US healthcare reform: Polishing a turd
Posted by Jack in Uncategorized, tags: health, USA
Against the odds, President Obama was last night able to get his healthcare reforms through Congress.
Obama-fans everywhere are ecstatic, declaring a fantastic victory. And let’s not be a total wet blanket. Around 30 million Americans with no health insurance will now get some, although unless you’re very poor or very old you’ll be forced to pay for it yourself. And it will become harder for insurance companies to cheat people out of insurance they’ve paid for by claiming that they had a “pre-existing condition.”
But as Leftfield has already pointed out, there are a whole host of problems with this new legislation, and it is far from an attack on the FUCKING EVIL health insurance companies, in fact it will probably end up making them MORE money.
Do these people live in the same Universe as us?
Of course, try telling that to the Republicans and the absolutely mental Tea Party protesters. Every single Republican voted against the bill, and Te Partyers gathered outside Congress to shout racist and homophobic abuse at representatives, as well as actually spit on them.
A key part of the success of the bill was the commitment given by Obama to sign an executive order that would continue the proud American tradition of restricting abortions to those that can afford them, by not allowing public funds to be spent on helping poor women excercise their reproductive rights (*facepalm*). This helped win over anti-abortion Democrats.
But the real reason is that Democrats were afraid that if Obama couldn’t get these proposals through he would begin to look a bit useless, and so, by extension, would they.
Views on the left about the new laws are mixed. Michael Moore, who can be grating at times with his Obama bigging-up, wrote a pretty honest letter on the subject here. It still hails the bill as a big step forward, but he’s at least honest enough to admit that the US STILL doesn’t have universal healthcare, and a big fight still has to go on to get Americans to have nearly as good healthcare as we do in the UK.
Dr Margaret Flowers
But personally, I tend to lean more towards the position of Dr Margaret Flowers, one of the leaders of Physicians for a National Health Programme. In her piece she writes that, despite the new restrictions and regulations on the health insurance industry. they are rich enough and politically powerful enough to get round them. You only have to look at the crappy proposals they got Obama to accept to see their power. There is no way to fix privatised healthcare, it is fundamentally evil and wrong. This bill is just polishing a turd.
Americans: It’s not rocket science. We’ve managed it since 1945. Get yourselves an NHS!
“As this passes, the public will be told it is a solution. They will be told to wait and see how it works when it is implemented in 2014. In the meantime, people will continue to suffer, go bankrupt, or die of preventable causes. This is unacceptable.
We want health CARE reform. Health insurance reform makes no sense. Health insurance is very regulated but they are rich enough and clever enough to evade regulation. We will not support health insurance reform: it is a waste of time, money, and human life.
If we want real reform, it isn’t going to be pretty. It can’t be brought in through the back door or by tweaking. We will have to take on a very powerful industry that currently owns the White House, Congress, and the media. But work for anything less is a waste of time. The smallest increment of change that will be effective is to change to publicly funded health care.
It is not going to be another 10 years or 50 years before we get real reform if this bill fails. The single payer movement is growing. We can organize and push for real reform. But we must stand strong and united on our principles. We must put single payer on the table. It won’t happen any other way.” -Dr. Margaret Flowers.
Still, if we all get nothing else from this bill, this headline might just make it all worth it:
Bonus: Short film takes on one of the many bastard health insurance companies:
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The Physicians for a National Health Programme statement is even more damning, and goes into a lot more detail about all that’s wrong with this legislation. As an analogy, they put it “we can’t sit by as aspirin is dispensed to treat cancer”. They also note that 2/3 of Americans and 59% of doctors support single payer health insurance.
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pnhp220310.html
Here’s the thing: the majority of the people didn’t want it. I’m American, and wanted to see what people outside of our country thought about what was going on, since we have a mostly propaganda media. The media skews things in favor of whoever is winning, or whoever owns the network they report from.
Anyway the health care reform forces the rich to pay for the poor, is causing more class warfare, is blatantly against our constitution, allows for no freedom of choice in treatment regarding vaccinations and immunizations. First, Obama gets this crap bill passed. Next, he wants to grant amnesty for all the illegal aliens who came over and took our jobs and identities and collect on our welfare. Each of our homes has had the GPS coordinates logged by IBM and Lockheed-Martin “for the census,” and now Obama wants to censor the internet.
Just as a sidenote…I hope not everyone outside the US thinks we’re awful, it’s just that we don’t really have access to information about other country’s cultures, and we’ve been fed crap for “history” since birth. By the way, I loved the “polishing a turd” analogy.
Hi Eirwen,
If that’s your point of view, I don’t know what you thought of my article! I made my position pretty clear, which is I think thatthe US needs to emulate the UK (and all the world’s other developed nations) in establishing a national state health system. The huge costs of American healthcare currently (the highest in the world) are due to the massive profits being creamed off by private industry, and the huge bureaucracy involved in administering such and illogical and complex system.
The insurance companies are pure evil frankly. Have you seen Michael Moore’s Sicko, where he shows just what lengths they’ll go to to let people die in order to save a few thousand dollars? They need to be taken out of the picture by allowing everyone access to a high quality state health system. Here in the UK, there is still some private healthcare, but it’s marginal in the market next to the free NHS.
I think decent healthcare is a human right, i.e. something that everyone on Earth should have access to. To do that there’s going to have to be at least some element of the rich helping with the cost for the poor. The alternative is sitting idly by while poor people die needlessly of preventable illness, which to me seems heartless, and not deserving of a civilised society.
last i checked the private health insurance companies were in favour of the legislation. i think that tells you all you need to know. the legislation actually represents a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.