Dangerous Alliance of Health Industry and Right-Wingers

[sfc_oliver]

SO Dennis you prove yourself again, talking without knowing. You are too easy.

[irishbobcat]

To the Editor:

Health-care reform efforts in Washington have reached a critical stage; it's time for all of us who favor universal coverage for all Americans to make our voices heard loud and clear. Health care is a fundamental human right, not a privilege for only those who can afford it. It is absurd that a country as wealthy as ours can leave 50 million citizens without proper care. Perhaps the most sobering reminders of how dysfunctional our current health-care system has become are to be found on bulletin boards in local businesses announcing fundraisers for people facing serious health-care problems. How terrible – being forced to solicit friends, neighbors, even total strangers to kick in cash so that you can get the treatment you need. It doesn't have to be like that.

As a nation we spend more on health care than any other country, yet get too little in return. Huge sums of money are lost to paper-pushing middlemen working for the HMO/insurance industry. What we need is a single-payer or public option similar to the one being discussed in Washington. A new and improved system will not only benefit the health of our people but also the health of our ailing economy.

For example, one very important reason American corporations have trouble competing globally is due to rapidly rising health-care costs for their employees. Corporations in other countries do not face such costs as their national health-care systems cover them.

Furthermore, most bankruptcies in America are due to exorbitant health-care costs, with more than half of the cases happening to people who have insurance. What an awful indictment of our current system! What I would like to know is how is it that countries much less prosperous than ours can provide their citizens universal health-care coverage while our country cannot? It makes no sense. A healthy America is a better America.

Please contact your elected representatives today and let them know you definitely want universal health care for all Americans.

Jonathan Maffay
Athens

[Towntalk]

Senate group omitting Dem health goals

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090727/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_overhaul/print

[irishbobcat]

Everett Oliver, I didn't bother to even look at GOP bills, I could care less.....

[sfc_oliver]

Ok so Dennis, there are no examples of the GOP rushing bills through without reading them. I hadn't thought so.

And yes Republicans would vote for health care insurance reform. If it was actually going to be good for the Nation.

[Towntalk]

The Republicans are not opposed to health care reform as such, its many of the sections in the bill that they are opposed to.

Even among Democrats absent the Blue Dog Democrats are not on board 100% with the House or Senate versions, so while you may hate Republicans with a passion, you can't put all the blame on them.

The Senate put off voting on their version for this very reason. They have a super majority so it would be easy enough for Reid to ram the bill through without any Republican votes, so it's obvious that not all the Democratic Senators are on board.

Then there's the matter of the House - Senate conference on the two versions. At that point, it's out of our hands since they don't call outside witnesses, and it's done behind closed doors.

What comes out of conference may very well be a watered down version of the original bills in order to secure votes.

[irishbobcat]

but will the Gop and conservatives ever be ready to vote for single-payer health care or universal health care?   no matter how much reading and studying
of a bill is delivered to them?

[Towntalk]

Dennis in his infinate wisdom said:

Health care will get pushed through......then we can argue about the devil in the details......the Democrats remember how the GOP sunk the Clinton health care plan of 93 and won't let in happen again.....

What would be served by arguing a done deal  AFTER THE FACT  ?

If a draconian bill came before the Struthers Board of Education only hours before the members were to vote on it, and copies were not made available prior to the vote you would be the first to raise a stink, and you'd be right, yet you see nothing wrong with the way the House Bill was handled. 

Doesn't make a lick of sense. 

[sfc_oliver]

I'm sorry but I just do not remember one bill that the GOP rushed trough, And the dems could always stop them with a filibuster. Can't think of any previous congress that had the nerve to vote on a bill while amendments were still being put together.

Name even one time prior to this congress where 300 pages were released at 3 Am and voted on the 1300 page bill the same day.

Has never happened, and our dear Mr Ryan says he read it before the vote...LOL

[irishbobcat]

When the GOP was in control of the white house and hill they rushed bills through....

now they sit on the other side of the fence......not fun is it?

Health care will get pushed through......then we can argue about the devil in the details......the Democrats remember how the GOP sunk the Clinton health care plan of 93 and won't let in happen again.....

[sfc_oliver]

Someone needs to make this out of control tax and spent congress and administration slow down. And they are spending more than they are even taxing. So the deficit and debt grow steadily.

It would be fair to say they are acting "stupidly"

[irishbobcat]

Dangerous Alliance of Health Industry and Right-Wingers
By Bill Moyers

July 27, 2009 - 11:51am ET


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With Michael Winship

As Republicans fire away on health reform, big business is stepping up attacks too, lobbying and advertising guns blazing.

Push finally came to shove in Washington this past week as the battle for health care escalated from scattered sniper fire into all-out combat. If it all seems to be getting more and more confusing, join the club. It's hard to see what's happening through all the gun smoke.

The Republicans have more than health care reform in their bomb sights—they want a loss for Obama so crushing it will bring the administration to its knees and restore GOP control of Congress after next year's elections.

In the words of Republican Senator Jim DeMint, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

The "Waterloo" of DeMint's metaphor, of course, is not the 1974 Abba hit but the battle in 1815 that ended Napoleon Bonaparte's rule as Emperor of France—a humiliating defeat and a turning point in European history. Right-wingers like Glenn Beck see Obama as Napoleon incarnate, a popular emperor who must be stopped.

Here's what Beck said on his television show Monday, July 20: "I'm telling you, this guy is dangerous. He's never lost before. He won't understand ... like, 'Who are you to question me?' I mean, this guy is practically an imperial President now. When he starts to lose and people start to question him and push him back against the wall, he's not gonna know how to react."

The Republican strategy is almost identical to the way they turned health care into Waterloo for Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993.

Back then, one of their chief propagandists, William Kristol, urged his party to block any health care plan for fear that Democrats would be seen as "the generous protector of middle class interests." Now he's telling the GOP to "go for the kill ... throw the kitchen sink ... drive a stake through its heart ... We need to start over."

So in lockstep are the Republicans that when strategist Alex Castellanos issued a memo outlining their battle plan, party chairman Michael Steele parroted large sections of it word for word in a speech at Washington's National Press Club. Asked a health care-related question that took him off script, Steele replied, "I don't do policy."

As the Republicans fired away, big business stepped up the attack too, their lobbying and advertising guns blazing. The Chamber of Commerce, for one, announced a major campaign of rallies and print and Internet ads to crush the White House plan for a competitive public option allowing consumers to choose between a government plan and private health insurance.

In key states where members of Congress remain on the fence, the airwaves are vibrating with television commercials aimed at shifting hearts and minds away from any change that might threaten profits.

President Obama rejected the Republicans' Waterloo metaphor and mounted a massive media counteroffensive of his own. But the President has already run into booby traps of his own making and minefields laid by members of his own party, exacerbated when the Congressional Budget Office reported that reform plans, instead of controlling costs, would send the national debt further into the stratosphere.

Meanwhile, supporters who want to scrap the present system for fundamental change are staring glumly though the fog of war at a battlefield in total disarray.

They fear that in the White House's desire to get a bill—any bill—passed by Congress, it will have been so compromised, so bent to favor the big interests, that it will be less Waterloo than watered down, a steady diluting of the change they had hoped for and that America needs.

The big drug companies are already so pleased with what they've been promised that they've brought back Harry and Louise—the make-believe couple who starred in TV ads that helped torpedo the Clinton health care plan—but this time they're in favor of reform.

According to The Associated Press, the drug industry's trade group PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) and the drug company Pfizer "reported spending more money than other health care organizations on lobbying in the second quarter of this year"—$6.2 million from PhRMA, $5.6 million from Pfizer.

"Including its latest report, PhRMA has now spent $13.1 million lobbying so far this year. Pfizer has reported $11.7 million in lobbying expenses for 2009."

This is part of the reason, as Alicia Mundy and Laura Meckler recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, that "the pharmaceuticals industry, which President Barack Obama promised to 'take on' during his campaign, is winning most of what it wants in the health-care overhaul."

Their story describes "a string of victories" plucked from the Senate Finance Committee by drug company lobbyists, including no cost-cutting steps, no cheaper drugs to be allowed across the border from Canada, and no direct Federal government negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies to lower Medicare drug prices.

And that's not all. The Senate Health Committee is giving the biotech industry monopoly protection against competition from generic drugs for 12 years after they go on the market.

No wonder the cost of reform keeps going up and up and up. Could it be that Harry and Louise are happier because, this time, they're in on the deal?