Privatise the NHS

[ChezGiven 0]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

[Happy Face 29]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

 

Any idea what the NHS costs each of us taxpayers Chez?

[ChezGiven 0]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

 

Any idea what the NHS costs each of us taxpayers Chez?

 

 

Total healthcare exp…………US$184.6 billion

Total healthcare exp per cap………US$3,064

Total healthcare exp as % GDP……….…8.3%

Source: OECD Health Database 2005

[ChezGiven 0]

"The NHS is primarily financed by general taxation (80.3% in 2006), with national

insurance contributions (18.4%) and patient co-payments (1.3%) making up the

remainder."

 

Same source.

[Happy Face 29]

Interesting page...

 

http://www.abpi.org.uk/statistics/section.asp?sect=4

 

We spend more on booze, restaurant meals and shoes than on medecine.

[Park Life 71]

Heal the world.

[Fop 1]

Anybody who thinks the US system where people are refused treatment for certain conditions beacause of the cost is a better system than the NHS is a moron. To think it is best to dismantle a system ostensibly there for the good of everyone and replace it with a system run to make profit for share holders is just insane.

 

I think you've got that the wrong way round. It's the UK that inspects the value of a treatment before rolling it out to the NHS. In the US you can pay for anything you can afford.

 

 

Unfortunately for your "Christian" dollar-fascist beliefs more than 50m people there cannot afford any. It's time you embraced peaceful socialism, Chris.

 

Do we get pin badges?

 

and free organs for all.

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3973]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

 

By presume I assume you meant "I don't have a clue so I am going to just make something up".

 

SVT stand for Supra ventricula tachycardia.

[ChezGiven 0]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

 

By presume I assume you meant "I don't have a clue so I am going to just make something up".

 

SVT stand for Supra ventricula tachycardia.

 

Fucking hell, i was just asking. Not far off though, both vascular diseases.

 

What sort of wanker asks someone a question, gets a decent response based on the best of his knowledge, picks out a mistaken assumption and then takes the piss?

 

Tosser

[Fop 1]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

 

By presume I assume you meant "I don't have a clue so I am going to just make something up".

 

SVT stand for Supra ventricula tachycardia.

 

Fucking hell, i was just asking. Not far off though, both vascular diseases.

 

What sort of wanker asks someone a question, gets a decent response based on the best of his knowledge, picks out a mistaken assumption and then takes the piss?

 

Tosser

 

Both affect humans too.

Edited August 29, 2009 by Fop

[ChezGiven 0]

Were you just trying to answer my question?

[Park Life 71]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

 

By presume I assume you meant "I don't have a clue so I am going to just make something up".

 

SVT stand for Supra ventricula tachycardia.

 

Fucking hell, i was just asking. Not far off though, both vascular diseases.

 

What sort of wanker asks someone a question, gets a decent response based on the best of his knowledge, picks out a mistaken assumption and then takes the piss?

 

Tosser

 

Ouch.

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3973]

Depends on your coverage, you'd incur out of pocket expenses on certain items i think. By SVT, i presume you mean a superficial venous thrombosis?

 

You have to remember that you dont pay tax towards healthcare at the same time, so you have higher incomes and retain a higher percentage of that for the same type of job. This is no comfort for those without jobs and therefore insurance of course.

 

By presume I assume you meant "I don't have a clue so I am going to just make something up".

 

SVT stand for Supra ventricula tachycardia.

 

Fucking hell, i was just asking. Not far off though, both vascular diseases.

 

What sort of wanker asks someone a question, gets a decent response based on the best of his knowledge, picks out a mistaken assumption and then takes the piss?

 

Tosser

 

 

All you had to do was type SVT into google or yahoo.

[sniffer 0]

You did and you couldn't even type it correctly.

 

Real clash of the titans.

[Guest alex]

What a shit wum

[Kevin Carr's Gloves 3973]

You did and you couldn't even type it correctly.

 

Real clash of the titans.

 

Who the fuck is this moron?

[Fop 1]

Were you just trying to answer my question?

 

The answer to that question is "who doesn't here?".

[Happy Face 29]

Dont doubt Obama too much, this boy is taking on the medical and insurance industries face on.

 

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferous email backlash -- easily -- was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

 

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists." Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

 

 

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

 

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

 

 

Let's repeat that: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place." Indeed it does. There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so. If you're interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it's better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you. Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get. The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

 

Yet numerous Obama defenders -- such as Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and Steve Benen -- have been insisting that there is just nothing the White House could have done and all of this shows that our political system is tragically "ungovernable." After all, Congress is a separate branch of government, Obama doesn't have a vote, and 60 votes are needed to do anything. How is it his fault if centrist Senators won't support what he wants to do? Apparently, this is the type of conversation we're to believe takes place in the Oval Office:

 

 

The President: I really want a public option and Medicare buy-in. What can we do to get it?

 

Rahm Emanuel: Unfortunately, nothing. We can just sit by and hope, but you're not in Congress any more and you don't have a vote. They're a separate branch of government and we have to respect that.

 

The President: So we have no role to play in what the Democratic Congress does?

 

Emanuel: No. Members of Congress make up their own minds and there's just nothing we can do to influence or pressure them.

 

The President: Gosh, that's too bad. Let's just keep our fingers crossed and see what happens then.

 

 

In an ideal world, Congress would be -- and should be -- an autonomous branch of government, exercising judgment independent of the White House's influence, but that's not the world we live in. Does anyone actually believe that Rahm Emanuel (who built his career on industry support for the Party and jamming "centrist" bills through Congress with the support of Blue Dogs) and Barack Obama (who attached himself to Joe Lieberman when arriving in the Senate, repeatedly proved himself receptive to "centrist" compromises, had a campaign funded by corporate interests, and is now the leader of a vast funding and political infrastructure) were the helpless victims of those same forces? Engineering these sorts of "centrist," industry-serving compromises has been the modus operandi of both Obama and, especially, Emanuel.

 

Indeed, we've seen before what the White House can do -- and does do -- when they actually care about pressuring members of Congress to support something they genuinely want passed. When FDL and other liberal blogs led an effort to defeat Obama's war funding bill back in June, the White House became desperate for votes, and here is what they apparently did (though they deny it):

 

The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won't get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday. "We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen.

 

That's what the White House can do when they actually care about pressuring someone to vote the way they want. Why didn't they do any of that to the "centrists" who were supposedly obstructing what they wanted on health care? Why didn't they tell Blanche Lincoln -- in a desperate fight for her political life -- that she would "never hear from them again," and would lose DNC and other Democratic institutional support, if she filibustered the public option? Why haven't they threatened to remove Joe Lieberman's cherished Homeland Security Chairmanship if he's been sabotaging the President's agenda? Why hasn't the President been rhetorically pressuring Senators to support the public option and Medicare buy-in, or taking any of the other steps outlined here by Adam Green? There's no guarantee that it would have worked -- Obama is not omnipotent and he can't always control Congressional outcomes -- but the lack of any such efforts is extremely telling about what the White House really wanted here.

 

Independent of the reasonable debate over whether this bill is a marginal improvement over the status quo, there are truly horrible elements to it. Two of the most popular provisions (both of which, not coincidentally, were highly adverse to industry interests) -- the public option and Medicare expansion -- are stripped out (a new Washington Post/ABC poll out today shows that the public favors expansion of Medicare to age 55 by a 30-point margin). What remains is a politically disastrous and highly coercive "mandate" gift to the health insurance industry, described perfectly by Digby:

 

 

Obama can say that you're getting a lot, but also saying that it "covers everyone," as if there's a big new benefit is a big stretch.

Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don't get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn't even conservative, free market or otherwise. It's some kind of weird corporatism that's very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.

 

Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people's money against their will, saying it's for their own good --- and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don't miss the money as much when they never see it.

 

In essence, this reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls. Progressive opinion-makers, as always, signaled that they can and should be ignored (don't worry about us -- we're announcing in advance that we'll support whatever you feed us no matter how little it contains of what we want and will never exercise raw political power to get what we want; make sure those other people are happy but ignore us). Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as "centrist," the noblest Beltway value.

 

Looked at from the narrow lens of health care policy, there is a reasonable debate to be had among reform advocates over whether this bill is a net benefit or a net harm. But the idea that the White House did what it could to ensure the inclusion of progressive provisions -- or that they were powerless to do anything about it -- is absurd on its face. Whatever else is true, the overwhelming evidence points to exactly what Sen. Feingold said yesterday: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place."

 

 

 

It's also worth noting how completely antithetical claims are advanced to defend and excuse Obama. We've long heard -- from the most blindly loyal cheerleaders and from Emanuel himself -- that progressives should place their trust in the Obama White House to get this done the right way, that he's playing 11-dimensional chess when everyone else is playing checkers, that Obama is the Long Game Master who will always win. Then, when a bad bill is produced, the exact opposite claim is hauled out: it's not his fault because he's totally powerless, has nothing to do with this, and couldn't possibly have altered the outcome. From his defenders, he's instantaneously transformed from 11-dimensional chess Master to impotent, victimized bystander.

 

The supreme goal is to shield him from all blame. What gets said to accomplish that goal can -- and does -- radically change from day to day.

 

Over at Politico, Jane Hamsher documents how Joe Lieberman's conduct on the health care bill provides the perfect vehicle to advance the agenda of the White House and Harry Reid. Consistent with that, she independently notes media reports that White House officials are privately expressing extreme irritation with Howard Dean for opposing the Senate bill as insufficient, but have nothing bad to say about Lieberman, who supposedly single-handedly sabotaged what the White House was hoping for in this bill.

 

Meanwhile, as one would expect, health insurance stocks are soaring today in response to the industry-serving "health care reform" bill backed by the Democratic Senate and White House -- the same people who began advocating for "health care reform" based on the need to restrain on an out-of-control and profit-inflated health insurance industry (h/t Markos).

 

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_gr...ouse/index.html

[ChezGiven 0]

That whole article is based on the opinion, expressed in one sentence, of a marginal senator who uses the word 'appears' quite judisciously to conclude that Obama can do what he wants, there is no such thing as filibustering in washington, there is just Obama and his desires. They need Lieberman or all of this will fail. Thats right, the 60-40 senate requirement hands all of the power to Lieberman, not Obama. As Obama says, why let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Get Lieberman onside, get the bill passed and tweak it in the second term when no-one is really watching.

 

The bill will (apparently) prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or dropping customers who fall ill. Thats not going to help the insurance companies. Nor will opening up exchanges for insurance coverage for those working but not offered health care by the company they work for. Those competitive exchanges will drive down prices and allow people to select basic coverage to meet their needs.

[Happy Face 29]

That whole article is based on the opinion, expressed in one sentence, of a marginal senator who uses the word 'appears' quite judisciously to conclude that Obama can do what he wants, there is no such thing as filibustering in washington, there is just Obama and his desires. They need Lieberman or all of this will fail. Thats right, the 60-40 senate requirement hands all of the power to Lieberman, not Obama. As Obama says, why let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Get Lieberman onside, get the bill passed and tweak it in the second term when no-one is really watching.

 

The bill will (apparently) prevent insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or dropping customers who fall ill. Thats not going to help the insurance companies. Nor will opening up exchanges for insurance coverage for those working but not offered health care by the company they work for. Those competitive exchanges will drive down prices and allow people to select basic coverage to meet their needs.

 

It's an insurance company blow job that's seen their stock prices rocket as predicted for months.

[ChezGiven 0]

The rising stock prices are driven by the same idiots who presided over the financial crisis, these guys arent deep thinkers, the logic goes like this:

 

"No public option! Gumph! Buy Blue Shied!!111!@@21!"

Edited December 17, 2009 by ChezGiven

[Happy Face 29]

The rising stock prices are driven by the same idiots who presided over the financial crisis, these guys arent deep thinkers, the logic goes like this:

 

"No public option! Gumph! Buy Blue Shied!!111!@@21!"

 

Not so much the lack of a public option. That would be maintaining the status quo. It's the fact everyone will be forced to buy insurance that's driving the price up. Another 47million customers guaranteed is it?

 

Then there's the ban on importing cheaper drugs which would have saved America billions, and was a common sense idea endorsed by Obama as a candidate which he's back tracked on now he's president.

[ChezGiven 0]

I'm going to wait until the full details are public but it being the status quo is only the view of one man as far as i can see.

[Park Life 71]

A complete backdown by the Uncle Tom president.

[Happy Face 29]

I'm going to wait until the full details are public but it being the status quo is only the view of one man as far as i can see.

 

I'm not saying the plan being put in place is the status quo and i don't think anyone in the article is. What I meant was if all that had been announced was no public option, then that would be no different to as it stands currently and there'd be no reason for stock prices to soar. Insured people are going to get a better deal than they ever had before, which is great, but that's going to be paid for by gifting the insurance companies almost 50million new customers...by law.

Which I think is a better deal for the insurance companies (who will continue to charge every customer a premium to subsidise their advertising, their profit margins and their fights to avoid paying out on claims) than it is for Americans....and the stock market agrees.