Politics Plus

Visualize this if you will.  You’re paying $200 per month for a used car, and though you are happy at the moment, you don’t know that you’ve been ripped off.  The engine, the brakes and the transmission are all about to fail, and the dealer has an escape cause built into your warranty, so he won’t honor it.  Now, let’s say someone comes along, takes your car, and gives you another that is in good repair and has a solid warranty for $205 per month.  Wouldn’t you say you were better off?  Those cancelled health insurance policies are much the same, but Republicans are calling the solution a rip-off.

A new controversy over the president’s health-care law is threatening to overshadow the messy launch of its Web site: Notices are going out to hundreds of thousands of Americans informing them that their health insurance policies are being canceled as of Dec. 31.

The notices appear to contradict President Obama’s promise that despite the changes resulting from the law, Americans can keep their health insurance if they like it. Republicans have seized on the cancellations as evidence that the law is flawed and the president has been less than forthright in describing its impact.

“The real problem is that people weren’t told the truth,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Tuesday on “CBS This Morning.” “You can remember, they were told that they would be able to keep their policies if they liked them. Now you hear hundreds of thousands of people across the country being told they couldn’t.”…

Inserted from <Washington Post>

Lawrence O’Donnell provided excellent coverage of this controversy.  (International readers, if you can’t view this. try searching YouTube or Bing Videos for Lawrence O’Donnell “Health Care: Campaigning or Governing”.  If not there by the time I post this, it should be in a day or two.)

Here’s the bottom line. If your health care policy is such a rip-off that it fails to meet the bare minimum standards that ObamaCare requires, and since ObamaCare is forcing your company to meet those bare minimum standards, ObamaCare is doing you a BIG favor. It is preventing you from getting sick and discovering that you don’t have the coverage you thought you do. Even the insurance companies cancelling policies say they will move customers into better policies that do meet the ObamaCare standards. However, some companies are trying to switch people into their most expensive product without informing them that they have less expensive policies that meet the standards.  Republicans are bitching about it, because it interferes with their RepubliCare plan: pay or die.

I bet you all remember the Kerry Campaign, and the Republican meme that Kerry was for Iraq, before he was against it, labeling him as a flip-flopper.  The Republican Party seems to have taken that page from Kerry’s playbook, because lately they have performed some flip-flops that even make Little Lord Willard etching his sketch seem tame.  Marco Rubio on Immigration reform is just one of many examples.

He was a leading member of a bipartisan "Gang of Eight" Senators who pushed a comprehensive immigration reform bill through the chamber earlier this year.

But with that measure facing little hope of passage in the Republican-controlled House, Sen. Marco Rubio feels Congress should play small ball when it comes to approving any bills on immigration reform.

Alex Conant, spokesman for the first-term Republican from Florida, said Monday  those who favor the comprehensive immigration overhaul passed by the Senate in June need to be "realistic in our expectations" of what the House might embrace.

"An all-or-nothing strategy on immigration reform would result in nothing. What is keeping us from progress on a series of immigration issues on which there is strong consensus is the fear that a conference committee on a limited bill will be used to negotiate a comprehensive one. We should take that option off the table so that we can begin to move on the things we agree on," Conant added in a statement to reporters…

Inserted from <CNN>

Rachel Maddow discussed how this fits into Republicans' extreme aversion to work. And they call minorities lazy!!

Despite Republican lies that there is no time, there is plenty of time to pass immigration reform. Obama and the Democrats gave them WAY too much in the Senate Bill, but once something Republicans say they want becomes amenable to Obama and the Democrats, Republicans refuse to take yes for an answer. They want to sabotage government, not govern. Since they go to such lengths to avoid their jobs, remove them!

I hate to, but have to admit that there’s a lot about Obamacare I don’t like.  However, it is a step in the right direction.  It’s a shame that, because Republicans have forced so many cuts in the number of government employees, the design and implementation of the website had to be outsourced to corporate contractors.  What we’re really seeing is a failure of the too poorly regulated free market to deliver goods and services as promised.  However I agree with the best solution, the one Paul Krugman suggests.

The good news about HealthCare.gov, the portal to Obamacare’s health exchange, is that the administration is no longer minimizing its problems. That’s the first step toward fixing the mess — and it will get fixed, although it’s anyone’s guess whether the new promise of a smoothly functioning system by the end of November will be met. We know, after all, that Obamacare is workable, since many states that chose to run their own exchanges are doing quite well.

But while we wait for the geeks to do their stuff, let’s ask a related question: Why did this thing have to be so complicated in the first place?

It’s true that the Affordable Care Act isn’t as complex as opponents make it out to be. Basically, it requires that insurance companies offer the same policies to everyone; it requires that each individual then buy one of these policies (the individual mandate); and it offers subsidies, depending on income, to keep insurance affordable.

Still, there’s a lot for people to go through. Not only do they have to choose insurers and plans, they have to submit a lot of personal information so the government can determine the size of their subsidies. And the software has to integrate all this information, getting it to all the relevant parties — which isn’t happening yet on the federal site.

Imagine, now, a much simpler system in which the government just pays your major medical expenses. In this hypothetical system you wouldn’t have to shop for insurance, nor would you have to provide lots of personal details. The government would be your insurer, and you’d be covered automatically by virtue of being an American.

Of course, we don’t have to imagine such a system, because it already exists. It’s called Medicare, it covers all Americans 65 and older, and it’s enormously popular. So why didn’t we just extend that system to cover everyone?… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

Click through for the rest, please.

The answer, of course, is that Medicare for all could never have survived the Republican filibuster preventing its passage.  Even during the few brief days that Democrats had a super-majority in the Senate, a very small number of DINOs took payola from Big Insurance and goose-stepped with the Republicans.  Medicare for all remains the best solution, and we’ll get there eventually.  In the meantime, Obamacare, with all the website problems, is a big improvement over RepubliCare, which offers only the RepubliCare Death Benefit.  If you cannot pay, you get to die for free.