Even if Harry Reid knew he didn't have 60 votes locked up, Reid made the right choice. Even if the White House worried that he didn't have 60 votes, he made the right call. The corporate centrists in our Party have too long grown accustomed to winning through refusal. Their refusal to even allow serious discussion of a Single Payer plan was just one recent example.

We are essentially in a state of war regarding health care. About as many Americans die annually as a consequence of poor or non existent health care insurance as died during the entire Viet Nam war. Our adversary, many would say enemy, is the private health care insurance cartel. They run the system that is responsible for those deaths. Not only do they run it, they profit off it, which makes them war profiteers in my book.

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 By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC Mediawire blogger

During a press conference yesterday, President Obama voiced support for government-administered health insurance for all who need it (aka the "public option"), as a key component of healthcare reform. Though Obama stopped short of threatening to veto a bill that didn't contain such an option, he said that a public option is needed to enforce market discipline. If the system is going to reform, the health insurance companies can't just keep selling the same bad coverage with bigger public subsidies for their monopolies. Essentially, Obama isn't about to force taxpayers to buy overpriced insurance from private companies.

"The public plan, I think, is an important tool to discipline insurance companies," Obama said during yesterday's White House news conference. "I think there is going to be some healthy debate about the shape that this takes." He outlined three options: Get insurance through your employer, buy insurance on your own, or buy insurance from a marketplace where public and private insurance providers compete for business.

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by Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger

Healthcare reform is back in the news, as Legislators and interest groups spar over the promised public component of Obama's healthcare plan. In very simple terms, this is a fight between groups with a vested interest in expensive healthcare and everyone else. This week, the American Medical Association warned Obama that a public plan could restrict patient choice. But for millions of Americans, getting a choice between healthcare and no healthcare wold represent a 100% increase in their healthcare options. Obama's public plan would also give people the choice of keeping their private health insurance. So, the public plan is an additional option, not a diminution of options.

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This looks interesting. The Calif. Nurses Assn

"Nurses Blast "Cruel Ruse" by Insurance Giants to Cover Patients As Deal for Forcing Americans to Buy Insurance"

Basically, they are repeating the criticisms that many other healthcare providers have been bringing up about the private insurance mandates and private insurance based health proposals from Obama and the health insurance industry.

They are true. For example, access to care and affordability has worsened in Massachusetts.

Additionally, the devil is in the details. Read this closely:
"On Tuesday, the insurance trade lobby America's Health Insurance Plans and Blue Cross and Blue Shield offered to stop denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions – but only if the healthcare reform plan under consideration in Congress contains a requirement forcing all Americans to buy private insurance – and if Congress rejects a proposal to include a public plan alternative for people not wanting private insurance."

But at what price? Its not at all useful if insurers offer to turn away nobody ONLY IF THAT PERSON PAYS WHAT THEY CONSIDER TO BE A "FAIR PRICE". Or if they offer, like the drug companies, to cover "people who can't afford it" but those subsidies are limited, like they are in many states, to people with arbitrarily low incomes. Excluding the middle class and even, most of the working poor.

And all others are asked to pay a price based on risk plus profit. or simply, "what they can get away with".

For example,three times the Federal poverty level works out to something like $35,000 a year FOR A FAMILY WITH SEVERAL CHILDREN.

We don't see millionaires without health insurance, even people who have had cancer. They pay huge amounts of money for it.

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Well, its looking as if it will be 2012 or 2016 at the very least before Americans have a political candidate or progressive party on a national level who makes universal healthcare that also makes healthcare affordable for those who really need it a priority enough to actually make it happen.

To his credit Obama has committed to make US healthcare more efficient by 2019, by embracing the troubled Massachusetts model which dodges the question of affordability and leaves many sick either "insured" but still unable to afford actual care or needed drugs, or uninsured and facing either a fine, or needing an exemption from the law because they could not find a plan- and still uninsured.

That's a problem. Here is another real world example of another major problem with the risk pricing model. It scares people away from preventative and diagnostic care. What about the person who may be healthy on paper now, say they have insurance now, but who is presented with a symptom which may be of a new condition? One that would increase an insurance company's exposure to risk. (Making them not a desirable customer. Insurance companies would prefer not to cover them or perhaps cover them, take their money, but later dump them if they make claims.)

So, (this being the United States, home of the barbaric healthcare system) should they test for it, with the knowledge that some test results may make them "uninsurable", if they lose their job with its group plan that spreads the risk around, OR should they "wait and pray" for real "change" and hope that they do not die before it comes? (Meanwhile, avoiding contact with the medical system.)

The reason I ask is that I have a friend who lives in another state. He has symptoms that he thinks could be cancer.

He is a blue collar employee, almost 40, and could easily end up out of work for a year or so if his company folds.

If he gets diagnosed with something serious, whenever, he can't have a period of noninsurance, because he may never be able to purchase nongroup insurance. If he lived in MA. he would be one of those who could not afford a policy within his income, so he would be exempt or perhaps less likely, fined for not having insurance.

He wants purchasing affordable insurance on the private market to be an option for his family as he has three children and a wife who currently get their insurance through his threatened job. (His wife works in a coffee shop and does not get insurance.)

Obama's risk pricing model would price insurance "fairly for both insurer and insuree", based on cost times some calculated risk plus profit, I would guess, but for a formerly middle class person with a medical condition, that fair price could be so far out of reach that it might as well be millions of dollars a year. Many people are just getting by. (The devil is in the details.)

(Moving to Canada, Europe or Australia isn't an option for them. They are Americans, and this is their home.)

What should he do? Wait and pray? Or test and pray?

Another consideration. Drugs to treat cancer can cost as much as $1000 a month or more, but his current insurance policy has a $1000 YEARLY cap on prescription costs.

Obama seems to like the Massachusetts model. It elimiantes the "free riders" who were being subsidized by the providers as writeoffs. Its also hurt many free clinics in urban areas. Money that used to go to them is now going to the insurance companies and drug companies, who charge more in MA. now. (more demand)

Massachusetts's basic minimal healthcare policies for the healthy, as well as for the ill, often don't include prescription drugs at all. They seem perhaps designed to insure the government more than the people.

The consumer driven healthcare model ("choice") saves money by making the patient pay more out of pocket through exemptions and cost shifting.

Earth to Obama, we have a problem here. People can't afford this path you have placed us on.

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