resign when HCS was accused and convicted for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. HCS went on to pay the largest single corporate fine in the history of U.S. business--$1.7 billion. Some of the other guys running the show actually went to jail. How Ricky boy avoided it is not known to me and I refuse to waste my time researching the case. But Rick carries some bad karma with him and some of the more fervent supporters of health care reform consider him an amoral psychopath whose policies led to quite a few deaths and, as they say in the health care trade, negative outcomes.
I can see Rickie funding this, but coming out as the spokesman is astoundingly arrogant.
This hit piece has since been thoroughly debunked and discredited and isn’t really out there any longer.
· Then we had the national spectacle of proponents of the single payer option being arrested in Senate chambers when they stood up and very politely asked why they didn’t have a seat at the table during. I watched it. It was very polite. They are all nurses and doctors after all. Senator Max Baucus had them arrested anyway. Then they did it again. And again. They were arrested each time. When one was taken out of the chamber the next would stand up. Frankly, it was great. And while it was very polite—it was also very disruptive. Which it should have been.
· Somehow we had gone from Obama’s contention that “all options were on the table”—to only the options that the insurance industry and their allies deemed acceptable being on the table.
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