The Soap Box                           

 

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By Roger Cohen:  Some of my summer in France was spent listening to indignant outbursts about U.S. health care reform. The tone: “You must be kidding! What’s there to debate if 46.3 million Americans have no health insurance?” [ Get Real on Health Care By ROGER COHEN, New York Times, September 13, 2009]

" A Primer on Comparing Health Plans"  By David M. Herszenhorn

 Texas health care - States rights - How ya doing?     Pres Obama Health Care Address 9-9-09

1min  48min

I love Obama's civility ... , his desire to work with his enemies, it's positively Christ-like. ... But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. ... You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the 70% of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that 70% ... when are we going to actually show up in all this?  Bill Maher

 

Maureen Dowd wrote: The American president got the Nobel for the mere anticipation that he would provide bold moral leadership.  However, Obama (who, as Robert Draper wrote, has read and reread Shakespeare’s tragedies) does not want his fatal flaw to be that he compromises so much that his ideals get blurred out of recognition.  The common ground is not always the high ground.

Moreover, the search for common ground is bad for bargaining. It informs the other side that what you most desire is the deal — that you will never acknowledge the finality of the difference, and never be satisfied with the integrity of opposition. There is a reason that ‘uncompromising’ applies to one who fit to hear, and has the faculties to hear, the confession of his subjects.


F.D.R. asked to be judged by the enemies he had made. But what of a president who strives to keep everyone in some vague middle ground of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, without ever offending anyone?

Obama’s legislative career offers cautionary tales about the toll of constant consensus building.  In Springfield, he compromised so much on a health care reform bill that in the end, it merely led to a study. In Washington, he compromised so much with Senate Republicans on a bill to require all nuclear plant owners to notify state and local authorities about radioactive leaks that it simply devolved into a bill offering guidance to regulators, and even that ultimately died.  Now the air is full of complaints that Obama has been too cautious on health care and too timid re-regulating the banks.  Dowd says, "The president should remember, though, that when you’re cooking up a more perfect Union, sometimes you’ve got to break some eggs."

Obama Threatens Insurers’ Anti-Trust Exemption - First sign of a fighter ?

Public Plan - MediCare, NY Rep Weiner, Lewin Group       Moyers: We need a fighter

8min  5min

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.:  And then there is the insured working person who discovers, with surprise, that health insurance is a for-profit industry, that the industry term for payment is “medical loss” and that the process of extracting payment for a dire health condition can turn into a bizarre game of “catch me if you can.”  September 14, 2009, New York TimesO Letter to Congressional Representative - Subject:  Urging your support in favor of President Obamas's Health Care Plan including the Public Option.

 

Dear [Congressional Representative]
 
I urge your support in favor of the "public option" in President Obama's health care proposals.

I believe the insurance industry has gained too much leverage so that like the financial industry, it is no longer serving the best interest of the people, or the country, but is profiteering.  For example, from 1993 to 2007 the ratio of outgoing claim payments to incoming premium receipts has dropped from 95 cents on the dollar to 80 cents.  Small business and individuals like myself have no affordable options than to go uninsured.
 
I think the question need not be ideological, but a question of what works.  If the question were ideological, we'd have to say the free market failed us in the banking and financial industries, and is also failing us in the Drug and Health Insurance industries where the concentration of market power is too great.
 
Most disappointing is to see Insurance money buying influence in congress, and Insurance money funding disinformation that scares old people, and to see the intentional organized disruption of congressional community meetings during the recess.  Manipulating the fears of poor and ignorant voters is a totalitarian tactic rather than a democratic one.    Representative government is intended to separate these extremist from those like yourself charged with creating competition, as is found in the delivery of services to Medicare clientele.
 
I urge you to put the best interest of the consumer above out-of-state corporate interest by supporting nothing less than the "public option" for my family here in [your state].
 
Sincerely,
[Name, Address] 

 

 Former Insurance Exec - Wendell Potter                      Oberman ReElection Warning to All

7min 14min

 

"American health care system is dysfunctional at the core."  David Brooks, New York Times

 

"After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem."  

How American Health Care Killed My Father”. David Goldhill, The Atlantic, September 2000 

 

 

Map: North vs South HPV Vaccination Rates             South Carolina 3rd Worst - Opposing Reform

 3min  3min

Howard Dean VA Government Health Care                 What End-of-Life provisions are in Health Care Bill

7min  4min

Medal of Freedom - Steven Hawkins Health Care      Former Struggle over National Medical Care

2min 10min

 One of 47 Million - God Forgive

2min

 

 

 

 

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