From Stephen:"Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive.
And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled.
And the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform, and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?" http://www.truthout.org/090209R
Huge IBC rate increases show need for public health insurance plan
Independence Blue Cross (IBC) filed for a rate increase of up to 52% for the three insurance programs it offers to individuals in what the industry called the "non-group market."
The QCC Personal Choice Plan which insures about 16,492 people would see an average rate increase for families ranging from 16.2% to 50.2%. If the insurance holder is under the age 29, the annual cost for a family would rise $2,243.88 or 39.4% for the standard plan. For insurance holders 30 to 39, the annual cost for a family would rise $2,824,68 or 41.5%. This is for insurance with a $1000 in-network deductible and that only pays 80% of costs up to a $4000 maximum. Rate increases for the premium plan, which has a lower deductible and which pays 100% of most costs, are even steeper. If the insurance holder is up to age 29, the annual cost for a family would rise $4,708.44 or 48.6%. For insurance holders 30 to 39, the annual cost for a family would rise $5,904.60 or 52%.
These shocking increases point to the urgency of creating a public health insurance plan to compete with private insurance. You can see an excerpt at http://tinyurl.com/obr7ns. http://youngphillypolitics.com/huge_ibc_rate_increases_show_need_public_health_insurance_plan
The lovely idea that animates social insurance--that we come together to share the risk of bad things happening to us--has long been rejected by the health insurance industry. But we have to fight to restore the idea of social insurance, that is, of widely sharing risk among all of us. That is particularly in providing health care, because we all have a fundamental right to health care. That means fighting for a public health insurance option, which will give us all a choice between private health insurance and a new public health insurance plan.
The BIG STALL, aka- the Public Option TRIGGER (Maintaining the Status Quo
The news has been filled with multiple reports of the White House working with Republican Senator Olympia Snowe -- one of the only remaining GOP moderates in a Senate that has been systematically purged of them via primaries -- on a healthcare "trigger", in which a so-called public option would only take effect if, after two years, other, weaker reforms fail to provide Americans with affordable healthcare.
It was back in the Spring that Snowe first floated her idea to create a public health insurance option, but only trigger its creation if the private market does not meet benchmarks to extend coverage to all Americans. After a meeting at the White House in July, Snowe elaborated a bit on her vision for the trigger plan: "This option would be available from day one in any state where - after market and insurance reforms are implemented - affordable, competitive plans still do not exist."
It seems fairly astounding that the White House would really want to bargain on such a thing. "Trigger" legislation is fairly infamous as a method of conducting a gigantic, transparent legislative whiff to keep the status quo while still being able to send letters back home saying that you've done a nebulous "something" that will really, for sure this time, do something supposedly substantive in the future. Triggers are designed to never actually be triggered, after all: if a "trigger" for a public option was strong enough to actually threaten the insurance industry, it would hit the exact same roadblocks that the public option itself has hit: a phalanx of top-industry-connected house and senate members who simply aren't interested in letting it happen, and will water it down until it no longer poses a threat.
More to the point, if our metrics are "affordable and competitive", that means next to nothing, and all parties involved know it. All the insurance industry has to do in order to dodge the affordable trigger entirely is to offer up more of the current "junk" plans that are relatively inexpensive, but don't cover anything when you actually need them: plans with $20k, $50k deductables and the like. That's exactly what they're doing now, since they've priced more effective insurance entirely out of the hands of millions of people. As long as it's "affordable" -- and a plan that covers nothing can be pretty affordable, compared to plans that actually provide healthcare coverage when you need it -- and "competitive" -- within the industry itself, with no outside public pressures on containing costs -- they're home free. Making the plan state-by-state? Again, a way to carve out what counts as "competit ive" on a per-state basis, and a way to avoid regulation across the country even as individual states continued to be sucked dry.
Nothing in such a plan would solve the problem of actually getting health care -- if you have junk insurance, you won't go to the doctor anyway, unless it's an emergency. And it won't solve the problem of people going bankrupt when they get sick. It'll just let the Senate bail on the whole damn thing, which is exactly what the insurance companies want, and exactly what much of the Senate has been desperately fighting to do. There's absolutely no way they'll design a "trigger" that is strong enough to kick in, or they'd be doing it now.
And I'll point out that the only way to make coverage "affordable" and "competitive", according to the insurance companies, is to mandate that everyone buys their products. It would seem impossible to have a "trigger" without first mandating that all Americans must purchase private insurance plans, which is the exact thing that will make even many diehard activists, like myself, vow to burn the current Democratic Party to the ground.
In short, it's the latest terrible, waffling, industry-sponsored idea in a season that has seen no shortage of terrible, industry-sponsored ideas, all in attempts to avoid doing anything truly substantive or useful in reforming our severely broken healthcare system.
We've come to expect it from the dysfunctional senate, from the GOP and the various industry-fellating Blue Dogs. But to have the White House itself entertain it, in a week which has seen numerous anonymous leaks from the White House apparently meant to signal how very, very ready individual members of the administration are to cave on whatever needs to be caved on, seems yet another bungle in a summer of badly bungled strategy.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/4/776432/-Talk-Grows-of-a-Healthcare-Trigger
Rob [bob-pol] Caring is the Key to Life - Health Care for All
racggg@gmail.com
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