While I will say that it is about damn time, I won’t turn away the left’s support of the killing the ReidCare bill
As I noted last week, since Joe Lieberman forced Democrats to ditch the Medicare buy-in compromise, some of the most intense opposition to the health care bill has come from the left. And as lefty opposition to the bill has intensified, something incredibly frustrating has happened: progressive criticism has come to mirror the criticism that’s come from market-oriented skeptics.
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Here’s the thing: None of this is news. I’ve said as much myself for months, as have basically all of the policy-savvy critics of the bill. Yet the liberal left is only now airing these debates — after the bill is more or less done.
What does this mean? I see two possibilities: The most likely is that progressives are latching on to these criticisms because they’re now so angry that they’re ready to do anything to kill the bill — including admit what they had to have known all along, which is that these criticisms actually have a lot of merit.
The second, while less likely, is more disturbing: Many progressives who backed this bill throughout the year had no idea what was in it. They hated Republicans, heard endless public-option hosannas from their leaders, and believed they’d found a way to start the move toward single payer.
My guess is that, for the most part, they did know, and simply ignored the criticisms they’re now making in hopes that they could bargain their way toward a plan that they hoped would stick it to the insurance companies and put the country on the path to single payer.
He’s mostly right.
I don’t think that the leftist foot soldiers had any idea what was in it and that they were being led by what the pols and pundits were saying was in the bill. Our elected representatives don’t even know what all is in it, and most likely still don’t. So how could the random member of the leftosphere know?
Oh, sure, they trusted whatever Kos or Hamsher or Aravosis said was there, but I’ve pointed out numerous times that even those bozos are taking their cues from someone else who is lying to them.
Just this week, PoliFact came out with their “Best Lies of 2009”, with the “Death Panel” on top of the list.
Sadly for them, there is page 148 of the Senate Health Care Bill
Beginning on January 1, 2015, a qualified health plan may contract with –
(B) a health care provider only if such provider implements such mechanisms to improve health care quality as the Secretary may by regulation require.
Dan Reihl translates
In plain English, any decision you, or your doctor, might make as regards your personal health care can and likely will ultimately have been pre-determined by Washington, DC. If a bureaucrat writes a regulation, and those will not be written or known until perhaps 18 months after this ridiculous bill has been passed, that will determine what is and what isn’t an acceptable health care choice for you, or your doctor.
So, not only is it still in the bill, it always was.
Though, I guess that a Cabinet level Secretary isn’t actually a “panel” per se. So I’m thinking that “Death Judge” would be more accurate.
Now we get news of the fact that Medicare is guilty of more Denials of Claims than any private insurance company.
According to the American Medical Association’s National Health Insurer Report Card for 2008, the government’s health plan, Medicare, denied medical claims at nearly double the average for private insurers: Medicare denied 6.85% of claims. The highest private insurance denier was Aetna @ 6.8%, followed by Anthem Blue Cross @ 3.44, with an average denial rate of medical claims by private insurers of 3.88%
In its 2009 National Health Insurer Report Card, the AMA reports that Medicare denied only 4% of claims—a big improvement, but outpaced better still by the private insurers. The prior year’s high private denier, Aetna, reduced denials to 1.81%—an astounding 75% improvement—with similar declines by all other private insurers, to average only 2.79%.
But since at least 2006 the rallying cry of the left was “Medicare for All!”. Which proves that they don’t really care about people, they just want America tied down with a socialized medicine program that can legally control people’s behavior.
Another point that the leftists haven’t been pushing for until just recently is an elimination of the “Gay Tax”.
The discriminatory “gay tax” on employer-provided health benefits for same-sex spouses or partners would continue under the version of health care legislation formulated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and accepted by all 60 Senate Democrats over the weekend.
It is as though this new fight was a passing thought, even though it has been around since “life partners” were legally able to get coverage for one another.
Way to think ahead, folks. Maybe you should have worked on getting rid of that before going for the whole enchalada.
And lastly, we’re learning of even more revisions to the CBO guesstimate.
Based on this extrapolation, CBO expects that Medicare spending under the legislation would increase at an average annual rate of roughly 6 percent during the next two decades – well below the roughly 8 percent annual growth rate of the past two decades. Adjusting for inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary under the legislation would increase at an average annual rate of roughly 2 percent during the next two decades—well below the roughly 4 percent annual growth rate of the past two decades. It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.
Does the director of the CBO ever go to the DMV or the Post Office? I guess not or he wouldn’t have had to write that last sentence.
The CBO should just refuse to give out an estimate until the legislation is written and ready to vote on. No hal-assed estimates and no revisions.
Of course, this wouldn’t do for when your Congress decides they hate you and wnat you dead via “free” government health care.
We on the right have to start to raise our monolith now.
That monolith will have to be an immovable, implacable policy: whatever you leftists do, when you fall out of the power structure, we are going to reverse everything you’ve done.
That’s the Un-Do.
It will be new on the American scene, although less stable democracies have been doing reversals since the beginnings of their Republics.
Here’s my Un-Do list:
1. The Czars. They ALL go away, all at once, or ALL the departments who pay them get defunded until they do go away. I’d accept their conversion to simple advisors with zero policy-writing authority.
2. All the bailouts. Every bailout is reversed, and all the money to be returned to the Treasury within one year. If that results in the failure of companies, too bad.
3. Lowering of the national debt ceiling, starting right away, but during the ascension of the Right, a Constitutional Amendment will be promulgated which will require a balanced Federal budget, and the repayment of the entire National Debt, within 50 years.
4. Health care. All government provision/funding of health care stops at a time certain. Reasonable regulation of the health care insurance field, and allowance of reasonable pricing of health insurance will substitute for it.
5. Fixed size of Federal employment, to be reduced in stages over 8 years to no more than 75% of what it is now, with the military exempt from reduction in force.
6. An orderly process set up to proceed towards a Constitutional Convention, with the understanding that the present Bill of Rights transfers to any new Constitution. That new constitution would have term limits for all Federal elective offices, term limits for Federal judges, and a national digital plebiscite system built into it. Any measure passed by plebiscite would over-ride any passed by Congress on identical subjects.
There’s much more, but that’s a start.
The Right also needs to signal that it’s monolith encompasses the citizen’s right to a society based on the value of production. If you want to suck on an ever-shrinking Federal teat as opposed to producing, you will be assumed to have given up your status as a citizen of the first order.
Accepting welfare as a way of life must not only be discouraged by shrinking those benefits which provide it, but also by telling productive people that they will always be first in line for the government’s attention and approval.
Actually, all the true believers that have even mentioned this bill to me don’t CARE what’s in it. They don’t really know.
“We need a health care bill NOW. Fix it later.”
They honestly believe that this is a good idea. Why?
“There are going to be serious flaws with any bill touching on health care. In this way, we’ll have a framework in place, and improvements that address real issues can be made later.”
In other words, massive boondoggle good, because it’s “better than what we have now.”