(a) There is a relevant article at Common Dreams under which the item can be posted and
(b) I think of cross posting and take the time to do that. I will not cross post everything nor even necessarily the majority of what goes here.
In other words, beginning immediately Unity Progress gets first priority, the automatic tie-in between Common Dreams and Unity is repealed, and therefore the miserable pattern of late postings at Unity will end. None of this is meant to state or imply that I think anything less of Common Dreams, which I continue to look at as the best progressive Site on the Internet. I'm just expanding from the roots, so to speak.
This site will only very seldom show up in Google Search results. If you don't want to lose track of this site, you need to bookmark this site in some way.
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Are they gone yet? I mean the special event guests of Common Dreams stopping by to brow beat and chest pound against the unreformed commies here at Common Dreams, the one and only site among sites with comments and some traffic that I know of that was overwhelmingly against Obama and Big Insurance' Rube Goldberg Care from day one. Firedoglake has been almost as resolute and you have to love Jane Hamsher over there, but even Firedoglake also has a disturbing number of Daily Kos and similar refugees with minds that seem to be seriously watered down by pro Obama corporate mush from the campaign and the early months of Lord Obama’s reign over the peasantry.
No, having read most of the comments, the special guests are thinning out but they are not quite completely gone yet. I see they are still posting their “but it’s better than what we had” and “how can you be so mean as to deny coverage to women and children due to preexisting conditions” riffs. Um, we don’t deny health care to anyone with our plan, not to mention that we don’t even need greedy, monopolistic, health care denying health insurance companies to run our plan. So get a clue before you try the equivalent of lecturing Einstein on physics.
We want our plan which is by far the best plan; we don't want no new plan at all.
Specifically to our guests: first, what is so complicated about understanding that some people will be hurt and some people will be helped by all the new laws? At this time, we can’t say exactly how many will be hurt and exactly how many will be helped, but it is a definite certainty (and admitted up front by the Democrats and the Congressional Budget Office) that there will be large numbers of both.
But is it normal or “to be expected” that major new laws benefit and hurt large (and different) groups of people? Yes, it is normal, that is, it’s normal if you are talking about a third world country! (As examples, removal of food import tariffs in Haiti or privatizations of water in various remote South and Central American countries come to mind.)
But on the good side of town, in the advanced countries, many of which you find in Europe and some of which you find in East Asia, virtually all major new laws benefit many more people than they harm. There are never large groups of people threatening to take up arms against Internal Revenue in those countries, no sir. And in those countries, there’s no “Well, in the years ahead, we’ll just have to keep track of the millions who are helped and the millions who are hurt and then about twenty years from now we’ll know whether the huge new law was a net benefit or a net loss for the citizens.
But it’s going to be a real nail biter. Dan Rather is saying it’s going to be tighter than a tick on a hog on a hot summer day. Laugh out loud. No, in the reputable and credible countries, they know for an absolute fact that the vast majority of people will be helped by major new laws before they even think of passing them. Whereas in the US, both the Democrats and the Republicans recklessly pass laws that are in effect and in part experiments to find out just how many peasants are hurt and just how many are helped.
And whereas, by contrast we know for an absolute fact that various types of single payer based systems work very well for decade after decade because we have more than enough evidence for that from numerous countries throughout the world. Whereas, we have no evidence whatsoever at the moment as to whether Obama's Rube Goldberg Care will work well.
And it almost goes without saying (but I’ve learned from experience you should say most of the “goes without sayings”) that no country other than the United States would seriously consider what actually just passed in the US, a particularly obnoxious, dangerous, and ironic combination of regressive taxation, restrictions on health care freedom, cuts to existing programs, and on the plus side curtailments of many of the most egregious violations of humanity of health insurance companies. ("Whew, that was one whopper of a price paid to stop pre-existing condition and rescission. I can’t imagine what the price the peasants will have to pay if WellPoint and the rest are to be forbidden from being monopolies! I think the peasants will be wearing togas and eating worms from the back yard if we go for anti-trust reform or the public option, so we better stop now.")
Second, what is so complicated about understanding that only in Wonderland can you look at the health care effects only while ignoring the effects on jobs and the economy as a whole? If the new laws prevent the labor market from recovering (to whatever extent it could without those laws which even I would say has to be to some extent) then Obama and company will be responsible for the worst and most reckless economic mismanagement since the Hoover and those who in 1935 and 1936 told Franklin Roosevelt that the Depression was over and it was time to get back to fiscal discipline (which resulted in many more Depression years featuring an extremely low stock market and many more years of additional job losses and lack of new jobs). Obama and company are gambling with the economy in general and with the job market in particular (not that they really care about your job or anyone else's job) but as I already implied, at least historians, who are sort of a “Super CBO,” will care.
Later, Dreamers.
A long discussion was generated by this intentionally provocative article. (Is anything I write not "intentionally provocative," laugh out loud?) Both the original article and the discussion about the article and about my response to the article (above) are here.
Here is by far my favorite among the postings in the discussion generated by my posting:
ardent1 March 28th, 2010 11:07 am
Look, Scott. I think that you are simply playing deaf. Obama called this an 'health care insurance reform' and though that is partially incorrect since it really doesn't even reform the insurance racket, at least it gets it right about this not even being any reform of health care itself. Don't you get it? I don't want health insurance but want health care coverage. The two are not the same at all, Dude! 'Your' insurance will not get you health care coverage much of the time. Your money (lots of it if you have that) will though, since 'care' has been made into a commodity by the US government controlled by the Big Business community.
Even with health care coverage in this country, you get an abomination and Obama and the Democrats don't even pretend to address that. For one example... do you really want the government to put you into a Big Business run 'nursing home' in a box when you get older? Do you really want the government to guarantee that you be 'treated' (tortured) to death if, God forbid, you came down with incurable cancer? The medical community in the US has no standards hardly, since the care given to you is seen as a commodity on a profit making assembly line. You get about as much quality control as a hamburger does at Wendy's on that assembly line.
Public community health does not exist in the US. It was all privatized and mainly disassembled decades ago. You have the CDC when you really need sick leave guaranteed to sick workers now having to work for minimum wage while ill. You have Planned Parenthood (maybe?) instead of single payer for all health issues being available. There are so many issues here that would fall under real health care reform. However we are talking only about what Obama calls only semi-correctly as 'health insurance reform'. Yes, it is about health insurance. No it is not a reform of even that, but a forced bailout of this racket to be paid for by those who hardly ever benefit form the so-called care that will then be DOLED out to some of them ONLY.
You want to believe in this 'reform' more than a Jesus Freak wants to believe in 'salvation' through Jesus. We just aren't buying your religion though no matter how starry eyed and vacant faced you get about it. Sorry... There just is no Obama, Pal. There just is no 'reform' being made. This plan is a deform of a deformity, not a reform. Get it yet?
To answer your question of .... "Do you think keeping the current healthcare system in place would provide you with better care and benefits than the reform?'
Yes actually I do. I think that from having next to nothing guaranteed by the current situation, that now I will actually have to pay for that next to nothing even more than I already do because of this Deform legislation put into motion by the Democrats. That's sad but exactly how I see the sad situation unfolding. It is a proposal designed to allow the current disintegration of Health Care to hold together by threads yet still longer, by victimizing the working poor even more! How sick is that, Scott?
'If you do, I hope you are wrong. I find it hard to believe so many people know exactly how this all is going to unfold.'
Well nobody does, least of all yourself, Scott. But I think that it is easy to see that the Democrats have advanced nothing of this cause for any of us Working Class folk. Why should they? They are a corporate made party made for the corporate class to act against the rest of us. You don't seem to get that though? This is deform legislation made to help the insurance business stay in operation at our expense.
Both the original article and the discussion about the article and about my response to the article (which is above) are here.
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