Gaming the system

Ralph Nader on Democracy Now!, March 18, 2010 on the health care package passed by Congress:

The 2,500 pages is full of opportunities and ambiguities for the insurance companies to game the system and to make it even worse.

And let’s say there are more people covered, right? Well, they’re being forced to buy junk insurance policies. There’s no regulation of insurance prices. There’s no regulation of the antitrust laws on this. Everything went down that Dennis (Kucinich) was fighting for. There’s no regulation that prevents the insurance companies from taking this papier-mâché bill and lighting a fire to it and making a mockery of it.

Today:

Insurers find loophole in health bill, say they don’t have to cover sick kids

Democrats said their health care legislation would provide greater medical security to those in need. But it appears to fall short on protecting arguably the most vulnerable demographic: sick children.


Insurance companies wasted no time after the bill was passed to unearth a loophole that allowed them to deny coverage to children with pre-existing illnesses for the next four years.


According to the New York Times, "Insurers agree that if they provide insurance for a child, they must cover pre-existing conditions. But, they say, the law does not require them to write insurance for the child and it does not guarantee the 'availability of coverage' for all until 2014."

LESS THAN A WEEK after the bill is signed. What next?

I can sleep better now...

Oh, boy! Great news! The U.S. and Russia have cut a deal to "pare back" their respective nuclear arsenals. Gee...

Now, instead of destroying the entire planet twenty times over, they can only do it fifteen times over.

I feel so much better...

Same old, same old

So Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is caving in due to pressure from the Obama White House and will vote for the health bill. Don't you just love it? For months, the Obama administration has been saying that the public option was off the table because there weren't enough votes. No consideration of any kind of pressure to be applied.

Yet there were those out there at the time saying that all Obama had to do was to threaten to not support democrats in their bid for reelection, and he could get public option in the mix of health care reform.

Of course, there are now accusations that Obama cut a deal with the Health Industry to not include the public option at all, even as he was publicly spouting that he was for it.

Suddenly, Obama can now exert tremendous pressure on House Democrats just to pass this watered down version of health care reform.

So the bottom line is that Obama used the single payer card to get the votes of progressives when he was running for President, once elected he immediately backed off that and into a “public option” mode, then cut a deal to not even include public option (“We don't have the votes”) in the final health care reform bill. And he is NOW putting major pressure to get a lackluster reform bill passed.

What a weak, ineffectual, smarmy DC player, “screw the people, increase the profits of the health industry,” president he's turned out to be...