American healthcare stinks so why aren’t the Republicans, who don’t want Obamacare, doing anything to help solve the problem? A New York Times editorial on 11/18 states firmly that we rank at or near the bottom of most healthcare categories among advanced nations. According to the Times editorial a survey of 20,000 people here and in Europe comes up with the following numbers.
37% of American adults went without a doctor’s care or didn’t purchase recommended prescriptions this year because of cost as against 4% in Britain and 6% in Sweden. Nearly 25% of Americans couldn’t pay medical bills which caused their families serious economic problems, against 13% in France and less than 7% in five other countries.
When Americans got sick they had to wait longer than people in most of the other countries. Fewer than 50% of Americans could get same day or next day appointments with a doctor. Only Canada was worse, probably because they are so much like us. About 32% of consumers spent a lot of time on paper work for claims they thought were covered. And despite these problems we pay far more for our health care than any industrialized nation on the planet.
The ACA was created to address these problems. It’s far from perfect but we need it and we need it to work right. The GOP has come up with nothing remotely resembling a functional plan since Mitt Romney put his plan in place in Massachusetts. Then he disavowed the ACA, which is almost the same plan, simply because Barak Obama made it happen.
But lo and behold, Tom, an old friend of mine and a determined Republican, who was one of the inspirations for this blog, has come up with his own solution for part of the problem. “To get the young healthy kids,” he suggests, “they should reinstate the draft and tell the kids that if they join ACA they will be exempt from the draft…” Typically far right and all but unworkable but at least it shows that they aren’t all asleep at the switch.
There are many problems with the ACA and the mess with the website has only added to them but our country is in desperate need of functional healthcare. The Republicans need to end their petty attack on the President and try, for once, to work for the good of the country instead of their own selfish ends.
The noise among the talking heads when this was written, was all about how Obama screwed up the implementation of the ACA website, and that criticism was certainly valid, but the comparisons to Bush , the deserter, and Katrina are just as certainly absurd. Going into Katrina, Bush already had started two illegal wars and was getting ready to bankrupt the country. Katrina was just the poisoned icing on the crumbling cake. People were actually dying in New Orleans even as he hesitated in bringing help so the comparison, like most of the noise being made by the right is at best inane. This is especially true when one considers the fact that no one was trying to stop Bush from saving Louisiana, as the right has been trying to affect a cancellation of the ACA.
If nothing else this mess is an abject lesson in the differences between the two parties. The Democrats, even the ones who hated Bush, would at least, half-heartedly back him for the sake of the country. The Republicans, even the ones who know Obama is right have always tried to destroy his legislation for the sake of their sponsor’s greed and their own bigotry.
Watching Martha Raddatz questioning of Kristen Gillibrand, on This Week, is a clear example of a host not asking the right questions In the middle of the interview, after asking about the future of the ACA and having Gillibrand explain the important points of the program that are too often ignored, Raddatz flips the discussion by saying, “We’re talking about leadership here…” No she wasn’t, Martha, you were talking about why the ACA would fail and Gillibrand was talking about why we needed it.
That’s exactly what’s wrong with Washington and all the politicians and media flowing out of that fractured city. Obama’s leadership qualities are not what are important to this particular discussion. The ACA; why we need it and what can be done to fix it, are the only pertinent concerns here. Who the hell gives a damn about Obama’s legacy? What the people care about is getting affordable healthcare without bankrupting the country.
Sure Obama has made some big mistakes on this, the first being not making it a single payer system. Why didn’t he do that? Maybe, because he couldn’t get enough Democrats to take a pass on their insurance company generated bribes and back him. But that was yesterday. It now seems that even the insurance companies, suddenly staring at millions of new customers, are trying to help the ACA. The only ones who don’t see the ACA eventually working are the far right and their reason is obviously because a black guy proposed it.
Anyone who wants to call that last statement reverse racism doesn’t know who lives in this country.
Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, joins the discussion by making a statement that has been made before but still stands as false as any that has been made in the entire ACA debate, when he says that it will be the ACA’s fault, when in June, thousands of employers will move full time workers to part time status to avoid having to keep paying their ACA benefits. This is pure unadulterated bullshit. The degenerate kind of management that moves workers to part time to avoid having to pay medical benefits, which those workers had earned as full time employees through collective bargaining will be acting out of pure greed and must bear the blame for the act they will perpetrate. It isn’t the healthcare law that is at fault for the despicable actions of greedy fat cats for whom more, is never enough and Bret Stephens should be ashamed of himself for making a statement like that. I know he works for the Wall Street Journal but that doesn’t mean he has to be a complete whore.
Weak links like David Gregory, who carried on, ad nauseum, about the damage done by the weak opening of the ACA website are not interested in whether or not the ACA will work or how long it will take to fix it. They are only interested in the political aspects of what is going on at this precise moment and that isn’t good for the country. Who cares what they think will happen two years from now, because of this bad opening? By that time everything will have changed ten times. That’s just the nature of politics. Two weeks before these discussions everything was chaos and here it is two weeks after them and the ACA enrollment figures are burgeoning and everything looks like it is going to work out fine. None of that is relevant to actual health care but the talking heads don’t care. All they care about is what will sell papers or in this case how much per minute, they can get out of BP for its phony lies about how many great things it’s doing for a Gulf Coast it almost destroyed.
I give bow to Nancy Pelosi, a woman of whom I have never been a fan, for standing up to Gregory and not letting him drive her off message, at least for part of her interview. She understands what is important here, and that is, that the nation needs healthcare. It’s just unfortunate that she isn’t a fast enough thinker or glib enough speaker to make her points more clearly.
When, on the other hand, Kelly Ayotte, ® New Hampshire is questioned about alternatives to the ACA she comes up an empty vessel, or essentially so, on anything that will improve it, this after blasting it for an inordinate amount of air time. This is typical GOP reaction to almost anything. Oppose it if Obama has anything to do with it but God forbid, they come up with any reasonable way to deal with the problem.
Cancellation notices have come in for a great deal of attention. The problem with cancellation notices is that they have everyone all bent out of shape when the reason for them is that the policies that are being cancelled were no damn good in the first place. Why are we having a big to do, about people who are too stupid to understand that they are being scammed? It seems that we should come up with a way to allow these turkey’s to keep their useless healthcare products and still protect the rest the nation from the problems of not having any healthcare at all. I mean if you have a policy that doesn’t really cover you and you are upset about having to do a little work to get another policy that will cover you better for about the same amount of money or less and you are complaining, I see no reason to help you. You are too stupid to appreciate it anyway.
There was an interesting conversation between Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal and Ezra Klein, editor of the Washington Post Wonk blog. Klein understands what is happening now and what can happen in the future and that basically the White House needs to find a way to get young healthy subscribers to sign up. He points out that there is plenty of time to get this done and that all other plans like, Social Security, Medicare, etc., have needed a huge break-in period, so why shouldn’t this one?
Henninger on the other hand, is a true naysayer. He completely misunderstands the involvement of young people whose lives run on technology. Rather than being befuddled by the tech glitches of the current system, they will simply ignore the whole thing for a while and them merely sign on when things are fixed. He doesn’t get this.
That’s basically the problem with the whole Right. They don’t get this or much else. That would be okay if national healthcare wasn’t so damned important. It’s pretty terrifying to realize that a significant segment of the national population doesn’t understand either the cost problem with healthcare or the coverage problem with healthcare and most of them are the ones running to the emergency room because they can’t afford their own program. These are the same people who rail about the welfare cheats without having a clue that the rest of the nation is paying for the healthcare they think is free at emergency rooms.
It’s a very simple situation. We need some kind of national healthcare that is both affordable and all-inclusive. We now have a program that is up and starting to function. Are we smart enough to push it along and help it to grow or are we so dumb that we will let it die and have no support system available to the American public?
1. It should have been Medicare for all to begin with rather than this nonsensical and pathetic attempt to get something passed by Congress at any cost. If one (see Obama and the Dem’s) capitulates immediately from doing the right thing then the result is predictable. Yes, I know it is a heavy lift to get single payer, however that is the only rational solution for affordable and meaningful health care for all. There should be no debate that this is a universal right for all citizens in a civilized society in the 21st. century.
2. As for Tom I am sad to say he is not the one who is not asleep but rather in a coma if what he proposed was meant to be taken seriously and as long as anyone gives any credit for patently absurd so called solutions then we only invite more nonsense from Repubs.