[Vision2020] Otter fights health care with "sue the feds" law

[Donovan Arnold]

Saundra,
 
Do you think the President didn't have the power to get Congress to pass a single payer health care system? Aren't most of them in office because of him and his fund raising? 
 
Your wrote;
"Then there are those 45,000+ fellow Americans who DIE each year because they don’t have health insurance." 
 
And how many died even though they paid everything they had to an insurance company which denied them a procedure anyway, which Congress and President will make you buy from and can still deny the procedures you need and a hospital that will charge you your house to get?
 
How does making people pay money to insurance companies without making them pay for procedures we really need help anyone other than insurance companies?
 
If Congress can make you buy health insurance, can they make you buy a car, a house, an education? You need all those too!
 
If Congress can make you buy health insurance, can they make you buy the type of coverage they think you will need, or do you get to pick based on what you know you need?
 
Can they make you see a doctor, or prevent you from seeing a specialist you think you need to see?
 
Garrett is correct, it seems to me that this is a slippery slope of power that the government is headed down of by forcing individuals to give their money to a for profit company for purchase of a service they may not use, need, want, or be able to benefit from. There are no other examples of such instances. This is an attempted increase in exercise of power by the Federal Government they did not have before and did not even vote to give.
 
The government makes you pay taxes, yes, however, that is not a dollar amount that you pay to another company for a particular service to be paid directly and only to you. It is for the entire community, or for particular community members that meet certain criteria and restrictions
 
If they government wanted to tax me and provide health care services, like it does roads, police, fire, and other general services, that would be one thing, but for them to force me to fork over my hard earned cash to Blue Cross of Idaho even if they won't pay for want I need medically, seems more like an assault on my health and welfare than any type of real assistance or fix to the underlining problems of affordable and accessible health care.
 
The Congressional plan sounds like their solution is to throw a huge amount of taxpayer dollars at the insurance companies in the hopes that enough trickles down on the people to pay for their health costs. Trickle down economics don't work very well.
 
 
 
 


--- On Thu, 3/18/10, Saundra Lund <v2020 at ssl.fastmail.fm> wrote:


From: Saundra Lund <v2020 at ssl.fastmail.fm>
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Otter fights health care with "sue the feds" law
To: "'Garrett Clevenger'" <garrettmc at verizon.net>, vision2020 at moscow.com
Date: Thursday, March 18, 2010, 7:41 PM








In part, Garrett wrote:
“Obama blew it by not insisting on a single payer health care system.  Instead he pandered to the insurance industry who will be raking it in under the federal proposal.”
 
Sorry, Garrett, I disagree:  Obama couldn’t “insist” on a single-payer health care system without the support of a sufficient number of Dems & Repubs, and the sad fact is that we didn’t have them because there are too many DINOS like Minnick and too many others with personal – rather than national – agendas.
 
Another sad fact is the short-sighted willingness of the current GOP leadership to successfully demand that their minority elected federal legislators put on brown shirts and march in lockstep opposition to All Things Good to the detriment of this country and their constituents.  Their success with that tactic has been in no small part due to feelings of betrayal by their own previous administration(s), and their ire is completely misdirected and short-sighted, but there you have it:  they are frighteningly willing to cut of their own noses to spite not only their faces, but the face of this nation.
 
Finally, another sad fact is that the US has absolutely no hope of regaining any kind of edge in a competitive world market if we don’t get meaningful and successful health care reform, and the GOP’s shortsighted obstructionism has made that an impossibility for now.  Which is devastating for any meaningful economic recovery, IMHO, because if we can’t successfully compete in the global market . . . 
 
All of that said, I do agree that Obama made a significant political mistake by misreading the willingness of the GOP to sink this nation all for greed,  and by leaving the initial stages solely to Congress for far too long after the GOP’s graffiti was on the wall.  It was clear to me long ago that about all the GOP cared about in the health care reform debate was protecting insurance carriers & drug companies and putting politics ahead of policy, just like they’ve been doing on everything else for the last year.  Big surprise there, eh?
 
I’m definitely not keen – at ALL -- on the personal mandate, but I do understand that to have any realistic hope of cost containment, the pools have to include the healthy who have a tendency to opt out for various reasons, some of them very valid.  It literally makes me ill to think that people will be forced to deal with the devil (insurance companies), but absent a single-payer system . . . 
 
Plus, the financial drain of one catastrophe with an uninsured person on those of us with health insurance is huge -- all you have to do is look at the cost increases for the rest of us from the uninsured to see we’re not talking chump change.  Of course, that gets us back to why a single-payer system really is the best answer, or perhaps a non-profit hybrid system similar to Switzerland, but . . . 
 
So, am I happy with where we’re headed now?  No – in fact, I’m really angry at the GOP obstructionism.
 
However, we have to start somewhere, and something is better than nothing.  Big Business has proven it is all too willing to continue to sell out the health of its workers for even more greed, and the insurance industry has proven that it’s all too willing to sink the health of this nation to more deeply line its own financial pockets.  Stupid & short-sighted, but that’s the way it is.
 
Then there are those 45,000+ fellow Americans who DIE each year because they don’t have health insurance.  Compassion alone should be enough for ALL of us to say that we’re mad as HELL and not going to take it anymore, but GOP obstructionism doesn’t give a rip about those fellow Americans.
 
We have a patriotic obligation to do whatever we can to make that STOP, and STOP now, not in another year or five or ten.  While the current proposed plan doesn’t do nearly enough, it’s far, far superior to doing nothing for another year or generation, which is what the GOP is advocating.  As best as I can tell, they seem to be advocating a kind of trickle-down health reform, and most of us know what a failure that was with respect to economics for tens of millions of Americans
 
Doing NOTHING while tens of thousands of Americans continue to DIE isn’t an option for any real American.
 
 
Saundra Lund
Moscow, ID
 
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
~ Edmund Burke
 
***** Original material contained herein is Copyright 2010 through life plus 70 years, Saundra Lund.  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce outside the Vision 2020 forum without the express written permission of the author.*****
 
 
 

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com] On Behalf Of Garrett Clevenger
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 9:37 AM
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Otter fights health care with "sue the feds" law
 




Kenneth writes:
 
"Otter's response to the universal health care needs and the financial challenges they bring to citizens and providers alike is increasingly paradigmatic of what not to do to achieve substantive improvements."
 
 
On the other hand, forcing voters to buy health insurance from a private company is probably not the best way to get reelected.
 
It's probably not the best way to solve the health care crises, too.
 
Can you think of anything else the government requires its citizens to buy?
 
That sounds fascist to me, something I don't support, and it's certainly understandable why a libertarian governor Otter is charting this course. It's probably not the best course either, but what else would you expect?
 
Obama blew it by not insisting on a single payer health care system.  Instead he pandered to the insurance industry who will be raking it in under the federal proposal.
 
The middlemen need to be cut out of health care if we really want to cut costs...
 
 
 
Garrett Clevenger
 
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