FROM “THE HILLS HAVE EYES” BLOG BY MICHAEL OSTROLENK
It’s well known that true conservatives and libertarians oppose the present day medical reform efforts in both the U.S. House and the Senate. Now, they are joined by progressives who are also now opposing these efforts specifically in the Senate. Some of the reasons for the opposition are different across the political spectrum but there seems to be growing agreement that the present day attempts at medical reform are not supportable.
(One area of seeming agreement across the spectrum is seeing a lot of this so-called medical reform as merely corporate welfare)
Although there may not be a lot of agreement between liberals, progressives, libertarians and conservatives on medical reform, I think there are a few key issues that could bring together a transpartisan nexus including;
1. opposition to corporate welfare,
2. protecting privacy rights,
3. supporting maximum choice in the market including access to natural medicine and innovative therapies.
Perhaps, in the near future a transpartisan process can be implemented were a true healthcare reform dialog can take place. Until then, all we can do is fight , fight , fight.
I have included an informative blog below from a well known progressive blogger;
Jane Hamsher, at FiredogLake calls to kill the Senate bill. She says;
From what we know about the bill, it is worse than passing nothing.
When urging its passage today, President Obama said two things that are manifestly untrue. He says that the bill fulfills all of the promises he made in his September speech before a joint session of Congress, but it doesn’t.
What the President said in September:
They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime.
But while nobody was looking, Harry Reid slipped in an “arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year”:
A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates.
The President Obama also said that “what ever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve and starting to reduce cost for families, businesses, and government, those elements are in this bill.” Not true either.
As we speak, Frank Lautenberg and Kay Hagan are destroying Byron Dorgan’s drug reimportation amendment by making a bunch of bullshit claims about drug safety. The danger of transferring drugs from a CVS warehouse in Canada to a CVS store in the United States? Zip. But they’re pretending that everything is coming from Chinese counterfeiters to keep something that could save the government $19 billion and the public over $100 billion from passing so the White House deal with PhRMA can be upheld. The Dorgan amendment could have been a way of honestly bending the cost curve, something the President campaigned on.
Instead, the “bend” comes from taxing middle class insurance benefits, which makes them worse. According to the CSM report released last week:
In reaction to the tax, many employers would reduce the scope of their health benefits. The resulting reductions in covered services and/or increases in employee cost-sharing requirements would induce workers to use fewer services. Because plan benefit values would generally increase faster than the threshold amounts for defining high-cost plans (which are indexed by the CPI plus 1 percent), over time additional plans would become subject to the excise tax, prompting those employers to scale back coverage.
