The Mendacity of Nope

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(And the Horse He Rode In On, Part 2)

The majority of Americans oppose the Senate Healthcare Reform bill! Really!

But, When asked where they stand on what's in the bill, they support it, don't think it goes far enough.

So, how did we get here? Does it have anything to do with persistent, unending lies?

I think so.

Death Panels that never were, tax increases that will never be, fines that cannot be assesed, cuts invisble under a tunneling electron microscope are coming. The Republicans stir the dregs at the base of the tea cup, Tea Partiers become even more bitter. A new lie is added ever time things seem to be calming down and the main stream media covers the falsehoods as if they were indistinguishable from the facts.

Afte all, the opposition wouldn't tell bald=faced lies for partisan gain? Would they? Financial gain? Of course not, surrounded by parentheses, prefaced by another not!

It's proof positve that even pygmy elephants, moving as a herd can trample the most needed reform,just for the hell of it,

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need:

"Besides Mr. Baucus, two Democrats, Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, voted against both public option proposals. Two other Democrats, Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Bill Nelson of Florida, voted against the first amendment, but supported the second.
Mr. Carper said he liked Mr. Schumer’s proposal because it “would establish a level playing field” for competition between private insurers and the government plan.
The votes on Tuesday set the stage for a compromise under which the public plan could be offered in states where people could not find affordable private coverage, Mr. Carper said. He and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, have proposed such a compromise."

Is fear what determines their votes? Right now the bill that came out of the Finance Committee could be titled the Insurance Industry Windfall Mandate because everyone is reqired to get insured, but insurance doesn't have to be affordable and the taxpayer will pay the difference in any case.
Where are the cost controls? Where is any pressure on the Insurance industry to lower their costs or even cut their overhead. Co-ops aren't going to do it because they are too small, by political intent. They're designed to look like an alternative without actually being one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/health/policy/30health.html?th&emc=th

Joe Lies! (Obama Heckled by GOP During Speech to Congress)

This isn't politics.

This isn't policy.

This is the spouse that lost custody accusing the winner of child molestaation, while planning to kidnap the child and go into hiding.

t r u t h o u t | Split on Health Care Goes Beyond Public Option

t r u t h o u t Split on Health Care Goes Beyond Public Option:

"The distance between the parties' leaders on health care was made clear on Tuesday when the No. 2 Republican in the Senate held a conference call with reporters. Asked by ABC News about a package of insurance market reforms that have been endorsed not only by President Obama but also by the insurance industry, Sen. Jon Kyl came out against all three proposals.

In particular, the Arizona Republican signaled that he opposes requiring insurance companies nationwide to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions; requiring them to charge everyone the same rate regardless of health status; and requiring all Americans to carry health insurance.

'One of the concerns I have about the approach of the Democrats ... is an assumption that there has to be a national mandate on all insurers to do various things,' Kyl told ABC News when asked for his position the three issues.

'Those are techniques that states can, and some have, used in the past with fairly disastrous consequences,' he said.

Although the public option has dominated coverage of the health-care debate, Kyl's comments underscored that the rift between GOP leaders and Democrats runs much deeper."The more you look into [the views of congressional Republicans], the more you are going to find significant opposition up and down the board to most ideas on the table when it comes to comprehensive health-care reform," Jim Manley, the senior communications adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told ABC News.

"Republicans are betting that the president will fail."

Kyl said he opposed guaranteed issue - requiring insurers to provide coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions - and community rating - requiring them to charge the same rate regardless of health status - because of concerns about cost.

"There's no question that it does raise costs," Kyl said. "And the objective here is to reduce costs."

Obama Supports Mandating Individuals to Have Health Insurance

Two years ago, the insurance industry commissioned a study of states that have pursued guaranteed issue and community rating.

The study, which was conducted by Milliman, Inc., found that these policies "have the potential to cause individuals to wait until they have health problems to buy insurance. This could cause premiums to increase for all policyholders, increasing the likelihood that lower-risk individuals leave the market, which could lead to further rate increases. If this continues, the pool or market could essentially collapse or shrink to include only the high risk population."

The insurance industry has since concluded, however, that these problems can be overcome by requiring all Americans to purchase insurance.

"If we can get everyone in the health-care system, we can do guaranteed issue, which means no denials on the basis of preexisting condition, and no rating by health status or gender," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans (A.H.I.P.), the insurance industry's trade group.

Obama originally opposed requiring all adults to purchase health insurance. In fact, his opposition to an individual mandate was a flashpoint in his fight for the Democratic nomination against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

Since becoming president, however, Obama has changed his stance and he now supports an individual mandate, viewing it as essential to winning the insurance industry's support for guaranteed issue and community rating.

"So it's important when people ask me, why don't you do the insurance reform stuff and not expand coverage for more people, my answer is I can't do the insurance reform stuff by itself," Obama said Friday during a town-hall meeting in Montana.

"The only way that we can change some of the insurance practices that are hurting people now is to make sure that everybody's covered and everybody's got a stake in it," he said. "Then the insurance company are able and willing to make some of the changes." "

http://www.truthout.org/081909R?n

The Health Care Challenge: Sailing Into a Perfect Storm - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

The Health Care Challenge: Sailing Into a Perfect Storm - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

Either Americans in the higher income strata must step up to the cashier's window to help subsidize, with higher income taxes, the health care of the most hard-working members of the lower income classes, or the United States will have to evolve toward a noticeable two-tiered or multi-tiered health care system, with bare-bones, low-tech health care for families in the bottom half of the income distribution and increasingly superior, high-tech health care for families in the upper-income strata.

Consider a family headed by two income earners each with a gross wage base of $30,000. One might be a taxi driver, and the other a sales clerk in a department store or at, say, Home Depot.

By "gross wage base" is meant here the sum of all of the debits that an employer makes to the account "Payroll Expense" for an employee. It includes the employee's cash take-home pay, all the income taxes and Social Security taxes and other deductions – for example, the employee's contributions toward health insurance and pensions — withheld from the employee's paycheck, as well as the employer's share of Social Security taxes and the employer's contributions toward the employee's health insurance, pension, vacation pay, sick days and so on. It is a sum that supports all taxes paid by or on behalf of the employee and all fringe benefits earned by the employee, whether formally paid by the employer or taken out of the employee's paycheck.

It follows from this definition of gross wage base that it must support all of the health expenditures made by or on behalf of the family in a given year — that is, the employer's contribution to premiums for the employee's health insurance, the employee's own contribution and the employee's out-of-pocket health spending.

According to the Milliman Medical Index, this total health spending figure for a typical non-elderly American family of four had reached an average of $15,600 by 2008. It had grown at an average compound growth rate of about 8.6 percent from $11,192 in 2004.

To return to our family with an assumed gross wage base of $60,000: If that gross wage base grew by, say, 3 percent per year over the next decade, to $80,600 by 2017, while total family health spending grew by, say, 8 percent per year over the same time frame, to $33,700 by 2017, then about 41 percent of the family's gross wage base would be taken up by health care alone, before any deductions for taxes or fringe benefits. If the wage base grew by 4 percent, health spending still would absorb about a third of the family gross wage base.

These numbers, which are realistic, suggest that before long the gross wage base earned by American households will become too small a donkey to carry the load of the family's spending on health care. It will put before Americans an uncomfortable choice.

It is one of the several unpleasant trade-offs facing President-elect Barack Obama.

Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economist at Princeton.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/the-health-care-challenge-sailing-into-a-perfect-storm/