I kinda thought that ObamaCare – The Public Option = ObamaCare…

Looking that way.

Agreed. ObamaCare by itself has no public option. The formula’s more like ObamaCare + Public Option = What ObamaCare Should Be.

Exactly.

I wish Willard could be blamed for the lame Public Optionless bill we may get. Alas, it comes from critters with big D’s after their names.

Romney care is so great/s that they are walking it backwards so it will cover less and less people. Selise was all over this issue of how the Mass example has no cost controls and leaves many people unable to pay premiums and preferring just to pay a penalty. The Mass Connector (read health insurance exchange) does indeed have NO Public Option. This story is so bad and ends so sadly, I am just going to drive myself over to the conclusion and park there. And guess what, nobody is rushing to move to MA so that they can experience the Mass-a-care.

Does anybody know the numbers of folks employed by companies with Republican CEO’s that provide health insurance to their employees???

I don’t know, but given that most CEO’s of the larger companies tend to be Republican and supporters of the “free market” it seems to me their argument that the PO would lead to government takeover misses the fact that all those Republican CEO’s against it will have the choice to ignore it, and keep their employees with insurance companies.

And since this is probably a sizeable chunk of workers, wouldn’t that mean there’s no way possible the public option would crowd out private insurance?

It’s even worse than you know.

Massachuetts whihc requires all residents to purchase for profit junk insurance has the highest premiums in the nation. This is what happens when you have mandates with no public option.

And five years from now they’ll tell us that no one in Congress or the Obama administration could have anticipated…

we wont have a real idea of how bad it is(or not) until after labor day. It seemed to take a week for the the WH to figure out that they have a real problem with “the base” i dont think they even really understand what happened during the election yet. the real grass roots hasnt been outdoors waving guns and swastikas, it has been working its ass off to build up a majority for healthcarereform. can Obama really be that clueless???i think the answer is definately. Rahm is still living in 1992 ( 3 years before windows 95 )he still thinks we have to “win the reagan democrats” to be succesful, and Obama is not as hip as we all imagined.

A mandate w/o a public option is the wet dream of every insurance company. Sickening to even consider.

yeah ive heard them talking about “the massachusetts plan” BULLSHIT! i aint buying it. i wonder if they will put us in jail?

Mandates w/o a public option is the answer! Unfortunately, the question is, “What can we do to make healthcare more expensive and less accessible?

Oh you have to pay a penalty?? what brilliant idea. we make the people who dont have any money pay for the national health care debacle.

Credit derivatives swaps were also a form of insurance, and we see how well those worked out.

And they make it work with 100 million Medicaid dollars from the Federal government (as per the above article).

what kind of coverage are people getting in Ma. and at what cost?

so its subsidized, and those people are paying the highest rates in the country..sweet

is there any hope that such a revolting plan could be brought down in court? how the hell can the governemt FORCE people to buy a product from an industry, which is exempt from all anti trust laws, and which is being subsidized by the government to “keep costs low”…???WTF

All You Need to Know in One, Simple Formula: ObamaCare – The Public Option = RomneyCare

All you need to know about Obama: Obama – The Public Option = One Term

My summary and projections

Wrote the diary last night after some wine so I had lost my inhibitions on writing.

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7450

If you perceive it to be sarcastic, you are correct.

YEAH that whole “im willing to be a one term president”..that wasnt for the pukes, that was for us. what a creep. and why?? so he can be memorialized and beloved like mitt romney???????

we might have work with ron paul weirdos and the secessionists to get this thing killed.

The danger is that Obamacare might turn out to have high deductible plans where the amount shouldered by insurance is only 65% of the cost of care. Unless they are vigilant, legislators might recreate all of the foibles of private insurance in the health exchange plans, including the future public option. That’s what I do not like about the tiered levels of coverage in HR 3200, of bronze, silver and gold plans; with the cheaper plans providing less coverage. It’s like the DNA of the free market is added to the dowecheatemandhow of the private insurance system and written into future legislation for a nationwide healthcare plan. (My apologies to the car-talk guys).

The sad fact of both these equations

ObamaCare – The Public Option = ObamaCare
Obama – The Public Option = One Term

Is they are valid when The Public Option = 0 or the null (empty) set.

Here are the options:

1. Continue with the present system.

2. Impose a Mandate to Pay our Insurance Overlords, and raise premiums by insisting they spend more money actually treating us.

3.Provide a meaningful Public Option to compete with insurance companies, and if it’s successful break the Insurance Companies, stop Big Pharma from stealing taxpayer funded research for obscene profits, Break Hospital holding companies, reduce Doctors’ incomes and break Big Education by outsourcing Doctors’ education to Cuba.

Cuba, who can graduate Doctor’s for 1% of the US costs.

Let’s explore the consequences of 1, 2 and 3. Now your darling Obama only needs to be able to count to three in public. Does that require appeasement?

1. Medicare will go broke, as the Republicans wish, and Medical Insurance Premiums will double in 5 years, leading to 150 million uninsured, and the old wrinklies, the teabaggers, will meet the real Death Panels, Republican YOYO.

2. Force poor Republican and Democratic people to pay money for no health care coverage from the Insurance companies. The Insurance Companies will continue to invent new and improved ways (like only paying 65% a claims) not to pay for procedures. As Republicans want, the Mandate makes the IRS and the Federal Government the true enemies of the poor. The Mandates will result in widespread civil disobedience, 150 million FICO scores of 500 or less, punitive interest rates, and the rich will continue to extract regressive rents from the poor. The Military will have to suppress the riots and insurrections with violence. Who cares, they are only the poor.

3. Provide the “Public Option.” Obama will have to stare down the Bullies, the Health Care corporate interests. The Health Parasites are just the first of the corporate interests to confront. If Appeaser Obama had really taken on the finance bandits (Oh, I’m so scared of being the angry Black Man), he’d not have to stare down this industry. To cut health care costs Obama will have to stare down Big Food & Ag, to clean up fast food, cheap fats and expensive veg.

Is Obama up to the task? Unlikely. He doesn’t have the balls to stage this coup. If he had the balls he’d be explaining the choices, with his brilliant oratory, in these stark terms, repeatedly on TV. Then he’d ask the people to call their congress people to express their wishes, and to arms to get his back.

His message, repeated every hour of every day, on all channels of TV:

“Congress and I can only proceed if you the people, back us the elected, by calling and expressing what you want. It is either you the people, or the corporations. You have to decide who is in control. You have to have our backs to size the country back from the parasites, corporate interests.”

In parallel with this Obama could arrest and detain under the Terrorism Statutes, Murdock the Traitor, all the Billionaires, and every CEO of the F500, and render the whole bunch to Gitmo, awaiting trial. Murdock needs to be executed, preferrably by being hung by the Balls, after a completely biased Military Commissions Sedition and Treason trail. Then break up the F500 into the unfortunate 50,000.

Well he won’t. Obama is, after all, Chief Appeaser. Rahm? He’s a cockroach, hatched out by the sun.

I don’t understand the purpose of a mandate in the first place. Isn’t it sorta like mugging my cat for his money, which is only fair since I pay for his catfood? But guess what, MY CAT DOESN’T HAVE ANY FUCKING MONEY. Not even pockets, not even pants.

Mandate folks to buy private coverage that they cannot afford, and penalties for those who don’t….conumdrum or crazy here and a very bad way to treat our citizens, esp. those who are poor/sick.

anything with “bronze silver and gold” tiered pricing schedules is a rip off.

yes, if such a bill ever goes to a vote with the WH support, i hope we move heaven and earth to kill it, and then to get a primary or 3rd party candidate to run against the pres. that he is even “open” to such an idea precludes me from voting for him ever again.

Solution: Mandate that Sharkbabe’s cat must wear pants.

or pay fines

Great way to phrase it, Blue Texan. Hope this gets repeated strongly and often.

Well, she better buy insurance…as we can say, ”not a pot to pee (or, wee wee in, but by golly you buy you some insurance from the men that make $$$$million bonuses. Nice, really. Kitty cat, you’ll like it. (Sorry I got carried away)

The emphasis on privatization of our national resources (our hospitals, our medical research labs and universities, our doctors) and the betrayal of promises to respond to demands for changes in the way healthcare is distributed, and the failure to respond to the widening gap between the richest and the rest of society, reminds me of the career of Carlos Menem in Argentina. Sort of described by synoia in paragraphs numbered 1 and 2. A democratically elected leader elected in a time of economic and political crisis promises to restore democracy and to stabilize the economy and then he meets with everyone who wants to buy a piece of his country.

Marcy Wheeler is upstairs!
Waxman’s Methods

Just a guess, but i think Obama knows he’s in trouble over this health care mess. The meeting with Daschle indicates that to me, since that’s who he wanted for Health Secretary.

Somehow I don’t find it very encouraging that he’s talking to Daschle…

A little light on our Mass. tax penalty for failure to buy for-profit medical insurance, from the friendly folks at https://mahealthconnector.org:

[I]f your income is above 300% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (i.e., $32,497+ for one person) and you are between the ages of 18 and 26, your monthly tax penalty will be $52.
If you are in this same income range and age 27 years or older, your monthly penalty will be $89 (i.e., $1068 per year).
Step 3: Determine your total penalty
Multiply the number of months that you expect to be uninsured by the amount of the penalty:
# of months X monthly penalty amount = total penalties for 2009
To calculate the penalty for a married couple, double the individual penalty.

You will get up to 63 penalty-free days if you had a gap in coverage. Depending on when you lost insurance, these 63 days may not fit neatly into a series of consecutive months. For the 2008 tax year, the Department of Revenue and the Health Connector determined that the 63 days could be rounded up to three months. Guidance for tax year 2009 is pending. (Yup, this is from the website today.)

Feeling better now?

No, I don’t either but I think that why he did it.

Oh, so I take the penalty for $1080/year.

Do I get health care? Or is it just a breathing tax?

How’s the Fund for the Mass Safety Net doing?

are hospitals exempt from the law that requires them to treat the uninsured in the ER?

and since sebelius has re “clarified” the statement from last week, that finnaly blew this thing up

Just for curiosity what would a CBO analysis do to the Romney care plan.

Hasn’t that already failed?

I am one of those unfortunates, who live in Mass .and don’t have insurance.
To hell with Romneycare costs haven’t gone down and you have to be dirt poor to get subsidized .It’s all just a give away to the insurance industry.
It also doesn’t help that many of the large insurers are based in the state.
No public option=big steaming pile of pooh!!!

I know a woman who has insurance but choose to fly down to Costa Rica for surgery that was done by a US trained MD. She claims she got better care. It was not govenment subsidized or covered by insurance. Will this bill keep people like her from outsourcing healthcare? I want to be convinced that something is better than nothing but I know that is not always the case.

So take your average guy making $32k per year in Mass. What kind of a bite will health insurance take out of him? Or is it worth just paying the $1080/year penalty?

I wonder just how popular a mandate without a public option would be to the Republicans if it included subsidies for up to 300% of FPL, AND the costs of the subsidies had to be 100% financed with a surtax on those earning above $200,000 a year.

Is it possible that the City of San Francisco has a successful Public Option program ? If it has couldn’t the pro-Public Option gang use it to bound on the anti-Public Option gang ? If it has why is everyone so quiet about it ?

There 40 million (40,000,000) government workers in the U.S.A. with health care paid for by the U.S. tax payers to private insurers . If 1/2 of them were put in the Medicare program tax payers would save billions . Enough to pay for any public option .

This is Romney-Care – he was governor of MA and this is his work.

it wasn’t just romney’s work – i thought it was a compromise, driven mostly by dems and some health care advocates. in fact, i supported lobby efforts for it based on what i heard from dems and progressive groups.

the people who warned it wouldn’t work are the same people who are warning now that obamacare won’t work (even with a po) — pnhp for example.

but i, like most dems and progressives, did support the 2006 MA reform, thinking that at least it would be an experiment and an incremental improvement.

the lesson i learned is to pay more attention to the people who know what they were talking about (see pnhp) and to watch out for dem industry bailouts in the names of healthcare reform.

Stunning conclusion, Unionave, do you have a linky for the source?