I'm not sure where healthcare is mentioned in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, such that the entire healthcare debate, absent the federal government's Medicare/Medicaid/VA programs, should be left with the states, who have primary regulatory authority over the health care industry from top to bottom. The states regulate the health insurers (the entire insurance industry), the hospitals, the doctors, the clinics, the nurses, the equipment, the facilities, the malpractice claims, and the only thing the state's don't regulate and can't regulate are the federal dollars that pay for those services when the patient is enrolled in a federally funded health care program.

I'm not sure where in the constitution Americans are granted the right to health insurance, but the federal government has programs in place for the impoverished, those over the age of 62, and those who have served our country through military service, everybody else is on their own.

I'd be happy with just a couple of reforms, such as requiring insurance companies to write policies regardless of pre-existing conditions and prohibiting rescission.

I'd also like to see health insurance divorced from employment so insurance would be portable and insurance companies would have to actually compete in the "free market" and negotiate directly with consumers instead of making back room wholesale deals with big corporations. But I'm a dreamer and that ain't gonna happen, either.

Nice job of pointing out the inherent conflicts in what people say they want regarding healthcare. As the whole mess is presently configured, it seems doomed to feel like a devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea kind of choice.

I don't think the place to start was ever with the single payer option. Instead, I think the places to start were, and still are, precisely where you've located them in the modest proposal excerpted above. It seems like it would have been so much easier to sell this point of departure to more of the public, and it also seems like it would have, and still could, make a huge positive impact on cost, therefore on availability.

The only people who'd have howled at these (actually huge) reforms would have been health insurors, I think, who behave aggregately like a supertrust to whom an actual free market would be anathema.

This "no health care in the Constitution" nonsense is one of the right wing's silliest arguments, akin perhaps to their literalist reading of the Old Testament and near-complete avoidance of the teachings of Christ in the New Testament.

People get sick; they need health care. One of the advantages of living in a civilization rather than in a cave is the implicit social contract which provides certain benefits over libertarian cave life. The availability of health care is one of these benefits.

To worry whether a bunch of wealthy slave owners in the eighteen century explicitly mentioned health care in their self-publications is merely to express a longing for a return to the cave.

Please excuse the rest of us if we do not wish to go back there with you.

insurance?

The hospitals cannot turn people away based upon their ability to pay, the hospitals cannot transfer patients based upon their ability to pay (dumping) and any living (and some nearly dead) have a statutory right to be treated in a hospital if they are suffering from a life treatening condition.

However, the federal government cannot force physicians, practitioners, and medical specialists to treat any individual without payment or other renumeration, health care is a business just like the corner grocery, the mechanics shop, the barber, the liquor store, the laundry or the food court at the mall. You pay to play or you find an insurance company, an employer provided program, or a government program to pay your medical bills.

The government already provides billions in programs through Medicaid, MediCare, VA and the people that fall through the cracks usually fall through the cracks on account of some set of circumstances which are unavoidable.

To the extent Obama wants to rein in doctors compensation like he wants to rein in Wall Street banker's compensation, that's a different story and should be addressed as such, that's not health care reform, that's socialism and price fixing, which they can do should they choose to do so, just call it what it is rather than call it health care reform, when accessibility and availability are not at issue, but soon will be with a socialized healthcare system run by the government.

We wouldn't even be having this conversation if a Republican was in the White House and Republicans were in a majority of Congress.

So that's another level of progress.

Bill Moyers did his Journal (PBS) last night on the health care issue. One of his best shows ever. Great vid clip of Zach Wamp slamming the uninsured (the "nekkid") for cluttering the emergency rooms "at our expense".

It all came down to the need for Wall Street profits, meaning our pension funds, city/county/state investment portfolios, CD accounts all depend on the health insurance companies denying benefits to increase bottom-line profits.

Looks like some on this thread are falling for the same arguments the health care industry used to kill reform for the last 60 years. If you don't read or listen to anything else, watch this interview with Wendell Collins, a native Tennessean who performed public relations for Humana and Cigna for 20 years. When he returned to his home town in Wise County, TN what he saw shocked him into talking publicly about the industry.

(link...)

Their PR campaigns are so sophisticated they are difficult to detect or trace. Their tactics ruthless. Decisions about the company profits are made by investors and hedge fund managers whose concern is satisfying wall street. Kicking people off the rolls is their most profitable practice. They run both parties in congress. Check out (link...)
for a ranking of who in congress gets the 'mostest' from the industry.

Sometimes they raise premiums on small businesses who provide coverage for an employee who gets sick and makes a claim. If the medical bills get too high the insurance company can cancel the plan with the business or they renegotiate for impossible (and often hidden) deductibles or co-pays that the individual must pay for, lowering the cost to businesses and shifting most of the cost to the sick individual. Small businesses and workers need a government plan to stay viable by forcing insurance companies to engage in actual competition.

(link...)

BTW. The show plays that clip of Zach Wamp on CNN shilling for the industry. Listen to Collins' remark about that. Too funny.

jcg

Overall, I believe that Moyers has had some of the best health care coverage of all media. Really good stuff, and last night was another one.

Pam Strickland

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." ~Kurt Vonnegut

John Duncan has a poll up that asks:

Should there be a government-run healthcare plan that competes with private insurers?
Yes
No
Not Sure

I think we should be hitting that thing every day. I know there has been focus here on Alexander and Corker but we should also be letting Duncan know how we feel.

You can take the poll at
(link...)

scroll down to the bottom of the page and look on the right hand side.

the interest groups they represent is wrongheaded.

The blame must be laid squarely on the Democrat Party, its representatives and senators, and the voters who put them in power and who for some strange reason seem intent on not holding THEM responsible/accountable, but, rather, on focussing on the entities that have bribed them into inaction.

Eight years of the GWB administration amply demonstrated there was nothing to the Republican Party. Those of us who expected no better from the Democrats are being quickly vindicated. Both parties are servants to the same vested monied interests, postituted to capitalist greed.