ObamaCare vs. RepublicCare

Given how America's political system works, the only alternative to ObamaCare is RepubliCare.

But while the GOP and its friends have spent over $400 million telling you how awful ObamaCare is, they haven't spent a cent telling you what their alternative is.

I can tell you what it is, though:

1. Repeal ObamaCare in toto.
2. There is no "2."

So RepubliCare is for-profit medicine by the medical-industrial complex, for the medical-industrial complex, by the medical-industrial complex.

RepubliCare is overcrowded emergency care facilities being used by the poor as their primary care. RepubliCare is your health insurance that you paid into for forty years getting canceled as soon as you really need it.
RepubliCare is private health insurance for those whose employers don't provide health insurance plus freelancers plus retirees, which provides excellent care for millionaires, while the rest find it's either too expensive to buy or whose deductibles are so high it's useless.
RepubliCare is the most expensive per-capital healthcare system on Earth, with the worst outcomes for most people compared to those of other developed nations--the healthcare system growing in costs so rapidly that it's consuming the American economy--the healthcare system every responsible economist said is unsustainable and running us over a cliff in short order.

ObamaCare has plenty of shortcomings--mostly due to compromises made at the behest of those who are now trying to kill it. But it's a dream compared to the nightmare of RepubliCare.

So--the next time your Republican friends, family and acquaintances want to talk to you about how awful ObamaCare is, make them do so not against some imaginary ideal but against the reality of RepubliCare.

Looking at healthcare reform defeat

Today's New York Times' lead editorial urges the House to pass the Senate's healthcare reform bill. Here's my comment:

When Paul Krugman said the same thing a few days ago, most of the many comments posted by readers disagreed with this advice--both left wing and right wing.

The diatribes from the political left seemed to be written in total ignorance of what Americans outside of college towns think. And they seem to think Obama was made king of the country, able to make laws by snapping his fingers. The American presidency is closer to being an administrator with a bullhorn.

You know he wants a single payer system. You should know he's just as frustrated as you are by how far the Senate bill is from that. But he lives on this planet.

So it's the mild reforms of the Senate bill, or less, or nothing. Th-th-that's all, folks. And if we get nothing--which all this left-wing howling is helping guarantee--we'll probably get a Republican president in 2012. Followed by a 7-3 Supreme Court corporatist-activist majority. Want that? Keep it up. Karl Rove is cheering you on.

The diatribes from the right mostly assume that the American people are all against the total takeover of American healthcare by European socialist death panels.

Um, the Senate bill was never anything like a takeover, and the lobbyists who form the fourth branch of government have seen to it that it's even milder than it started. It's only socialisim in the sense that Rush Limbaugh and the rest have redefined "socialism" as "any kind of regulation whatsoever."

Of course total gummint takeover is just what the Healthcare Denial Industry has been spending over a million dollars a day to make Americans think Congress is cooking up.

Odd that the right wing comments on Krugman's op-ed piece never--not once--acknowledged that American public opinion has been molded by this $1.4M/day tidal wave of advertising, PR, whisper campaigns, sock puppet pundits and more--countered by a pathetic trickle of truth. I say truth because nearly every claim the Republican leadership has said about the Senate bill has been shown to be a baldfaced lie--according to rigorously nonpartisan fact checking organizations like www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.

I'm not saying Democratic leaders always tell the truth. They don't. And they've certainly been swayed by lobbying and by public opinion, despite that public opinion being based on well-financed, slickly disseminated lies.

But on healthcare reform the Democrats are saints next to the the Republicans.

I only take slight comfort from knowing that when healthcare reform is defeated by rigid left-wing idealists and foaming-at-the-mouth right wing nutjobs--many in both groups are going to wind up with their tails in a crack as a direct result of healthcare reform failing again.

I heard a caller on one right wing talk show say "I don't want to pay for someone else's pre-existing condition."

Wait'll it's you. And you wind up with one of those medical bankruptcies right wing nutjobs deny the existence of (along with all science whose findings they don't like).

It'll serve you right. So go ahead and gloat at the defeat Democrats are looking at now. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Healthcare reform and party reform

Paul Krugman advocated liberals holding their noses and supporting the Senate's highly compromised healthcare reform bill. He got numerous comments. Mine got zero recommendations from readers. Here it is:

Professor Krugman is exactly correct here about everything he's touched on in this op-ed piece.

Let me add one more reason to pass it: the GOP (short for Greed Over Princoples) has utterly abandoned anything a Republican of Eisenhower's time would recognize as Republican or conservative.

Moreover, the tactics being used to try to defeat healthcare reform are nothing short of despicable. Nearly every word that comes out of Republican leaders' mouths, or that appears in the $1.4 million/day ad blitz against healthcare reform, is a baldfaced lie. I don't expect readers to believe me--they shouldn't. But believe www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com. Both have proven to be utterly nonpartisan, mainstream factcheckers and truthtellers.

There are conservative arguments to be made against the current form healthcare reform is taking, but the GOP isn't making them. Instead they've resorted to fearmongering demagoguery.

Only if they lose this fight is there a chance for GOP reform. America needs a conservative political party. Right now the GOP isn't that. So if you're a Republican voter, bite your lip and contact your congressman in support of the Senate bill.

Healthcare reform under the hood

The press talks about the healthcare reform effort in Congress as being a contest between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

But another way to look at it would be to see it as a contest between the healthcare insurance industry and the voters. From this viewpoint you could say that the healthcare insurance industry owns nearly all of the GOP congressmen and enough of the Democratic ones to prevent the most meaningful aspects of reform from passing.

GOP congressmen and pundits deny this hotly of course, and point to public opinion polls supporting their opposition to healthcare reform.

But what they never mention is the $1.4 million a day the healthcare insurance industry has been spending for months and month on shaping public opinion--just as they did the last time this was tried.

And that opinion-shaping takes the form of scaremongering lies that have been thoroughly debunked by nonpartisann factchecking organizations like www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.

They also have as a partner in crime the Angry Billionaires' Club--America's richest 1/2 of 1%, none of whom need any social services, and who want to preserve the Third World income distribution profile America now has. They have invested countless millions of dollars in a PR campaign to make Americans fear and distrust government in toto, and to voluntarily abandon the only things that protect individual Americans from being exploited the way workers were in the England of Charles Dickens.

So whenever government tries to regulate any business sector, the industries involved can tap into this free-floating government distrust that has been inculcated by the minions of the Angry Billionaires' Club for decades.

Listen to congressional opponents to healthcare reform and you'll see how they invoke this general distrust of government--reaping the harvest created by this careful cultivation of the American foundational attitude towards a distant and uncaring government on the other side of the Atlantic back in the 18th century.