"Jack Sparx" writes:

We should have been arguing about which single payer option.

[...]

Obama has so cleverly weighted the debate in favor of the corporate elites, that none of the devilish details even enter the discussion.

I think this is fundamentally correct. Healthcare is a right in all civilized countries, whereas "the public option" is an altogether different argument, that "affordable health insurance is a right."

It isn't, and a non-universal public option plan will always be vulnerable to being destroyed by defunding.

But healthcare is a right, and if a simple single-payer plan can pass with 50 votes in the house, a simple bill that covers everybody and that people can understand, then it's time to dare any senator, whether a dem or a republican, to essentially cross a picket line to fillibuster as the whole country watches and vote against healthcare for everybody.

The reason Bill Clinton erased the deficit in the 90s and the economy boomed is because of a tax bill that increased revenues that only democrats voted for. The only way to get meaningful healthcare reform now will be to do the same thing, and the blue dogs and moderate republicans can go to hell or not, as they see fit.

I meant 50 votes in the senate( plus Joe), but every time I pass that stupid pop up ad it zooms out and won't co-operate when I try to close it, distracting me. Just for that I'm not buying a damn CTS, even if my dire poverty suddenly evaporated and I found myself able to do so.

As long as any democratic plan has individual mandates, forcing people to buy insurance if their employer won't provide it, then that plan is vulnerable to this kind of criticism.

And, needless to say, the only way to do without individual mandates is some kind of single-payer. Think about it:

Of course the working poor, stuck in hellish dead-end jobs making 8 to 10 bucks an hour, generally without insurance, are going to resent this legislation if it forces them to buy substandard insurance (generally with ridiculously high deductibles) to "stay legal". The bargain-basement plans are essentially hospitalization insurance, not paying for doctor's visits or prescription meds, and that one extra bill will make it harder to scrounge up money to go to the doctor. People who don't realize this live in another world.

It's not that I think Steele cares about the working poor, I seriously doubt it. But I see the rottenness of the individual mandate as the poison pill that it is.

Viswanatha alludes to the comparative plenitude of doctors in India being a factor holding costs down. Whether you see it as the work of the AMA or not, we have institutionalized doctor shortages in the US for quite some time, insofar as medical schools are partly funded by the states and the federal government,even the private schools.

And as far as I can tell, nobody in Washington, on either side of the aisle, is discussing making the number of available seats in medical schools appreciably bigger. When your average accredited medical school turns at least 85 percent, and often over 90 percent of its applicants away, it stands to reason that many of those who don't get in are well-qualified candidates rejected just because of scarcity of resources to train them.

Of course, one imagines some of those otherwise qualified candidates then turn to law school, presumably an utterly unrelated phenomenon.

earlier, "Busy Body" wrote,

"The Public Option in the Bill on the Table Is Engineered to Fail"

I suspect this is likely, if for no other reason than the fact that the same people who are touting the public option are often the ones who want individual mandates, which will hurt the working poor.

Why spend hundreds of billions subsidizing the private sector(and a very financially strong segment of the private sector at that), when the same money could go for establishing a single-payer plan, possibly even just buying outright 2 or three of the top insurance companies, making them cover everybody and booting all the employees who make, say, over 300 or 400 grand a year?

It would cost the taxpayer less, and could cover everybody, in one fell swoop.

They resist doing this not because it's "socialism" but because a cadre of very powerful special interests would balk, and everything that congressional proponents of the public option have done so far, whether dem or GOP, suggests that they are more concerned about not displeasing the insurance companies rather than holding down costs or expanding access to healthcare.

For these reasons I fear that the final version of any 'public option' will be a dumping ground for the insurance companies to toss sick policyholders into, making it effectively a subsidy for the private insurance companies.

Yes, I know that the insurance companies will supposedly be unable to get rid of sick policyholders or deny people coverage, but I see no enforcement teeth or cost controls compelling the insurance companies to offer modestly priced policies to everyone, and frankly the trajectory of the various current bills' evolution suggests to me that

1. yes,we will have some sort of public option, but

2. it will be a dumping ground for the sick that the insurance companies don't want to cover and that taxpayers will come to resent, fomenting class resentment and encouraging the citizenry to blame sick people rather than congress or insurance companies for the high cost of healthcare.

As always, the devil's in the details.

"...and lighten up on killing Afghans. OK?"

sincerely, Nobel peace prize committee.

Giving your things away, and saying goodbye to people are also behaviors associated with persons contemplating suicide.

for this article.

One editor of a country music magazine demanded that Cash resign from the Country Music Association because "you and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists and country DJs."

I knew the song before, but I didn't know "Ira Hayes" was a top 10 Country&Western hit, and apparently in spite of the industry.