“no need to give you a page number, just read the bill….”
Thanks, I needed a laugh. What a delightful way of saying, “I don’t know what I’m talking about”.
First off, there are 2 bills, a House version and a Senate version, the two have not yet been reconciled, there is not even a final bill ready to be read yet.
Second, we don’t need to read these rough drafts to know a summary of what’s in them (which right now is that one contains a “public option” and one does not). Why not? Because we have the President who asked Congress to write the bill, we have the Congressmen who drafted the bill, we have the other Congressmen who have read the bill and we have the media who have read and disseminated the bill and not a single one of them even kind of claims that this bill puts “single payer” into place.
The problem however, as I understand it is that it “paves the way” for a single payer option, but you don’t really even attempt to support your slippery slope argument to show how exactly this even could happen.
But let me take a guess. You figure that because a plan with a public option will result in the public option being cheaper because it is financed by tax dollars, that everyone will bail out of their private plans into the public plan and that groundswell of support will lead to single payer.
What strikes me as funny about this argument though is that it’s generally the free market Republicans who think that the free market will always be superior and competition will always drive any waste out of the system who think that a public option will somehow manage to be sustainable long enough to drive these robust free traders out of business. It’s logic that doesn’t add up, but let’s for a second assume that somehow we manage to finance this costly, bureaucratic system for long enough without bankrupting our government to drive free enterprise out of the health care system altogether, OK, great, let’s go with that.
My first point is, even IF health care were PROVIDED by the government, why would that be a bad thing? It is provided by the government in several countries which get far better marks from the WHO than we do on their ability to provide a strong health care system which serves the public and does not break the back of government. Indeed, we ourselves give publicly funded health CARE to our Veterans, and you don’t generally see them deciding to go somewhere other than the VA for their care. Yeah, the VA has problems, but try to find some veterans who aren’t glad that it exists then get back to me.
Second, the big problem is, what you’re scared of is a publicly RUN health care system…that is what people are all worried about…it’s going to be like the post office or the DMV (and hey, I can drop something in a mailbox at my house and get it to the other end of the country for 44 cents, if my health care could provide me with that kind of value, I’d gladly wait in a longer line when I went to the clinic), or it’s going to be some horror show where when costs get out of hand, we’re just going to have to stop covering the sick. But how’s this…ask someone who is uninsured right now who has a chronic (read: expensive) disease if he’d like a public option…I’m quite sure he’d consider the risks of going without say his diabetes meds as far less troubling than the idea that maybe some day the government would say he’s too expensive to take care of. Indeed, what Obama has said ALL ALONG is he wants a system that will cover ALL Americans, for which no one can be turned down for pre-existing conditions. And now opponents are saying he’s pushing for exactly THAT…a system that would deny people health care for pre-existing conditions. The rhetoric is positively Orwellian.
Third, what is in the bill is NOT publicly financed health care, but what’s more, what you’re worried about and what you SAY you’re worried about are TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS. What opponents are fighting against is Publicly provided health care, and you say that because Obama says he favors a single payer system, he will lead us to a single payer system. But the disconnect is this….a single payer health INSURANCE system is NOT the same thing as publicly financed health care. Canada has a single payer system…the government collects money from individuals and businesses and uses it to pay for the citizens’ health care directly, but they use PRIVATELY run clinics and hospitals to PROVIDE the care. THAT is what a single payer system would do…it would effectively replace the employer based deduction system wherein the employers are responsible for providing health INSURANCE (something too many companies can’t even afford to do anymore), and it would take all that money from essentially the same sources…some from employers, some from citizens, and pool all the money, and use it to pay for health care services provided by private clinics and hospitals at rates the government could negotiate in order to create competition which currently doesn’t exist. Even IF we went to a fully single payer system, it is NOT publicly provided health care. France on the other hand has publicly provided health care, they clinics are state run. They have the #1 health care system in the world according to the WHO. We have the #37.
Yes, Obama said all along he favors single payer, and so do I, and so do tens of millions of Americans, and even some conservatives realize that privately run health care which has to compete for public funding is a FAR better system than we have now, one which would lead to cheaper, better care for Americans than the system which leaves 1/6th of our population without insurance, and 17,000 people a WEEK filing bankruptcy because of medical bills they can’t afford.
I suggest it is you @missingbite, who needs to do some reading.
Composing members:
0
Composing members:
0
