I want that to be understood. A lot of the arguments FOR are appeals to authority of this politician or that, and it almost works on me, because I respect these people.

But I also know that a lot of face-saving goes on in politics and politicians always prance around making these kinds of claims... I'm skeptical.

The medicaid expansion is an unqualified good for the very poor.

But the working poor and the working uninsured are going to get screwed big-time, and these politicians are prancing around saying "well, we 'covered' them!"

Those subsides Ezra's talking about help people buy insurance they can't afford to use, so he can claim they're covered. Meanwhile, the subsidies, as I understand it, make up the dif. on the 8%.

So, by Ezra's value judgment, I can now afford health insurance. Well, thanks a lot Ezra! But 8% of your income is a much bigger deal if you're poor, and it's going to cost the working poor on HEALTH CARE.

So we're taking away their HEALTH CARE to say we gave them INSURANCE. And his final big "mechanism" for keeping down costs is the one that the Republicans have proposed: screw the poor and working people.

Look, insurance companies SELL PRODUCTS intended to mitigate the risk that poor people will stiff on medical bills!

So all the major provision in this bill does is keep those insurance companies from having to pay out on their products!

Poor fellas! Market pressures sure are tough!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogu lescu/the-democrats-authoritari_b_402146 .html

Democrats and liberals once stood for providing a social safety net through government programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, which were administered by government employees for the benefit of the American people and not by private companies for the benefit of their shareholders and executives who receive multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses.

For over 60 years, they stood for the principal that health care should be a right and not a privilege and that Medicare should be extended to all Americans.

Democrats in Congress, under the leadership of Barack Obama, have now turned that principal on its head and made health care neither a right, nor a privilege, but an obligation for individual citizens and a government-mandated profit center for private corporations.

For the first time in American history, Democrats are about to pass a bill that uses the coercive power of the federal government to force every American -- simply by virtue of being an American -- to purchase the products of a private company.

At heart, the Democrats' solution to 48 million uninsured is to force the them to buy inadequate private insurance -- with potentially high deductibles and co-pays and no price controls -- or be fined by the federal government.

In effect, this represents an historic defeat for the type of liberalism represented by the New Deal and the Great Society and the ascendancy of a new type of corporatist liberalism.