Once it passes they will own all of it, not just the reforms. Republicans will turn every health insurance horror story in a story about how the Dems' HCR is a tremendous awful horrible failure, whether or not it has anything to do with specific reforms enacted.
This is exactly right. So I am absolutely, completely befuddled as to why anything that represent real reform is being blocked by Senate Democrats.
I simply don’t understand this apparent determination to gut healthcare reform at all costs. The two biggest problems with our current healthcare system--high cost and lack of access for millions of people--are being gutted right and left:
• Importation of drugs from overseas, which would lower costs? No way. Pharmaceutical companies don’t like it, so it’s a no-go.
• Eliminating caps on insurance benefits? Of course not! Someone facing a catastrophic illness like cancer or severe brain injury--something requiring loads of expensive hospitalization and rehab--should still face bankruptcy and financial ruin under the “new” rules.
• Real competition for insurance companies in the form of a “public option”? That’s crazy talk! Insurance companies must be allowed to maintain their monopoly to provide whatever service it is they perform -- and I’m still unclear as to what that is, since they no longer pool risk but seem to exist simply to skim their profits off the top.
• Repealing the antitrust exemption insurance companies have enjoyed since 1945, limiting competition and keeping costs high to consumers? Not yet! We’re still holding out on that one, though.
Listen, the healthcare bill sucks. It’s worse than bad because near as I can tell, it’s nothing more than a big handout to insurance companies, which in my opinion is an industry that has outlived its usefulness. Listen, insurance folks: You’re supposed to pool risk and keep costs low. You aren’t doing that, in fact, you’re doing the opposite. You’ve become a little scam fleecing hardworking people of their life savings. And you act as if you are completely unable to change your most egregious policies yourself, begging Congress to come in and pass a law against them.
What the hell?
Anyway, Democrats need to get a fucking clue. What they are expending so much time, energy, money and effort on sucks. Not because it’s “socialism” or “government-run healthcare” but because it doesn’t change a damn thing. And we’re going to come out of this nine months of town brawls and hanging Congress critters in effigy and divisive political angst and agita with a healthcare system that is still broken. I'm absolutely dumbfounded.
And excuse me, but the Republicans are no better, in fact, they're worse. They're throwing up roadblocks right and left, even trying to tell us that the system we have now is just super, in fact, is so much better than what people in other countries have. How stupid do you think we are?
Republicans and Democrats alike have come at it from opposite directions but they seem to have arrived at the same place: keep the broken system we have now. A privileged elite are making far too much money off the scam to change it.
If you ask me, it’s better to have no healthcare bill at all right now. Because it’s not worth the paltry “reforms” we’re being presented. I’d rather not have an individual mandate forcing people to buy costly private health insurance when that health insurance still caps benefits, is exempt for any competition, and the only piece of candy we’ve been presented is eliminating pre-existing conditions. Nice but not worth it.
So everyone who is asking me to call my Senator asking them to support the healthcare bill: No. My Senators are Republicans and they are not going to support it anyway. They aren’t supporting it for all the wrong reasons but we at least have arrived at the same place.
Democrats: you screwed up. BIG time.
