If there's no Public Insurance, I am with the Teabaggers on Mandates

Yes, I agree with the Teabaggers. The government should NOT require ANYONE to buy private health insurance.

Such mandates would be an Unholy combination of the worst aspects of both Capitalism Gone Wild and the Socialist Nanny State. You get the disadvantages of both, but none of the advantages of either.

Now, before you assume I've become a wingnut, let me make something clear.

I believe we should -- and reasonably could -- set up a truly affordable universal health care system by opening up Medicare to everyone...As far as I'm concerned, it could either be optional or made universal IF the mandates were similar to existing proghrams liuke medicare and Social Security.

But since too many Democratics lack the courage of their convictions -- or don't have any principles to begin with -- truly Universal Affordable Public Health Coverage has been taken off the table.

And since it is off the table, there is NO EXCUSE for Insurance Mandates. It is a gift to the Private Insurance Industry. It makes us all prisoners of the Insurance Oligarchs. And it is going to cause unbelievable hardships for many moderate income and middle class families.

And that is where I begin to agree with the Teabaggers when they say "Just leave me alone!"

Or, in a different version of that mantra -- "If the government is not going to be part of the solution, then it is part of the problem and should get the hell out of the way."

If Congress and Obama insist on imposing mandates without real reform or actual support for the people, so-called "reform" would be an abomination.

;)

The Democrats and the basic principles of liberalism won the last election.

And yet we still insist on acting like whipped puppies, and avoiding doing anything truly ;positive for fear of offending the third of the country who will automatically oppose any reform.

Don't force people to give money to private health insurance companies.

I will fight tooth and nail against any mandate, period.

Bravo, Armstead! :applause:

sw

By all logic, many of those teabaggers should be ranting lefties and progressives.

Apart from the hard-core nutcases, bigots and opportunistic exploiters of that movement, many of them are responding to very real feelings of powerlessness and exploitation.

The right-wing corporatists have been successful in channeling that fear and anger to their side. But that was not inevitable.

We progressives and liberals have FAILED to make our case, even though the actual self-interest of those teabaggers would be better served by progressive and liberal policies and values.

So rather than dismiss all of them out of hand, we ought to looking at the reasons for their anger, and find ways to addesss them with progressive populism.

Just like you c an;t lump together everyone on the left side of the spectrum,you can't lump together eberyone on the right into one set of generalizations.

a muslim. They CHEERED for Pence, for Beck's name, and for every rightwing nutjob that attended that event. They cheered for the worst of the worst. That was the overwhelming majority of the people there. There were NO significant defections from that mass of shitheels.

There is nothing in the world that could make me join with the likes of them, for the same reason I wouldn't go protesting environmental destruction with the Klan. It is not worth bolstering their numbers because then all of their ridiculous ideas are accepted as "true". If you show up with the teabaggers, you are not only endorsing "No Mandates", you are endorsing "No Socialism" "Glenn Beck tells the truth" "Obama belongs in a zoo" "Obama is a muslim" "Pelosi is Hitler" etc. etc. etc. That is how it will be reported on the news networks, and that is the point that will come across, even if you only mean to protest mandates.

credibility to the fuckers. Racism or satire?

I agree with you that the "tea bag Movement" should not be given any support or credibility. It's a b yunch o' crap.

However, as I wrote earlier "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

Apart from the bigots and hard-core wingnuts, there is a considerable number of people who are attracted to the Fox news/tea bag crap because they are frustrated, afraid and angry over the same things that frustrate and anger progressives.

Fox feeds them an inaccurate analysis of the causes of it -- But many could be turned around if we were to acknowledge the validity of those concerns and were more willing to make the progressive case more clearly AND push for policies that actually get at the root of the problems.

We progressives and liberals have FAILED to make our case, even though the actual self-interest of those teabaggers would be better served by progressive and liberal policies and values.

I don't think the liberals have failed to make their case. I think the Democratic party leadership at this time is failing liberal principles on the health care issue. I don't want to offend anyone, but this is my deepest belief.

I too think Medicare for everyone would be an almost infinitely better solution, although it would be costly, and to get it, we have to explain to people what they are really paying now (because most people don't understand what they are really paying for employer-based insurance), and how paying into a public system might seem more expensive, but would actually be cheaper over your lifetime, because you'd REALLY BE INSURED. Right now people don't buy insurance because it is all temporary. You can pay in for 30 years and still find yourself basically uninsured when you really need the coverage.

I just don't think the current proposals are going to work. Nor do I believe they are liberal. For to many people, this will amount to an extra tax with no increased security. People know that.

How many trillions are we going to throw into big banks and insurance companies? Is it working now?

Does anyone really believe we can afford NOT to cover illegal aliens?

Does anyone really want to reach their late 50s or early 60s, find oneself out of work or working part-time for a minimal wage, and find oneself fined if no coverage but not necessarily able to afford to buy coverage?

The questions people are asking about this proposal are based in reality, and if the Democratic party wants to be the reality-based party, it needs to pay attention to the real problems of tens of millions of persons.

It's not that liberalism is failing. It's that we are not really serious about it.

You said it more cogently.

There can be no reform without an affordable, competitive public option.

Kucinich has a very well-though out plan for universal coverage, and he explains his proposals in a way that makes sense on so many levels.

or will it be a public option in name only, so far it appears to be the latter.

But there will be mandates.

:puke:

The Incredible Shrinking Public Health Insurance Option

by Time for change

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6576051&mesg_id=6576051

"The story of how our previously promised public health insurance option shrunk from an option that was originally supposed to be offered to ALL Americans, to one in which “less than 5 percent of Americans would sign up”, as our President said in his September 9th address to Congress, is an incredible one. In this post I’ll discuss how that happened, possible reasons why “less than 5 percent of Americans would sign up”, and what it is likely to mean to the American people if we are unable to pressure Congress and our President to expand the public health insurance option to its original form..."

There is no way to ban pre-existing condition discrimination without some sort of individual mandate. So you are saying that sick people should continue to be left to go bankrupt, all because you don't believe you should have to pay a private company. You are right -- I don't see a huge difference between you and the teabaggers. Both are perfectly fine screwing the sick to ensure that you (and the teabaggers) aren't negatively affected at all.

You really believe that as the profits come rolling in from the new captive market, the health insurers are going to say "hey, let's just give those new profits away" out of the goodness of their hearts?

Newsflash -- The health insurance industry has been raking it in for years, and they haven't changed anything in terms of improvements. All they've done is find creative new ways to deny people coverage.

Give them, more customers,and they'll just keep finding ways to deny coverage to more people.

As I said in my original post -- I would support mandatory cov erage if it were tied into meaningful public reform. But not just to give private profiteers more loot.

It will be the law of the land. Right now it isn't illegal, and after this plan passes it will be.

They can't turn you down, but they can charge you anything they damned well feel like charging you. Plus, age discrimination is written right into the law.

They also can only vary premiums by age up to a certain, low, defined ratio.

If they are going to raise their prices, they are going to have to do it for everyone. They would soon have 100% of the country behind a public option/single payer if they were to do that.

Maybe this will turn the country towards single payer--or it may turn them towards being pissed at Dems for nothing much happening to health care for 4 years.

See the first section of Schedule A of

http://finance.senate.gov/sitepages/leg/LEG%202009/091609%20Americas_Healthy_Future_Act.pdf

Yes, it would be nice if it were immediate instead of within a year. But even a single payer bill would not be immediate.

There is not a single indication here of what specific assistance any individual in such a pool would actually get. Typically, high risk pools are for disposable human garbage, period. Their very existence is a moral abomination. And they are allowed to charge older people FIVE TIMES as much as younger people. You can just fuck that one straight to hell, IMO.

why not? If they gave some of their huge profits to the poor then that might be OK. HOwever, we are interested in closing them down.

for the public option, just partially copying an old post.

How are we going to fund the increasing numbers of Medicare enrollees?

:shrug:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/slipslidingaway/81

knr - Also I believe the protesters do have a point....

Posted by slipslidingaway in General Discussion
Fri Aug 21st 2009, 06:27 PM

not about death panels or whatever they are saying.

We know that many baby boomers will be eligible for Social Security And they will also be eligible for Medicare.

We are told that we can partially fund health care reform with hundreds of billions of dollars in savings from Medicare.

What happens when millions of new people start to enroll in Medicare over the next decade and stay on the program for another 20 years?

Estimates are that the current number of people on Medicare will grow from 46 million to 79 million over the next two decades and that the influx of new people begins in 2011.

Even without knowing all the details of the numbers, that is a hell of a lot of people moving to Medicare and I believe that any savings will be needed for the Medicare program.

In addition to covering everyone, a Medicare for All program would also help to minimize the projected strain on the Medicare system...

even though the fuckers will change their position to the opposite of whatever. Brilliant!

And I don't believe in mandating that people be required to support private companies that have a history of screwing people over, ripping people off, and primarily looking out for their bottom lines. When I see their top executives making $20 million+ a year, no way will I support a system that requires poor people to pay into that. I'm embarrassed that Democrats are even considering that kind of system.

If the government wants to require people to have health insurance, then the government itself ought to offer it to them at the lowest possible cost, through a government-run system that charges a small administrative fee to pay wages and other expenses, but not exorbitant salaries and perks. That system would be fair, because it would not be looking for ways to rip people off and screw them over. You could trust that system to serve the people. That's the only system I can support.

Unfortunately, the Democrats don't want to stand up for that kind of system.

The way this healthcare debate should have gone is Obama should have laid the groundwork for a public option by doing the research on our current system to find out what particular aspects of it drive the costs so high. Identify the factors, find solutions to them, and then present all of that to the people along with a specific plan. Obama's most important task was one of education. You can't expect people to adopt a radical new system without telling them exactly what it is and explaining to them in detail why it's necessary. If there's no education and no plan, then we end up with the situation we have now where people are pretty much in the dark about what's going to be done, where people's imaginations run wild, and where naturally people are going to resist the unknown.

As it stands now, we don't have a plan, and nobody knows what's going to happen. It's a chaotic situation where people are basically being asked to "trust us, in the end at the last minute, we will tell you what you're going to get." That's a fked up way to propose healthcare reform, and that's why real healthcare reform will not happen.

i have heard many of them say that if public option is gone to keep costs down they won't vote for people to be forced to have expensive care.

gets the money.

I have no greater interest in a government program that I can't pay for or depend on anymore than a private plan with the same problems and the reverse is equally true.

All things being equal, few care. The argument is all about getting to equal. I share the skepticism that for profit insurance will every get where we need it to be and that is why at least the public option is crucial but the obsession with the existence of these companies is just a hair off point, imo. Most people do not really care about the how but the how much and I think the arguments for a government program would be much sharper and more effective minus the obsession with the companies.

My main objection to mandates is that the government would be forcing people to patronize companies that behave like pirates -- and which have shown no inclination to behave otherwise.

is going to be portrayed in the press as a Democratic bill. The repukes won't be on board regardless of what's in the bill anyway. Any "Democratic" bill that forces people to buy expensive private insurance or face a penalty for not doing so is a guaranteed ticket to big losses in 2010 and beyond. They are insane for even proposing it.