Fact-esque

The Healthcare Reform Pony

It's so pretty and bright but you can't ride it and it doesn't do any tricks except the one where it rubs itself against a tree to brush you out of the saddle. It may be expensive and largely useless -

It's not just that single-payer was off the table from the git-go - it's that the public option wasn't even really on the table.

And it still isn't. A public option that isn't available to everyone just isn't an option at all, it's just what's left when they already know you have nothing left to take.

But think about this: The administration said publicly that they had no intention of passing a public option. They said it where the insurance companies could see it. They started from the weakest possible negotiating position. And the only reason we are still even talking about the public option is that enough people decided to push back.

- but that hasn't stopped the Democrats from working it like it's a sure cure for cancer.

US Corpo's to Employees: "You Lose"

We've commented before on the arrogance Corporate America has developed in the 30 years it took to build a fascist, oligarchic US. They can do anything they want and there's no one to stop them. Not even reality stops them. Their near-destruction of the world economy through blind avarice has taught them nothing. Saving their asses has only taught them that they can go right ahead and do what they were doing before. masaccio notes at FDL (via Norwegianity) that their self-righteous pomposity has reached the point where their trade associations - PR and political arms which are supposed, among other things, to guard their industry's public image - felt that it wasn't at all dangerous to take out a full-page ad in the NYT extolling their own virtues and putting employees and workers in their appointed place. Under corporate heels.

Cute Corporate Capitalist Cultistry

It's just so adorable the way capitalists and their lackeys manage to think of themselves as brave, risk-taking pioneers, standing alone against the barbarian hordes in the awesomely dangerous jungles of corporate throat-cutting and skinning-alive Big Business behavior when what they really spend their time doing is cutting risk to the minimum and shoving the expense of whatever's left onto someone else. Like taxpayers.

Huge Health Insurance Price Hikes for Small Businesses - What a Good Idea!

OK, Quiz Time: If you were a health insurance corpo exec during the first national discussion of healthcare reform since Truman, a time when the public is pressing for a public option on the assumption that it is going to be way cheaper than anything private for-profit investor-driven health insurors have any intention of offering what with the continuous price hikes we've seen for the last 30 years running alongside a deteriorating healthcare system in which everything is a pre-existing condition and it always seems to turn out that nothing is covered and said public already, like, hates your guts, would you: Raise rates on smll businesses, the core of GOP and conservaDem voters, both of which parties are desperately trying to protect your profits in the face of enormous public opposition?

Would I go too far if I assumed your answer to that question is a resounding "Good grief, NO!" If not and that's actually your answer, um, you're wrong. That's precisely what the insurers are doing and promise they will continue to do right up to the point a real public option makes them completely irrelevant.

Norwood Nurses Join SEIU: Michelle Malkin Falls Down Backwards and Foams at the Mouth

Well, not yet. Maybe tomorrow when she finally hears about it.

Nearly 600 workers at Norwood Hospital, ranging from respiratory therapists to housekeepers, will join the Service Employees International Union as the result of an election yesterday.

***

Norwood became the third hospital in the Caritas Christi Health Care system, based in Boston, to unionize this year. More than 800 employees at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the flagship of the six-hospital Catholic chain, in April affiliated with the same labor union, Local 1199 of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.

Malkin hates that. In fact, she hates unions, apparently because they promise better working conditions and pay to workers. Well, that's what she said. Calling SEIU's organization of home health care workers a "home invasion" - a term which used to be applied to criminals who broke into your house and robbed you with AK-47s or whatever but which Malkin now feels free to apply to people who ask you to let them help you live better - here's what she thought was so terrible:

Over the last month, home-based providers started have been receiving unexpected visits from out-of-state union lackeys trying to recruit them with the promise of health care benefits and more money.

(emphasis added)

Monstrous! Oh, and she doesn't like any of that voting business, either.

The Blue Dog Rubicon: Everybody's Mad At Them

The brilliant Democrat policy of following Republican-style divide-and-conquer tactics in the healthcare bill is having the unsurprising and perfectly predictable effect of splitting two of the party's once stalwart base groups by forcing one to pay for the other and threatening the second's coverage.

In hundreds of meetings with millions of its members to promote a health care overhaul, AARP, the huge organization for older Americans, has often found itself forced to referee a battle between generations.

Its 40 million members are split about evenly between those who have access to Medicare, the federal government’s health program for the elderly, and those who are too young to be eligible for such benefits. The younger members, or those between the ages of 50 and 64, sometimes face terrible choices in the private insurance market, with age and declining health status making premiums high and benefits poor.

But members 65 and older get among the most secure medical benefits in the country, and many are in no mood to share.

That isn't because they watch Fox and get all unnecessarily agitated by the hours and hours of non-stop fearmongering and phony class warfare, though that doesn't help. It's because the Blue Dogs have forced the protection of insurance company profits (since they, you know, work for those same insurance companies) at the expense of everyone else.

AFL-CIO's Trumka v Rahm on the Public Option

For once, Rahm Emanuel lost an arm-twisting session. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, browbeaten into agreeing to a meeting with President COS Emanuel, refused to climb down off his white horse. He flat-out told The Enforcer that the public option was the best and most viable of the current (sad) crop of healthcare reform measures. FDL's Jane Hamsher spoke directly with AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale.

 I asked if Trumka considered "triggers" to be a public option. He responded:

Trumka is sticking to what he said on triggers all along - which is that we haven't seen any plans that would be as effective as the public option, and he told that to Rahm Emanuel today.

They discussed the Baucus/Pelosi plan to pay for reform by putting an unfair burden on the benefits of many AFL-CIO members.  (No doubt it's just a happy coincidence that the one big liberal institution which has pledged to withhold support from any Democrats who won't vote for a public plan is getting specifically hammered.)    Trumka reiterated that "working families shouldn't be taxed on their health care benefits, which often have been gotten by foregoing wage increases and other benefits." 

It's a good point and one that's often forgotten, even by raging progs like me. The management class used to offer benefit packages, particularly health care, in lieu of wage increases because such packages used to cost less than the pay increases being asked for. They thought it was a good deal for them, and it was until Reagan's deregulation cut the health insurance companies loose and premiums started to rise like Apollo rockets off a launching pad. Even then they could get cheaper coverage for a group (their employees) than any one of those employees could possibly get for him/herself and used the difference to wangle wage concessions and other benefit givebacks. (They used pensions and 401K payments in much the same way.)

Ben Nelson Protects Medicare Advantage (And Big Pharma)

Prime Blue Dog Ben Nelson, who hasn't made many non-Republican friends lately - or ever - has just sold the New York Times a Bridge to Nowhere, convincing one Robert Pear that, really, Medicare Advantage isn't a huge giveaway to Big Pharma that costs seniors A LOT of $$$ they wouldn't otherwise have to pay for their drug treatments, it's..well, let him tell it in his own inimitable way.

The bill taken up this week by the committee would cut Medicare payments to insurance

companies that care for more than 10 million older Americans, including nearly one million in Florida. The program, known as Medicare Advantage, is popular because it offers extra benefits, including vision and dental care and even, in some cases, membership in health clubs or fitness centers.

Yuh. At 3X normal rates. And of course health clubs and fitness centers are very well known for the massive numbers of senior citizens who go there to work on their abs and get shinier, more healthy quads, running on treadmills and bench-pressing free weights. And since when is there no vision or dental care with Medicare? When did that happen? Or does "extra" mean they pay for rhinestones on the hornrims?

Balance in Healthcare

If you haven't seen this yet, it's perfect. (For the record, I ganked this from Adam at A Violently Executed Blog who yoinked it from C&L.)

Friday Palin: "The Winged Witch-Monkeys Didn't Show Up Because I Scared Them Off"

In what has to be one of the most brazen bits of credit-grabbing in GOoPer history, Sarahcuda announced yesterday that the non-existent "death panels" don't exist because she scared Obama into abandoning them. In effect, Palin's declaring victory in an imaginary war. And she wants credit for it. (Via Norwegianity)

In an op-ed in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, Sarah Palin suggests that there won't be any "death panels'' under health care reform legislation after all. Only in her telling, this is thanks to her diligence in sounding the alarm, and the scared-witless response from those for whom "it rang true.''