It Lives! [Supposedly]
Over at Corrente Hipparchia takes a look at what the House hath wrought: HR 3200: the House Health Care Deform bill.
No matter how bad you thought this bill might be, trust me, it’s worse. This is an asystematic collection of the worst ideas associated with the concept of “health care reform”. There is nothing in this bill that will offer any real improvements for patients or doctors. There is nothing in this bill that offers any cost containment.
The process of legislation has too often been compared to the making of sausage, which is insulting to sausage makers. CMOT Dibbler has never offered for purchase anything as bad as this in his entire career.
That the House leadership announced this with great fanfare shows how totally incompetent and out of touch they are.
People can’t compete with the insurance mafia on campaign contributions even in the best of times, which this isn’t, but perhaps if the politicians see large scale changes from Democrat to independent they’ll realize that they screwed up.
13 comments
cut-me-own-throat…
how apropos.
There are a number of people in the Democratic leadership who remind me of Dibbler.
I’m still chugging through the bill, but I thus far have not spotted anything that changes my conclusions from reading the draft, which is that it solves the access and deadbeat problems, but not the costs problem.
I’m a bit more optimistic about this bill than Hipparchia is. Despite its cost and complexity, it does solve *half* the problem — the access half — and should make no overall difference in and of itself in health care spending. Still, as you say, it is sausage. Reading it, I can see all the stuffing that various wonks working for various Congressmen have stuffed into it. This bill is pretty much every health care reform idea ever proposed (other than single-payer) since and including the HillaryCare fiasco in 1993. HR676 is far, far preferable, but let’s face it, HR676 isn’t going to get passed unless President Obama gets on board and says “pass it”, and that’s not happening for whatever reason. (My own personal thought: He doesn’t give a sh*t. He promised health care reform, all he cares about is it gets a checkmark off of his campaign promises list).
So yeah, the bill half-sucks. But given the fact that what we got now is full-suck, and we got a President who thinks half-suck fulfills his campaign promises just fine (and it’s actually better than the plan he proposed in his campaign — which I blasted in no uncertain terms as a fiasco that would wreck the U.S. healthcare system), well. I don’t know where we go from here. Maybe half-suck is the best we can do for now.
– Badtux the Glass-half-full Penguin
There is no public plan until 2013, so people without insurance are screwed for four more years. If you have a terrible plan at work, you get stuck with it.
This is to protect the insurance mafia while fooling people into believing there will be ponies.
Another mandate on small business, and the self-employed, to keep them in their place and unable to compete with corporations.
Well, the current system is that we get a public plan, well, *never*, so that’s another glass-half-empty situation. I’m seeing a half-full glass, you’re seeing a half-empty glass, we’re both right, either way it’s better than a completely empty glass which is what we got *now*.
.-= ´s last blog ..New GOP talking point: House plan outlaws private health insurance =-.
i’m seeing a glass with some spit left at the bottom: This is to protect the insurance mafia while fooling people into believing there will be ponies says it all.
i see nothing that keeps the insurance companies from continuing to deny claims and distort the way medicine is practiced. they are largely rersponsible for the fragmentation of our system, not the rise in the number of specialists., and that’s just the beginning of their crimes against health.
the fact that they’re thieves on top of being murderers is just icing on the cake. cake, as in let them eat…
the access part isn’t truly solved either, since the optimistic estimate is that it still leaves 1/3 of the uninsured uninsured. moving a little closer to reality, since it’s unlikely to control costs to the extent that its designers are expecting, the money for subsidies isn’t going to be there at the level they’re expecting either. massachusetts, anyone?
speaking of massachusetts, they only managed, at great cost, to insure about half of their uninsured. sure they reached 96-96-97% insured, but they started off with one of the highest percentages of insured in the country, something like 92-93% insured before ‘reform’. and here it is 3 years later, and they’re already looking at purposely dropping some of their insured because of lack of money.
in the 3-4 years it will take to design and build the exchanges [assuming all goes as expected], and for the money that’s going to be spent on that, we could instead have been running medicare-for-all and private insurance side-by-side, allowing people to gradually switch over / get used to single payer.
Badtux, the insurance mafia are getting crystal and magnums of champagne, while the uninsured are promised that they will possibly get paper cups in four years. As for filling the cups, the little people should wait for something to trickle down.
The only thing that will trickle into the paper cups is when the people have to go to pathology for a urology test. They won’t get anything else.
Well, the good news is that Kucinich got his single-payer amendment into the bill today. So if any state wants to set up their own single-payer system, they can opt out of this monster.
.-= ´s last blog ..Today was a four-cup-of-coffee morning =-.
yay, dennis!
next up, rep anthony weiner takes a stab at turning it into a single payer bill.
Too true, Kryten.
Very good news if you have a state with political leaders who understand the economics, and have the courage to save money, Badtux. New York State could save a bundle just on the costs for government employees and retirees, especially on public safety people. Of course, Florida would never consider a public program.
We can hope on the amend to substitute move, Hipparchia. I would really like to see a vote on it.
Well, single-payer has passed here in California *twice*, and been vetoed by the Governator both times. But his term of office ain’t gonna last forever…
.-= ´s last blog ..Friday music blogging =-.
Recalling Gray Davis was such a brilliant move.
I worked for several Fortune 500 corporations in California, and they reduced operations in the “Golden State” for two reasons: 1. the cost of real estate, and 2. the cost of health care. Nobody ever mentioned taxes as a problem.
I ran a small business in California and those were my concerns: office rent and health insurance. The taxes were noise level. I would have loved to have paid millions in taxes, because it would have meant I was making tens of millions in profit.
I came to the realization that the only way anything gets down is California is by initiatives because the state government is dysfunctional. The ironic part is that it was made dysfunctional by the initiative process.