It’s Health Care Week! We bloggers are supposed to blog about health care every day to get everybody informed and with the program. Here goes…
Last week I heard that my Senator, Olympia Snowe, was unwilling to support any public option for health care unless there was a trigger. To say the least, I was disappointed.
Public option
Surely you’ve heard about this. It’s kind of like public health insurance. It would be a choice for those who can’t afford private insurance, or who are uninsurable because of pre-existing conditions. People who decided that the public option was a better choice could choose it over their private insurance.
Health care
Health care is when you get medical services to get you healthy. It should not be confused with health insurance, which is no guarantee that any health care will be received.
Trigger
This would be give the insurance companies another chance to make health insurance and health care available and affordable to all.
They would have a decade or so to decide how they were going to accomplish that goal delay until they managed to get it removed from consideration by a subsequent administration or Congress they had bought out.
Okay, I was really displeased about the situation. For me, the public option is not even really adequate, but it’s the only thing on the table that seems to be a step in the right direction.
Other suggestions have been exceedingly reactionary, such as taxing health insurance benefits and forcing the uninsured to buy junk insurance.
There are those who say that any reform is better than no reform, but I am not one of them. I think that a “reform” whose net result is making health care scarcer and more expensive for those who need it most is no reform at all.
But today I heard that Sen. Snowe is going to strongly support the public option. I don’t have to go to her office now to talk with the good-looking young men who work there, but maybe I will stop in anyway to say “Thank you!”
Maybe Susan Collins will come over from the dark side now. But probably not.
Sarah Palin, woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown for Everyman, has tweeted that she’s going to sue us all for saying unflattering things about her, many of them true.
She’s going to sue everybody who photoshopped her pictures after she whined that her wingnut talk show host supporter ended up on one. Especially the one who put two heads on her body.
The woman has always had issues with the concept of “truth”. Her story changes as often as she needs it to, and she expects us to accept her version with deference. It is disrespectful to question Sarah dearest, or to check the facts. Most often, she does not seem to be aware that people are capable of checking what she says to see if it is reality-based or non-reality-based.
To speculate on Sarah dearest, her shadowy past, her present, her future, her work ethic, her motives, etc., is illegal, or it ought to be. Sarah dearest is the law. There will be no other laws above her. Oops, does that sound like a Commandment?
According to a commenter to the story in the Anchorage Daily News,
Question_Assumptions wrote on 07/05/2009 08:58:12 AM:
If a rumor-monger only writes about and forwards negative rumors and doesn’t make an attempt to prove or disprove their veracity, that should be sufficient to prove “malice”. Slander and libel are not free speech and never have been.
My goodness. It looks like they’d have to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine and eliminate hate radio to satisfy that condition.
Too bad she’s incapable of taking advice, or she might have learned some skills years ago that would help her cope with criticism, which is part of being a public figure—which, by the way, she intends to continue being. Sarah dearest is the gift that will keep on giving and giving…
She might also have attempted to learn some facts about, oh, everything. Knowledge does not seem to be her strong point. And while she was at it, she could have picked up some creative writing skills. That speech Friday was atrociously badly written. She has a degree in journalism? Her alma mater should rescind her degree.
So sue me.
Somethingawful.com has offered a non-apology for making Sarah dearest resign. Warning! Offensive!
That’s where a sick person files a major claim on an existing insurance policy, a policy that they have been paying premiums for for years. Maybe the condition is some kind of cancer or other condition that may require long-term treatment to assure recovery.
The standard insurance company policy is to comb through all the patient’s records to see if there is something they inadvertently forgot to admit to when they first got the policy, something like acne or a sprained ankle. The company then claims fraud, denies the claim and rescinds (or cancels) the policy.
The person who is responsible for discovering justification gets a bonus, and if they cancel enough policies over a year, they get a big raise. For killing people.
At an insurance company hearing this past Tuesday, insurance company executives declared that they would continue this policy, even if they were taking part in a reform plan intended to increase coverage.
Hello? Thanks for clearing up the confusion. We here were under the impression that public mandates or taxpayer spending meant that abuses would be curtailed or, like, go away. Now that we know that bad faith is the plan, we can make out plans, too.
Watch Sicko to understand about how the health insurance industry takes advantage of sick policyholders to reap obscene profits. And kill them. I’m uploading now.
Last week, when the case against Ted Stevens was dropped for prosecutorial mishandling, we heard about evidence that was withheld from the defense. It happens all the time, but rarely is it so severe that anything comes of it, at least not influencing the disposition of the case.
As in the Coleman/Franken case, the judge usually finds out about it and chews out the lawyers. Occasionally the judge will throw out a case.
Now if you were one of those defendants who doesn’t have a lot of money for expensive lawyers, you’d never even know it happened to you. They’d probably get away with it every time, which obviously is not the way the justice system is supposed to work in this country.
But for the case to be completely dropped, rather than merely seeking a retrial of some sort had to mean that the case was so ‘poisoned’ by whatever had been done that it could not be retried.
There was even speculation that the Bush administration was responsible for making sure that the case would inevitably be thrown out on appeal, thus being an embarrassment for everyone involved, except of course Ted Stevens, who is claiming that this is proof he never did any of the things that they said he did.
Not hardly.
Well, of course we assumed that maybe somebody would get a slap on the wrist, or some Bush appointee would get pushed out of their job a bit early and end up getting wealthy writing slanted books rewriting history as fiction and giving interviews on hate radio claiming persecution by liberal fascists.
Not so. It seems that we really will find out wtf was happening.
“In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said.
And then he appointed a special prosecutor to figure out exactly what happened and bring the criminals in the department to justice.
YES!
In case there is any confusion about what “justice” might mean in a case like this, they are looking at disbarment and prison time.
The word is that the Bush administration has salted the employment rolls of the current administration with hangovers who are ‘moles’, undercover operatives waiting to take orders from Bush, Cheney, Rove, and the Republican caucus and sabotage whatever the Obama adminstration tries to do.
What Cramer is saying is that the only consideration in determining the economic health of the nation as a whole should be stock market prices. This is an interesting perspective. Clearly a great many investors feel this way. That is why the administration has been putting so much effort into boosting investor confidence. The media, locked into worship of the market as a be-all and end-all, has responded by declaring that the depression is over and it’s back to normal for the country. It takes the pressure off announcements of continuing job losses, foreclosures, corporate corruption and looting, etc.
The administration “fixed” the stock market to get the media off their backs.
The stock market “creates wealth”? I thought that was the problem with investment in this country, money from nothing creating bubbles.
Bill Moyers did a show about the real problem, which is nowhere near being addressed: corporate fraud.
In perhaps the most incongruous quote of the year 2008, Governor Blagojevich told a reporter last month that he runs because “it keeps love in your heart.” The Chicago Tribune ran a song contest for its readers, and we now have 38 songs on the joint themes of “Blagojevich” and “It keeps love in your heart.” The winner will be announced soon. Click through the photos in the article to hear them all. Enjoy!
The health insurance industry has come out in favor of a mandate for the uninsured to buy insurance. They’re willing to work with the Obama administration on this, bringing their expertise into the negotiations. They’re even willing to extend coverage to everyone, even those with pre-existing conditions.
Let me guess. They’re going to accept people with pre-existing conditions, but they will find a way to deny these costs. Or the co-pay and deductible will still make it impossible for sick people to get health care whenever they need it.
Thr uninsured and the uninsurables will be required to buy at least the minimum policy being offered, and with the insurance companies writing the law, it will be neither cheap nor generous.
If the pool includes all the poor people currently uninsured, plus all those who are currently uninsurable, that’s a huge chunk of cash. Another way to say it is that this will be a huge chunk of wealth, and the insurance companies are salivating at the idea of getting Washington to redistribute that wealth directly from the lowest income people, with no influence in Washington, to them.
This will be a hefty tax on the uninsured and the uninsurables, the ones who can least afford it.
Why are they willing to enter negotiations? They’ve heard the phrase “single-payer”, and they’re scared to death. That’s literally scared to death, as it will mean the end of the money machine pumping our health care dollars into the black hole of American health insurance.
Seriously, whose side is Cheney on? Is he really so unaware that he is arguably the most hated man in America that his endorsement will only hurt McCain and the rest of the Republican ticket? Even Bush has decided to stay out of sight until after the election is over.
There are, of course, those who say that the Republicans are trying to lose so they can obstruct the Democrats for the next 4 years, then sweep back in on big victories in Congress and the White House. Something tells me that if they push enough Republican Senators over the edge, they may get far more results than they wanted out of the next few years.
You should be careful what you wish for. You may get it.
