Obama is determined to get a health care reform bill passed by the Senate, and he has been meeting with Senate Democrats in order to iron out their differences. Obviously, a public option is one of the main sticking points, with many Blue Dog Democrats opposed. Yet, Obama knows he needs all sixty Democratic Senators in order to prevent a Republican filibuster.
I don't want any of the bills proposed to pass, frankly, but I have to wonder if, of all the different possibilities under consideration, one that includes a public option is that bad, relatively speaking.
In fact, I will go on record here as stating that, if there is any health care reform bill at all, passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by this president, it had damned well better include a public option, or we are all in a lot of trouble, particularly if a part of the bill includes a mandate that all are legally bound to buy some form of insurance.
Many people wonder if they could be in danger of prosecution should they fail to purchase insurance under such a law, something the White House denies. That, however, is only a part of the problem. If the bill contains that kind of provision, and it is enforceable, you can expect insurance rates raise and possibly even skyrocket without a public option. In fact, in some places such as Utah they already are. Oh, maybe not for everybody, but you can damn well be sure that for the middle class, any decent insurance plan will probably increase by at least ten to twenty percent-and I do mean, at least.
A public option would probably serve to put the brakes on those potentially devastating increases, or at any rate, they should limit them somewhat.
People really need to think things through better before they jump on these bandwagons. It's one thing to oppose health care reform on principle. It's something else again to pick it apart to where it ends up being even more of a monster than what it has to be.
9 comments:
I definitely see these guys compromising this whole thing into the nightmare they don't want.
You're as looney as the lefties sometimes, pt. If you want "real" (bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha) competition, just remove the interstate and other barriers currently PREVENTING competition. Don't simply introduce a below-market subsidized provider and give him an eventual monopoly.
Well, like I said, I'd just as soon they not pass anything that I've seen them come up with so far. I'm only saying IF they pass the current bill being debated, and IF that bill includes a mandate that "Ye must buy health insurance", then having a public option under those circumstances would be better than not having a public option under the same bill. That's all I was saying.
You'll see what I mean if they pass it and there's no public option, because when things go to hell, who do you think people are going to blame? They'll take it out on the mostly Republican members who opposed the public option. Fairly or unfairly, that's how it will be painted as "if only those damn Republicans let us have a public option things wouldn't have turned so shitty".
Sometimes, see, you really do have to consider the political part of the equation after all.
And just to make sure I'm clear on this, if I could pass my own version of a health care reform, it would look nothing like what's going on now.
My health care reform would involve eliminating taxes on businesses and corporations, the operative businesses here being pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. Other businesses could afford decent health insurance for employees.
And yes, insurance companies could sell insurance across state lines. I admit, I wouldn't do away with all regulations, but I would probably do away with close to a third of them, at the very least.
You wouldn't need to tax them to pay for what regulations you kept. Cut government spending, or at the very least have a moratorium on further growth, and you can pay for it from the general fund.
Business would boom again, and a flat tax on private income would be more than sufficient to pay for our needs, provided we also cut the bloated Pentagon budget-something that is unfortunately akin to heresy to most so-called conservatives.
I could go along with tort reform too, but I would prefer that doctors that make multiple serious errors just be fired, or transferred to research, etc. If problem physicians were removed from doing further harm, there would be no excuse to jack up insurance rates to cover for their egregious behavior, which a lot of the time is probably drug induced.
Sorry, I just have a problem with the idea that if a doctor were to remove my good leg and leave the worthless one attached until he got around to getting it as well, that there should be a limit on what I should be able to sue the fucker for. Give me my ten million dollars and fire the motherfucker.
IF that bill includes a mandate that "Ye must buy health insurance", ...then we'll see the whole bill in SCOTUS and it will be judged to be "unconstitutional"... unless Roberts, Thomas, Scalia and Alito kick it before then and Kennedy gets a burr up his bum.
FJ-
All it would take would be for Kennedy to side with the liberal wing of the court, and that would be it, regardless of whether the others were to "kick it" or not.
Also, you have more faith in people doing the right thing than I do. If people were so ready to do the right thing, would we even be anywhere near the mess we're in right now?
Scalia is an originalist, and you never can tell what he's going to go along with on the grounds the constitution is silent about it. For example, his statement to the effect that states have the right to enact sensible gun control legislation, so long as they don't deny citizens their basic right to bear arms. This based presumably on the proposition that the constitution does not say they can't enact "sensible" regulations.
My feeling about the conservative judges are, for the most part, they would be more than likely to declare a health care reform bill unconstitutional if it included a public option than they would if it did not include such a provision.
Otherwise, why doesn't somebody challenge the different state laws that mandate health care coverage? What about all the different states, which I think might be every damn one of them (certainly almost every one of them) that mandate auto insurance coverage?
If somebody were to challenge laws like that, surely they would vote to declare them unconstitutional. I realize there is a difference in that we are talking about state laws in those instances, and a federal bill in this case, but states are required to follow the constitution as well, presumably.
Where in the constitution are states given the power to enact health care (or auto insurance) legislation and impose it on their citizens any more than the federal government has that right?
In both cases, citizens are being forced to purchase something they might prefer not to hand their money over for. Just because it makes good common sense for people to buy auto insurance, or health insurance, does that give the government (federal or state) the right to impose it on them?
Where in the constitution are states given the power to enact health care (or auto insurance) legislation and impose it on their citizens any more than the federal government has that right?
The nineth and tenth amendments.
You have the option to "not drive" if you don't want to buy car insurance, PT. You don't have the option to "not breathe" if you don't want to buy health insurance.
Our system of laws is generally based upon the classically liberal principle of establishing negative liberties. Attempts at enforcing positive liberties would in all likelihood be ruled unconstitutional by any "originalist".
I agree the states probably have the right to enact health care reform legislation. I'm just not so sure they have a legitimate right to force you to buy insurance. They do that anyway though in Massachusetts, which has been given as a model of health care reform.
This is all legalized theft, from the coffers of the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry in the form of taxes, the expense for which (as well as all the regulations) they pass on to the consumers, to the pockets of the taxpayers, who get ripped off twice.
1. Higher taxes to pay for such programs.
2. Higher costs associated with all aspects of health care passed on to them from the various components of the health care industry.
Now they're getting ready to sock it to them yet a third time, by telling them they have to purchase insurance.
Like i said, if they are really serious about reforming health care, they should stay the hell out of it and substantially lower taxes on businesses. Their interference has actually caused the lion's share of the problems. You see the same formula repeated in all segments of society. The government steps in and fucks something up and then calls out for reform for the problems they have caused in large measure. Education is another example of how this process unfolds.
Of course, there's no way they are going to substantially reduce, never mind eliminate, taxes on businesses, as long as there are too many politicians willing to demagogue with populist rhetoric about the evil insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
By the way, the Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to guarantee that no private citizen could have his constitutional rights trampled by a state entity. It might well be that this would not apply to the case of health care, but it damn well should.
The main point I was making though is that without a public option, this could turn into an unforeseen nightmare for the Republicans, if it were to result in unsustainable increases in insurance rates across the board, or for a large segment of the population.
I've already resigned myself to a second term of President Obama, because I can see this crap unfolding as we speak. Sometimes it can be useful to concentrate on the negative, if you seriously don't want to see a 6-3 liberal supreme court take shape over the next six to seven years.
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