Is the individual mandate really the hill progressives want to die on?

Too true! I never seriously considered that the conservatives might kill the mandate alone. You’re right, that would be hilarious. Not really, but entertaining in a bitter way. But not in a million years will Scalito and Thomas let that happen. They completely lack the intelligence, imagination and creativity for a stunt like that. Plus, that would not please their minders, who are the same minders who own POTUS. But Obama spending the last 6 months of his presidency dismantling “his legacy” (as Digby calls it in her delusions) would be such poetic justice.

I’d want to just strike down the individual mandate and leave the rest in place, because I would laugh myself sick every night watching Obama have to kill the bill himself,

That would be great theater, and might be the only thing cheering me up this election season. Consider the situation in which either the mandate or the entire law gets ruled unconstitutional: the White House has NO contingency plan. Fucking hilarious.

I’m with Glen Ford on this, and think that Obama is the more effective evil than the Rs, not the lesser evil.

I’m still of the opinion that the Court will uphold the mandate — the so-called health reform was all about how to funnel taxpayer money to the insurance companies and hospitals. The Roberts Court has never seen a business privilege that it didn’t fall on its knees offering up to its friends.

The alternative is to see the Court as more interested in being an electoral politics player. They may have come to that, living in the elite bubble. But as you say, the Republicans don’t even want the presidency. They can get more from Obama, and all the craptacular policy and its results gets blamed on liberalism.

Fact is, though, that “public option’s” salient characteristic is ability to fool progressives into believing it’s either a panacea or a good foothold, regardless of its size and terms. Qualifiers like “robust” and “strong” and big size targets reliably fall away.

Not saying you’d be fooled by a shitty version of “public option,” but keeping that sneaky chameleon on the table is an invitation for fool-me-twice by most left/lib/progressives.

It’s a goal on wheels that the powers that be move around… and the hip “public option” advocates love to get everyone chasing it. Doesn’t the big blogs’ and activist groups’ track record from the year of healthcare reform debate speak for itself to that effect?

@vastleft

I’d love to see the big blogs financials from the time around the health care debate. There must be a better reason that they banned all talk about single payer (and mocked commenters who brought it up) and pushed “public option.” I mean – I hope some money changed hands, and it wasn’t merely ass-kissing and strategy phone calls from the West Wing.

This is a very good post and discussion.

Vast-Left and/or Ian, could you please stop disagreeing with each other? I love you both to death and the disagreement is making my heart hurt.

As for predilictating on the outcome, it’s an interesting case of the immovable object and unstoppable force. The silly hyper-partisanship that is very real (remember Bush v. Gore) vs. the fact in Washington that money writes policy, and you would expect a Roberts Court to follow suit in that respect.

So will they be good party members or good special interest cronies? I think the court has broken enough from its history of an appearance of independence with the advent of Roberts that we can pretty much lump them in with the rest of Washington and say they’ll rule according to the money. Also, Wall Street doesn’t seem to be worried in the least.

Of course, like most around these parts, I’m definitely rooting for a mandate-kill, definitely for the entertainment value, but also for the fact that the stock of single-payer will rise, slightly.

@LorenzoStDuBois, it is awfully rare for me to disagree with Ian.

But I have nominated myself to be the “public option” police, nagging people to reconsider treating it as a lost opportunity, because its essential characteristic was and remains being a tool for squandering the opportunity for real HCR.

It’s a huge blight on progressive policy debate, and barely anyone is prepared to come to terms with how and why it came to be the coin of the realm and at the cost of diverting interest from quite popular ideas like single-payer. It’s a zombie that few people recognize for the threat it is.

@LorenzoStDuBois, first I’ve heard of it, thanks! I guess my free-speech zone got a little smaller.

well, from a European perspective the US debate about socialized medicine and such sounds outright crazy.
Not that we Europeans found the golden rule.
Far from that.
But the French, German, British medical systems have about half the expenses of the US-system.
You know that.

This is a complex issue.
The US-system has legal issues, to protect doctors and clinics from costly legal battles.
This feeds a whole foodchain of profiteers, e.g. lawyers.
Pharmaceutical company-propaganda and the outright creation of ‘illnesses’ are another case.

This is no market, because a sick individual is no ‘homo oeconomicus’, but a person needing care, and a rationality, replacing their temporarily missing one, carefully restoring their autonomy.
Such a system is lacking globally, but at least it could be a perspective, what would be the right thing to do.

The Republican fringe does not seem to understand this (democrats not so different) , and seems to say:
Care for yourself, and pay for it, or die. Under any circumstance.

See all that as a self-serving system, where the sick individual is an object of exploitation.

The overarching issue seems to be a a politics of fear, disguised as a politics of self-empowerment.
The retardesd lot of republicans seems to live in a 19th-century world. Indians, guns, scalps, fights, law in statu nascendi.

And it works quite well.

I call this infantile regression.
It is not the gun in your hand, but the thumb in your mouth.

Interesting points…

1) Both the Obama Administration and the bill opponents are arguing that the mandate is an essential and integral part of the bill, and cannot be severed. The court had to appoint its own advocate, H. Bartow Farr, to argue that it was severed. AND…the usual severability clause was removed from the bill before final passage.

So, we are left to conclude that Obama and the Republicans agree that from their point of view, they’d rather see the whole bill be struck down rather than just the individual mandate (because then it becomes a marginally better law).

-StewartM

The progressives … as a whole, I’m sure there are exceptions … are a lot worse that I had thought they were back in 2009. I actually thought back then that they stood for something more than blindly backing obama and the democratic party and would eventually come around and realize that obama was nothing more than the head pr man of the establishment who dutifully represented the plutocrats’ interests over ours. Well, they got more than enough proof to come to that conclusion … actually the fisa bill turnabout and sellout before he ever got into office should have been enough for that … but they still loyally back obama and the dems no matter what the hell they do even when he does things that were worse than the things they used to jump all over bush for back when they used to posture like they had principals. It’s been quite a spectacle and they have accomplished very little except to continue to corral people into their tribe and get them to vote for the extremely corrupt democratic party and try to co-opt and thwart any movements from the left that don’t pledge their allegiance to their precious party.

Now they are off on their latest stunt: obfuscating the issues about the aca bill. But hey, I suppose they have to back “their” president during an election year. Except that he ain’t their president, they’re his idiots.

Z

With luck the Roberts Court will die on that hill.

Circle, circle, circle…

To groo:

Yes, our “healthcare” system treats the sick as profit centers and no more.

But you give what sounds a bit much like the reich-wing slant when you say: “The US-system has legal issues, to protect doctors and clinics from costly legal battles. This feeds a whole foodchain of profiteers, e.g. lawyers.”

First, there DO exist incompetent doctors, the effects of whose, sometimes hideous, mistakes are legitimately revealed and repaid. No injured patient could possibly represent themselves in court and the incessant demands for “tort reform” are no more than an effort to limit access of the individual to the legal system.

Two, the reputedly outrageous cost for malpractice insurance is on the order of 1% of healthcare costs and perhaps 5% of the healthcare insurance “overhead.” Of course, who, exactly, is to blame for the horror stories of doctors having to quit practice due to excessive INSURANCE costs? No “tort reform” legislation would ever include malpractice insurance caps.

The medical insurance industry “overhead,” variously quoted at 15-20%, is comprised of executive bonuses, armies of workers finding ways to refuse/reduce payment and the legions of THEIR OWN expensive lawyers to cover them all.

Medicare is reputed to operate at 2-3% overhead. Perhaps this is why our proudly, and aggressively, ignorant teabaggers want the government to keep it’s hands off “their” Medicare.

Are European doctors perfect? How does your system deal with patients injured by medical malpractice?

vastleft PERMALINK
April 3, 2012
@Phil, the big Professional Left pushers of the “public option” included Open Left (Chris Bowers, in particular), Firedoglake (primarily Jane Hamsher and house HCAN fixture Jason Rosenbaum), Digby, and activist groups like MoveOn. And, lest we forget, Howard Dean, “paid advocate for interest groups that would find few fans among the progressive voters,” whose “Stand with Dr. Dean” campaign helped seduce early supporters of the great HCR nothingburger.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That’s a pretty good compilation; the galoot’s of one side against the galoots of the other; who needs galoots?
None of us who cherish our individuality.
But then, some of us stay just outside of the crush…

I wrote a long screed here but deleted it, since y’all don’t want to read it. I simply cannot understand in what universe you would think that if Obamacare/Romneycare hadn’t passed, single-payer would be any closer. News flash: single-payer true universal health insurance (==care) isn’t and never was an actual part of the discussion, Obamacare wasn’t promulgated as a way to prevent the route to the Promised Land.

The reason why progressives fear the Supreme Court on the mandate front is that the arguments against the mandate are in a fundamental way identical to the arguments against single payer. They are the arguments against anything that looks, even symbolically, to be an extension of insurance/care to the uninsured.

The universe in which it is not a literal negotiation between roughly equal partners. In that universe, single payer is brought to the table, summarily rejected for communism, and nothing happens for some unpredictable amount of time later, until something similar to Obamacare is passed by a Republican administration and upheld by the Supreme Court.

THAT universe.

The underlying problem is that it is not possible in the USA to have a discussion about “proven solutions” to real problems, because there is the deadweight of a huge chunk (a minority, but large enough) of the public who are willfully and knowingly accepting of corrupt media bamboozlement, who have a vicious mentality, and who have brownshirted political unity about certain issues.

In that universe, there only solutions that remain are to (1) permit collapse of some sort or (2) negotiate with one hand tied behind one’s back with entities whose maximum is much higher than any rational minimum. The insurance industry had to be enlisted in a (yes, certainly) corrupt compromise to prevent imminent collapse (in case you want to believe that I would ascribe altruistic motives to the principals here).

But that is relitigating 2009 onwards. Which we can do all over again for fun, I suppose, but I don’t want to waste that time.

When it comes to the Supreme Court, here and now, the individual mandate and single payer and all of a piece. They are seen as accomplishing the same end—allowing the socialization of risk for ordinary people—and that privilege is verboten and reserved only for the rich and powerful. The mandate would be allowed if it were the Republicans who passed it under a Republican president (or there would be no question, since we don’t have the judgement yet and it could be in favour of the mandate). But right now any policy on health care, when passed by a Democrat, generates the wrong symbol.

John Puma,

…Are European doctors perfect? How does your system deal with patients injured by medical malpractice?…

No.
Ofcourse not.

In my country doctors are very protected from malpractice.
It got better (from a patients perspective), but still has to get better. And it will. The ‘system’ has some flexibility to the better side.

What the REAL problem -methinks- is, is the pharmaceutical companies.
They have the REAL lobbying power, and, as a side-effect, also protect their front(wo)men, the doctors.
In Europe eg there was the Contergan scandal of the 1960s, with 10000 people affected.
Another case would be the recent silicon-breast-implant-scandal, where industrial silicone has been used.
And there are lots of comparable other cases.
The companies either went bankrupt already or pay a minimal fee.
To ruin a life costs approx 50-100k$.
In the US this maybe 50million, with 40million going to the lawyer.
What a wonderful world.
The fight against the Cuban approach as displayed by Michael Moore, has some plausibility, right?
Because the Cuban healthcare-system is diametrically opposed to the US-American one, and is approx. >10times more efficient, the US-Ciceros repeatedly say: “Ceterum censeo, Cuba deletam esse” (pun intended.)

Thanks to the army of lawyers the system is kept alive.
This is lobbying by another name.

Now, what makes medicare so expensive in the US?
Double that of other industrialized countries, and possibly severalfold that, what it needs to be, without any loss of efficiency, measured as average life-expectancy.

Final question.
Why do you think that the US is deadlast in the industrialized world wrt to this ‘efficiency-measure’?

The system is ‘efficient’ wrt the system, not the patients.
It is parasitic in the genuine sense, and you have to find out why the parasite, which originally should be a symbiont, has grown to such monstrous proportions, that it nowadays, as some say, has has invested the brain, and convinced the host, that this is all in the hosts best interest.
This nearly sound as a right-wing-conspiracy. It is not!

It is a constant fight, to be sure.
Everywhere.

NB:
And because all follies in the US are role models for the rest of the west, count me as concerned.

G.
OK?

Mandos, did you forget the procedure by which laws are passed? Wholly owned politicians of one or both parties pass them. But it’s all for the best in the only possible of all possible worlds.

Mandos, did you forget the procedure by which laws are passed? Wholly owned politicians of one or both parties pass them. But it’s all for the best in the only possible of all possible worlds.

Sure. If you believe that that is the only factor involved here, then what you would be thinking about is how to own a party.

Or is it the case that all of this was just about validating your magical thinking? About giving you an excuse to draw sophomoric cartoons spewing contempt for well-meaning mainstream liberals? Because, of course, grassroots political coalitions are built on sneering contempt for well-meaning members of the majority…

To groo:

What fraction of the total medical system cost goes to protect doctors from malpractice claims?

Everything in the US is magnified well beyond logical extremes. I do not deny large settlements are announced, just that very few are “paid in full.” This another function of the corporations’ trial lawyers, to allow the “legal” refusal to pay judgments. There is no mechanism to assure enforcement of court awards.

As Mandos has pointed out, the double standard ignores, or even glorifies the legal technicians of the rich, but the individual plaintiff and his/her attorney are demonized for considering a suit against the insurance companies.

While the reich-media fulminates about “excessive” settlements to individuals there is essentially NO discussion that most settlements are awarded in, and most of the courts’ time is taken up with, corporate claims against other corporations.

I see no great difference in the insurance (all forms) and pharmaceutical industries. They are close enough in reprehensibility to not warrant the effort to determine which is worse.

Why are US healthcare costs so high? Good question.

In general, we are the seat of predatory capitalism. We are (or were) generally wealthy, so something as important as maximizing longevity and enjoyability of life is not a right as any rational, compassionate, LIFE-LOVING society would insist but no more than another way to turn a handsome profit.

Also, while there are hardly any unions left to trash, the strong doctors’ union, the AMA, limits the number of physicians allowed in the supply and demand game. Double standard again.

A couple articles:
http://tinyurl.com/bs59pdf
http://tinyurl.com/ck4t5x4

A google search will have you hip deep in them.

Speaking of magical thining..

As Jon Chait and Ezra Klein have (belatedly) noted in the last few days, Medicare can be expanded with a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill. Think about it. Obama had 59, and then. for a few months, 60 Dem votes in the Senate. He needed every single one to pass Obamacare. If he had pushed a Medicare for All bill (even Ted Kennedy’s watered down version that’d let consumers opt out for private insurance), he only needed 50 Senate votes to pass it, with Joe Biden breaking the tie.
Unless you’re going to rationalize away everything Obama does as the best, smartest, bravest thing anyone could possibly do, there is no non-corrupt reason for Obama walking away from a 50 vote plan in order to enact a 60 vote plan, especially when the former had the added advantage of being constitutional.

OK, so we are going to relitigate this again:

If he had pushed a Medicare for All bill (even Ted Kennedy’s watered down version that’d let consumers opt out for private insurance), he only needed 50 Senate votes to pass it, with Joe Biden breaking the tie.

Senators 51 through 60 were an alibi. For anyone who (quite possibly justly) believes that the US political system is thoroughly corrupt, and that it’s not just a few bad Dem eggs, why would you imagine that if push really came to shove, Senators 25 through 50 would have come through on the reconciliation thing? They felt safe in publicly supporting various version of the ACA because they had Joe Lieberman to hide behind. Joe Lieberman, who had no shame about publicly nixing anything that looked like it would disintermediate the private insurance companies, and saying openly that was why he did it!

My Mainstream allies? I think the so-called liberals/progressives pushing the badly-named Affordable Care Act as progressive are a bunch of fucking idiots.

Eh, I was mostly taking another jab at Vastleft and his cute little cartoon series and T-shirt line.

If it’s so predictable, please explain it to me. Hinge it on an actual legal principle, please.

Why? On which legal principle was Bush v. Gore hinged, aside from Scalia’s “We wants it”? IANAL, but I could see some kind of hacked up interpretation of the takings clause being deployed. ie, insurers don’t want to cover the old so Medicare>65 isn’t depriving them of a market, etc. Who knows, like I said, IANAL, but almost anything can be read into the constitution, especially by “originalists” or whatever they’re calling themselves today.

“I’m going with the “more effective evil” monicker that I’ve been hearing lately.”

That’s fine, but I just can’t abide “lesser evil”.

Yes, there are far too many progressives who want to die on that hill. Who can blame them? After all, there’s nothing more romantic than losing a hopeless battle over something that wasn’t worth fighting for in the first place.

I hope that the mandate is killed, but the Medicaid expansion is not. That strikes me both rational and supported by precedent. IANAL, and what I think is rational is probably a contrary indicator to what the Supreme Court will do. It’s certainly been a contrary indicator to what the other two branches of government have done recently.

… anything to support “their” president.

Z

there’s no good reason to declare this [ACA] unconstitutional … Weakening the legal authority the Federal government derives from the commerce clause

The ACA’s use of the Commerce Clause is unprecedented, and even the Congressional Research Service said that it its constitutionality is “unclear”. I really don’t see how the mandate can be constitutional.

Progressives are already dead, they just don’t know it. They’ve been dead for quite some time now. They’re Zombies. There’s a reason Zombie movies are en vogue these days….it’s because there are so many walking about these days, IRL. It’s perfect metaphor for society and goes hand in hand with the vampire craze that’s so ubiquitous these days.

Night of The Living Progressives IV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5IRI4oHKNU

It’s way too late for them “to say they’re sorry” (per the song), not that they would, anyway. Zombies are not responsible for their behavior. How could they be. They’re not alive.

And these are the progressives … like moveon.org … that later threatened to primary any democrats that voted against a bill that DIDN’T have a public option in it.

If the supremes just sever the individual mandate … and keep the rest of the bill completely intact … not only would it be fun watching obama trying to dismantle his own bill becoz it doesn’t have the mandate (while still attempting to conceal the obvious truth that he was blatantly looking out for corporate interests in this bill over the people’s), it would also be awfully amusing watching moveon.org changing their position from first demanding a public option in the bill; to then threatening to primary any democrat that voted against a bill that DIDN’T have a public option in it a week later (because of all the “good things” in it); to now taking the stance that the bill is completely unacceptable if we aren’t forced to buy insurance from private for-profit insurance companies. They’d probably swing it though, and file it all under “we got to support our president during an election year”.

Z

There isnt a difference between giving up and being on the sidelines, and if you’re still spending time to pay attention that objectively makes it more pitiful. I’ve read your blog for sometime now, ever more impressed but always dismayed ok you’re smarted or more practiced than me something constructive more often would be nice. You say you spent years trying and now you’re done, cant win dont try; the path is to a lower quality of life, how is slower worse than nothing. Impeding the elite is better than stepping aside, this wont end anytime soon regardless slowing it down reduces the chance of irreverisable domination.

I think Jane Hamsher distinguished herself from the rest on that list becoz at least she exposed the obama administration’s duplicity and corrupt backroom deals, aggressively whipped for the public option, reported on the progressive caucus’ caving, and didn’t later turn face and lobby her readers to support a bill WITHOUT a public option.

Was she wrong to muffle the calls for single payer on her blog? Yeah, I believe so for multiple reasons. But, again, at least she didn’t acquiesce to the obama administration’s call to support the piece of shit that the bill turned out to be.

Z

Bruce Wilder
April 4, 2012

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You hit the important points, at least for me; powerlessness, the necessity for radical change, and denial. Denial floats back and forth, between the beginning and the end of the problem, IMO.
Thus my intransigent pessimism. IME, true change isn’t incremental; it’s sudden and generally radical. The truth of this is an oft taught aspect of Buddhist mystics regarding human nature.
True change is most difficult and in these times of intended/directed turmoil, it becomes even more difficult.

Bruce Wilder,
Good to hear from you, occasionaly.
You stopped commenting on economistsview sometime ago. Which is a pity.

Anyway.
On the healthcare-issue, I find it astounding, that countries do not learn from each other.
On a rational level, one would think, that countries learn from each other, which system is best.

But this does not happen. There are always arguments, why system A does not apply to society B.
This maybe the case in a restricted sense, because beliefs and habits are different, but the vested interests are so much stronger than any rational discourse, that this seems impossible.
TINA, ‘freedom’ and other memes do the job of keeping the systems as they are.

This is a global syndrome, where the leader –the US more often than not– sets the agenda.

This is not away from a conspiracy, which it actually is.
The international corporations set the agenda in their specific fields, and i am quite sure that thhey have have task-forces for all the key countries, to advance their agenda.
They are not in lockstep, but the general direction is clear.

See this:
http://exiledonline.com/the-one-percents-doctrine-for-the-rest-of-us-slavery-feudalism-la-da-da-dee-dee-dee/
By Mark Ames.
Ofcourse he is right.
He tells the story from his angle, and it converges on a common theme, which is always the same.

The US-system, as the center of the capitalist universe, immunized itself by majority rule, ie generating a two-party-system, gerrymandering, party-donations, election-sponsoring by corporations and so on.

The US-election-system is the heart of darkness, to borrow Joseph Conrad’s term.
I don’t know whether you Americans recognize that.

As a result, the American system is immunized against ANY substantial change.
As a second result, this will -by necessity- propagate through ALL western nations with some delay.
But there will come a point, where this smoothing out does not work anymore, and the whole edifice, called the ‘west’, will collapse, quite similar to the collapse of the soviet bloc.

But we all know that here.

I preach to the choir.

Sorry.

Yeah, it’s when things get out of the power structure’s control that change breaks loose. As long as things go slow they have time to adapt their strategies to keep it contained. Look at the OWS movement: it went a lot further than expected, but it’s going to have a lot more difficult time matching that gradient of build up this time becoz the authorities are ready for it.

This coincidentally is why obama is the biggest danger to the citizens of this country in my opinion, not only has he been able to mute groups that would have been against his actions if they were administered by almost anyone else becoz he’s a democrat and he’s black, but he also is a cold, calculating bastard that moves forward with his fascist agenda methodically and incessantly, yet not fast enough to awaken the subjects … which tells you the subjects are damn near in a coma becoz he’s moved pretty damn quick.

Z

Ian,
OT but I just read a book you would love, Alan Taylor’s “The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels & Indian Allies”. It focuses on the American invasions of Canada, which I knew virtually nothing about until this book (freakin’ Laura Secord!). :o)
The most astounding part is how the US more or less threw the fight by letting bondholders dictate military strategy. The more things change, the more they stay the same I guess.
http://books.google.com/books?id=0nYRpx1X46YC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA269#v

Considering that was 1812 Beowulf, what must that say about the Civil War……that Rorschach War which has become whatever the beholder has wanted it to become based off of the beholder’s conscious and unconscious predilections.

groo
April 6, 2012

Is this any different from the late Romans, who maintained the ‘life’ of empire by imposing the dictum of ‘death’ in their adversaries, not ever trying to understand in their late phase?
Watching Fox news is probably not very different from going into the colloseum.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Boy, you said a mouthful! And no argument here on your observations.
That closing sentence is killer! Cheers…

I don’t know about dying on a hill, but:

“We should be preparing to riot in the streets the day the ACA ruling is handed down”

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/04/06/100078/#comment-3164877

Ian, don’t forget the Pig War, though I think only one shot was fired and the only casualty was the pig.

“Canadians still like to point out that in the only war we fought against the US we burnt down the White House.”

Ha, yeah and the Capitol Building too. When Tony Blair gave a speech to Congress in 2003, he brought down the house (so to speak) with this:
“On our way down here, Senator Frist was kind enough to show me the fireplace where, in 1814, the British had burnt the Congress Library. I know this is kind of late, but sorry.”

Pepe: Jason Rosebaum at FDL, who was forced to disclose his affiliation by single payer advocates, also worked for so-called “public option” weasels HCAN’t, which was funded by SEIU. He proceeded to print HCAN’t propaganda and never, not once, linked to or covered a single payer story. That’s how the news blackout worked at FDL. Money changes everything…..

Wow. A pair of blockquotes really screwed up that comment. Sorry about that.

I think some folks are too caught up tagging anyone who even mentions the public option as someone who “took the bait” on it. Many times the discussions on the public option are just being used as an example of how intellectually corrupt that progressive groups are. For even though a lot of us, myself included, were for single payer, it says a hell of a lot that these progressive groups, even after making their initial compromise to basically black out any single payer talk before the negotiations even began, later, after claiming that the public option HAD to be included in any health care reform bill and stating that they wouldn’t support a bill without it, turned on a dime … under the direction of the obama administration … and tried to downplay the importance of the public option and then pushed their followers to support the bill anyway.

Yes, they were wrong for not aiming for single payer from the get-go … and that was their worst mistake in my opinion … but then, even on top of that, the fucking hypocrites turned face on the public option as well.

Whether or not the “deal” was with the hospital lobby or not, it was more for the insurance companies and was part of a bunch of intertwining deals that I’d bet heavy money on was primarily directed towards the insurance companies’ interests. The whole hospital thing just gave the obama administration some plausible deniability on accusations that they directly traded off the the coverage for pre-conditions and community rating by forcing americans to buy insurance from the crooked, for-profit insurance companies.

Z

I think the insurance lobby had a defense in depth strategy. Their preference was Obamacare, status quo, Public Option and (God forbid) single payer.

They already had their trenches built for single payer (if their worst fears were realized, they cold still lobby that the template should be the existing Medicare Advantage system of private insurers funded directly by the govt); They gave money to the Democrats (Max Baucus and his ilk) to get exactly the corporate welfare plan they really wanted; they secretly gave money to the Chamber of Commerce to defend the status quo (that may have been more about staying in good standing with the corporate plutocrats who own the Chamber); and they gave money to public option groups (once they figured out how to quietly drain it any usefulness). Even if the PO groups had won, it would have a “robust public option” that maybe a few million unprofitable customers could pay for out of pocket, everyone else would be stuck with the dog food Max Baucus was serving.

There was no need for the insurers to muddy the waters by endorsing the public option since Medicare for All was DOA, but they had laid the groundwork for it to be their second to last (Medicare Advantage being last) firewall against a single payer plan wiping them out. Its possible the hospitals were acting as their stalking horse in demanding Obama kill the PO, more likely the hospitals didn’t get the memo that the PO was really about PR.

slight correction, sorry:
…
This profit-maximizing scheme (pharmaceuticals+doctors+lawyers9 seems to be about double the average in Europe.
And even here it is a already scandal!
…
This profit-maximizing scheme in the US (pharmaceuticals + doctors + lawyers) seems to be about double that of the average in Europe.
And even here it is a already scandal!
…
sorry.
I write this, and then there are those embarrassing errors.
Beg your pardon. Being a nonnative speaker is not really an excuse.
I have to express myself correctly.
At least in the lingua franca.

On the other hand:
In my own idiom we are proud to be misunderstood. This maybe provincial, but maybe you understand. Being misunderstood is a linguistic defense-mechanism against the dominant dogma of the language of power.
(“He speaks 10 languages, but does not know the way.” This rarely does apply to the Americans, who typically are mired in THEIR single language. How do they understand, compare?)

Petro,

😉
G.

Z,

the more I think and read about the issue, the clearer it becomes to me:

The health-care issue is just another class-war-issue in disguise.
Such, that the gullible do not recognize it as what it is.

We have a well-hidden history of class-divide, which mutates from outright slavery to feudalism and capitalism in its diverse incarnations.

What all have in common, is that the elite of its time uses a variant mixture of force and propaganda, to further their immortal agenda.
Which is: live off other people’s means. Their supreme goal.

Methods vary over time.

One revealing statement is this:

“…everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”
-Arthur Young; 1771

The health-care-issue is just another tool to make You afraid. The more the better.

The perverse situation is, that the lower -active voting- strata of society
can be aligned to the ideology of the elite (1%).
This works more often than not.
With a little help from the 10% profiteers.
So add this up:
the solid 1%, plus 20% energized idiots with IQ <80, plus 10% profiteers whom you have to pay a decent, but, well, adequate salary, and you win most elections, considering 40% nonvoters.

As an armchair capitalist, who has nothing to do the whole day, you just manipulate the percentages, which mostly go into your direction.
For the rest of the day you can go fishing and sailing and partying, or go to a vernissage, meet friends, avoiding the Bernie Madoffs, ofcourse. Life is difficult.

I stop here and put the rest in a second post.

Of course they would like to die on a hill like that, they would like to die on a hill, that’s better than to live where they live in low place…

Well I just wanted to give em some type of rational, for their behavior, go up on to a hill, and die! that might be the onliest thing such idiots could ever do, other than be some piece of crap cannon fodder, or other useful idiotic trash.

Petro,
The commenting crowd at ‘the Exiled’ is quite a grim one.

Needless to say that I like (most of) them.

A lot of humanist anarchists, who know about the futlity of their aspirations.
As we do.
Right?
But the fight goes on.

A couple of months ago I ordered two books by Perelman from the US, plus two others.
It took six weeks of delivery.

The customs noticed me that the delivery has been inspected.
Four books sent from an obsure small publisher, publishing -ahem- Marxist publications.

Tells it all. McCarthy reloaded
As George Carlin said. “nobody notices, nobody cares.”
Right?

Suppose I am on the no-fly-list now.
But I do not intend to visit ‘the land of the Free’ anymore in the rest of my lifetime.
So it does not matter.

G.

Off course not! The whole deal is to obfuscate, obliterate, make impossible the onliest thing that is correct: Single Payer. But as many have come to see, and to observe, USA America, is not the country that we fought for,,, anymore….

We in America today, are under attack by a kind of internal… fifth column… a take down of our country by the bastards of … finance…. the captured govenment apperatchikis… these are some of the problems… we will need to find ways to bring back our wonderfull country, that has been hyjacked.

we might even have to employ things, from the past!! to get it right.

Groo, thanks for the heads up, I appreciate your concerne… X’ ten… also, you are so helpfull Groo!… well at least I got one little comback… I think however, that if I were to interpolate… I could derive not too good of a thing.

And to your use of the term: Frustrated… of course, aren’t most of us a little ferusterated… in these times?.. Fusterated… Oh Yeah! you bet ya!….

SO you got some answeres for us on the “Fusterated ” do you… !! ?? !!