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One of the captions in the above cartoon reads: : “When Trillions are spent on war, but health care reform has to be revenue neutral.”
The government of the United States can pass laws in a few days to spend tens of trillions of dollars for war and the bailout of wall street and the bankers. Yet those who ‘govern’ pass universal healthcare for themselves, but they cannot spend even one trillion dollars for universal health for those who are ‘governed’! This is what is considered, by the powers that be a democracy and part of the democratic way.
Below are some quotes about what is wrong with proposed health bill passed by the United States House of ‘Representatives’.
There’s no polite way to put it. If you’re one of millions who voted Democrats into Congress and the White House last year to enact universal health care, you’ve been played and betrayed. Instead of recognizing a human right to health care, the White House and congressional Democrats have enshrined into law a corporate right to profit on the delivery or the non-delivery of health care. Health insurance will be mandatory, like car insurance, and government subsidies will enable everyone to purchase the shoddy, deceptive and defective products of the private insurance industry, which already rakes off fully one out of every three health care dollars in tolls for nothing more than standing between patients and their health care. — Played, Betrayed, Health Care Delayed: House Passes Bailout For Private Insurance Companies by Bruce A. Dixon.
A very complex, mandatory private insurance scheme recently passed the U.S. House. The public is being overwhelmed by sound bites on one hand about how great it is, on the other, how terrible. We are hearing few of the details that are actually in the bill. Having read the bill, it is clear now that what started as health reform has emerged from the political process as health “deform,” building on the worst, not the best of the current system.If passed, this law will move the U.S. farther from universal health care, making it harder than ever to accomplish health care justice in the future. If Congress does not have the courage to stand up to the private insurance industry now, it will be even more difficult in the future, especially after giving the industry trillions of new dollars through this terrible legislation. Let’s call this what it is: another corporate bailout on the backs of working people. The legislation institutionalizes permanent inequality in health care. Unlike Medicare where all beneficiaries have a single plan, this bill further divides the U.S. system into tiers based on ability to pay. It creates basic, enhanced, premium and premium-plus plans. A basic plan will provide only 70 percent of the coverage of a “reference benefit package,” one that includes even fewer services than most insured people have today. The bill doesn’t even mention coverage for essential services like vision and adult dental care except in the most costly premium-plus plan. Out-of-pocket costs remain sky high. Everyone will be required to pay monthly insurance premiums. Some low-wage workers will receive taxpayer subsidies on a sliding scale. The lowest income people will have full subsidies. But remember, this is not money for care, it is support only to buy insurance. The legislation creates a law to let these corporations increase what they charge people as they get older. In fact, they can be charged up to twice as much as younger people for identical coverage. The legislation makes it illegal to not buy health insurance. The penalties are described in a section of the legislation called “Shared Responsibility.” This will let the IRS impose a tax of up to 2.5 percent of modified adjusted gross income for not having health insurance. People on the financial edge, people fighting foreclosure to stay in their homes or people who are unemployed all or part of a year will not be able to afford the insurance premiums or the penalties for not having insurance.We will all be drowning in paperwork, which will continue to drive up administrative costs. Right now, insurance administrative waste is about 30 percent of every health care dollar— or about $1 billion a day. Adding more people to an insurance-based system will result in even more money going into this bottomless pit. — We Need Health Care, Not Insurance, by Carol Wilson
Actually, the democratic way would be to have a national referendum on health care so that those who are being raped and pillaged, by the health industry, be able to vote on health care! We need to have a national referendum on health care!
Let the people vote on healthcare! — Let us decide for ourselves!
