Healthcare reform op-ed
Recently, Matt Stoller claimed Obama had a 61 vote majority in the Senate and enough to secure either Universal or Single Payer Healthcare. We all forget the one Senator from Aetna stand which killed any other options an Medicare for those starting at 55. President Obama did not have a filibuter proof 61 votes in the Senate for any other healthcare options muchless the ACA. The Blue Dogs (Nelson(s), Bacus, Bayh, Cantwell, Feinstein, Lincoln, Pryor, Widen, Conrad, etc) wouldn’t move for any healthcare plan unless they brought home the bacon as Nelson attempted to do for Nebraska. Just plain ordinary obstructionism to block whatever this President would attempt to do. Senator Lieberman killed anything beyond the ACA.
Former Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and others should be sorry if the entire ACA is struck down or dismembered as we will go another decade before a President and a Congress take up the issue again and heathcare costs (for which healthacre insurance is a reflection) will again rise faster than inflation. Because of the power of Medicare, it has been able to rein in rising healthcare costs so far at less than 3% than that of the commercial market at about 9% %. Standard and Poors Healthcare Economic Indices .
The last time healthcare reform was attempted was under Clinton and costs have increased multiple times. A failure to allow the ACA to go forward will allow the overall Healthcare Industry to again implement inflationary costs in a market which has no restraints. Certainly, I can not conjur up what SCOTUS will do. The kings in black robes will decide what is best for us as Congress lacks the will power to represent those who placed them there with the exception of ALEC, Koch(s), and Norquist.
http://business.time.com/2012/03/23/will-the-cost-of-health-insurance-eventually-eat-up-your-entire-paycheck-study-says-yes/
The above from rjs
If ever there was a classic example of free-market failure, it’s the American healthcare system. I can’t believe that people like Mitt Romney continue to get away with claiming that the market will correct the problems—as if the market hasn’t already had a long enough time to try to do that, and as if most of the non-free-market healthcare insurance systems in the other modern otherwise-free-market countries don’t serve their citizens’ interests, including controlling costs, far better than our free-market system does.
Of course, the Republicans claim that there is no such thing as an example of a free-market failure—the economic collapse of 2008 and its repercussions, included.
I think the ostensible Dem majority in the Senate in 2009-10 (counting Lieberman) was 60, not 61, btw.
I once read an article that persuasively demonstrated that by 2245 the whole mass of the earth would have been converted to National Geographics. See, no-one ever threw them away, and they kept making them…
The US health system has been on the brink of collapse for what? a decade at least. We will NOT “go another decade before a President and a Congress take up the issue again” because collapses are happening all over, specifically that business can afford salaries, or they can afford health benefits, but not both.
Like an angry red blister, you can’t predict what exactly will pierce the shiny skin, and what will happen after that. Riots? One incident so terrible that no-one can ignore it? (hard to believe, as we’ve had so many already.) Perhaps the collapse of the largest insurance companies holding Americans hostage, due to loss of customers? or the collapse of the whole health insurance business model? maybe a big war that will push our human resources so badly that the medicare and VA system expands to envelop eventually everyone?
Whatever it will be, it will be worse for the nation than just swabbing the boil with iodine right now and lancing it cleanly. But by then, the men and women protecting the current model will have retired and settled down to keeping bees and collecting antique furniture.
Bees? What bees? We may not have any.