Americans attack NHS

[carl stromberg]

I see many in the US have been attacking Britain's marvellous National Health Service!

[Kristatos]

Yep, it seems to upset a lot of people over here. "NHS death panels", wtf? For the record, the NHS was our main reason for moving back here, having been bankrupted by American healthcare costs, so it's an issue of tremendous interest to me. I hope Pres. Obama can enact some form of healthcare reform over there, but the health insurance industry is a greedy, all-devouring monster that has representatives on the boards of all the major media owners in America and any number of politicians on their payroll, so they ain't gonna give up without a fight.

[bjmdds]

Oh-bama's plans are a joke. Increasing taxes so illegal aliens get covered is ridiculous and nonsense. You need price fixing, tort reform, laws enacted to limit the yearly premium increases to the cost of living, etc. Not this madness. 34% approve here;49% are against his ideas; the rest do not count in the poll I guess. Hillary and Oh-bama will hit Barack-bottom in popularity within the next 3 months.

[Kristatos]

34% approve here;49% are against his ideas; the rest do not count in the poll I guess.

Looks like the health insurance industry's propaganda offensive is working, then. Before I left the States, opinion polls consistently showed Americans 2 to 1 in favour of universal healthcare. Unless the 49% includes those who think Obama's healthcare reforms are too timid. From what I understand, they are just tinkering at the edges and fall well short of a full single-payer plan like Canada's.

[bjmdds]

Kris: Oh-bama this week pulled 2 stunts. Firstly, in a town hall healthcare meeting Sheila Jackson Lee from Texas let a so-called physician ask her a supposed spontaneous question about Oh-bama's plans. The problem is, SHE IS NOT A PHYSICIAN and representative Sheila Jackson Lee knew it! The woman admitted to be an Oh-bama delegate, NOT a doctor. Secondly, in New Hampshire I believe it was, a 10 year old girl who Oh-bama supposedly did not know, read him a question from her mother. The fact is the kid's mother is the HEAD of that state's Women For Obama and the kid already met Oh-bama's kids! Fraud, deception, and a joke, just like the fake faintings at EVERY campaign rally for him last year. Now Oh-bama is gathering emails of those dissenting Americans too. This guy is a LOSER and has now been exposed as a radical socialist idealist with a shady past. The guy is dreadful and hopefully a 1 term and gone president, ala Jimmy Carter.

[Dr. No]

34% approve here;49% are against his ideas; the rest do not count in the poll I guess.

Looks like the health insurance industry's propaganda offensive is working, then. Before I left the States, opinion polls consistently showed Americans 2 to 1 in favour of universal healthcare. Unless the 49% includes those who think Obama's healthcare reforms are too timid. From what I understand, they are just tinkering at the edges and fall well short of a full single-payer plan like Canada's.

I don';t believe it was ever 2 to 1 who wanted universal health care.

Health reform? hell yea. But what is being offered is the worse of government run anything combined with the worst of insurance companies. BTW Insurance companies and big pharma, and AARP are on board because they are getting their piece of the pie. This deal is a crooked as anything done in the rush since January. We've wasted a lot of money on pork and other things useless things and grown the debt beyond belief for little return. hell we could have mad every American citizen a millionaire for a fraction of what has been spent

We need health reform but a lot of the problems are left over from when Clinton tried to do reform and failed, they changed the rules and laws and the insurance companies took advantage of it.
We need to trim the fat off the hospitals, insurance, and drug companies. And we need to get the laws changed so that it no longer varies from state to state

We (my family) have good insurance but have a hell of a hassle getting approval for scans, blood work and the like. We have to go another place to get our blood work done instead of at our dr office. That kind of BS needs to be cut out.

[Kristatos]

Kris: Oh-bama this week pulled 2 stunts. (snip)

American politics is all showbiz. Obama probably figured that he needed some fake supporters to combat all the fake dissenters. These "townhall meetings" are about as spontaneous as a Michael Jackson concert (when he was alive, obviously).

[Kristatos]

As for the "radical Marxist agenda", you probably won't be surprised to learn that I subscribe to the "more cynical interpretation" contained in this article from The Nation. In my view, the more cynical interpretation is usually the correct one where politicians are concerned.

After his brilliant beginning, the president suddenly looks weak and unreliable. That will be the common interpretation around Washington of the president's abrupt retreat on substantive heathcare reform. Give Barack Obama a hard shove, they will say, rough him up a bit and he folds. A few weeks back, the president was touting a "public option" health plan as an essential element in reform. Now he says, take it or leave it. Whatever Congress does, he's okay with that.

The White House quickly added confusion to the outrage by insisting the president didn't really say anything new. He's just being flexible. He still wants what most Democrats want--a government plan that gives people a real escape from the profit-driven clutches of the insurance companies. But serious power players will not be fooled by the nimble spinners. Obama choked. He raised the white flag, even before the fight got underway in Congress.

He hands the insurance industry a huge victory. He rewards the right-wing frothers who have been calling him Adolph Hitler or Dr. Death. He caves to the conservative bias of the major media who insist only bipartisan consensus is acceptable for big reform (a standard they never invoked during the Bush years). Obama is deluded if he thinks this will win him any peace or respect or Republican votes. Weakness does not lead to consensus in Washington. It leads to more weakness. The Party of No intends to bring him down and will pile on. Obama has inadvertently demonstrated their strategy of vicious invective seems to be working.

Barack Obama mainly did this to himself. To avoid the accusation of socialized medicine, he intentionally shrouded his objectives in bureaucratic euphemisms like "public option." What the hell does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. The vagueness allowed anyone to fill in the blanks and anxious people did so in apocalyptic ways. The original idea, after all, was making something similar to Medicare available to anyone between childhood and old age who was either shut out by high prices or abused by insurance companies policing the system. This approach--call it Medicare Basic--would in theory give government the greater leverage needed to control the price inflation and reshape the system in positive ways. If you told people "public option" was a Medicare equivalent, the polls would demonstrate the popularity. Instead, that objective is now at risk. The right still calls Obama a covert socialist.

There is a more cynical interpretation of Obama's flexibility. He is coming out right about where he wanted to be. Forget the good talk, it is said, this president never really intended to do deep reform that truly alters the industrial power structure dominating our dysfunctional healthcare system. He just wanted minimalist reforms he could sell as "victory." Not until years later would people figure out that nothing fundamental had been changed.

In this scenario, Obama has always been more comfortable with the center-right forces within the Democratic party--Senator Max Baucus and the Blue Dogs--and the Clintonistas of DLC lineage who now fill his administration. His real political challenge was to string along the liberals with reassuring talk until they were stuck with lousy choices-- either go along with this popular president's pale version of reform or take him on and risk ruining his presidency. This sounds a lot like the choices Democrats faced during the Clinton years. Candidate Obama said it was "time to turn the page." We are still waiting to see what he meant.

I do not subscribe to the manipulative, deceptive portrait (not yet), but you can find lots of supporting evidence in Obama's behavior. His response to the financial crisis demonstrates a clear desire to restore Wall Street power, not to change it. His war strategy in Afghanistan looks like the familiar trap of open-ended counterinsurgency. The trap may soon close on him when the generals announce their need for more troops. Will this president dare to say no? Obama negotiated a truly ugly deal with the pharmaceutical industry--a promise not to use government bargaining power to bring down drug prices. His lieutenants still yearn to demonstrate "fiscal responsibility' by taxing the health-care benefits of union members or whacking Social Security.

In other words, this is really a decisive test for the Democratic party and its main constituencies. Will they go along with the president or push back and reject his misdirections? The burden will fall mainly on Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House majority. They will be under intense pressure from the White House to stay "on message" with the president. Organized labor seems to be breaking out of the go-along passivity. Richard L. Trumka, soon to be president of the AFL-CIO, promises to blackball Blue Dogs or anyone else who double-crosses the working people who faithfully financed their election campaigns.

Taking the high road will be hard and divisive. But maybe this is at last the season when Democrats reveal which side they are on.

The Nation