Less than 2 weeks after Obama was elected, America's Health Care Programs sent out a press release.

[Poll_Blind]

That press release was titled Health Plans Propose Guaranteed Coverage for Pre-Existing Conditions and Individual Coverage Mandate and you can read it here. This is long before health care reform even began, when we were all still giving each other high-fives about the election.

And over the course of the next year and a half, there would be debates and arguments in Congress about changes to health care but in the end, the PPACA ("Obamacare&quot wound up following the template from that press release.

Isn't that interesting? Why do you suppose that is? Were some of the most ghoulish and vampiric corporate entities that exist in America being...magnanimous? Generous?

Really?

Really?

Nomatter. You are now officially on the hook. Whether you've realized it yet or not. You are now on Karen Ignagni's hook, on AHIP's hook.

For life. By law.

It may look like you just walked into a room with free danishes and coffee- who doesn't love that? But that shit isn't free. It's being provided by organizations with the most ruthless and brutal bottom-line in America. Grab all the danishes and coffee you can, AHIP gets 'em cheap.

Oh and here it comes. Lemme guess: You think I wanna see people die because I'm against subsidizing private health care corporations, right? You think I want to rip out the intravenous drips from the arms of little kids with leukemia. You think I want to deny the chemo for the woman with breast cancer.

There's a whole industry in America that has financial incentive and no qualms about letting those people die, and you're eating their danishes and drinking their coffee. So enjoy the illusion while you can. Every election year from now until you leave this earth, politicians will be promising to stand against those ruthless health care corporations and fight for your interests. And every election year, you'll hope that this batch of politicians is telling the truth.

In a post-Citizens United America.

Good luck with that.

Forbes: Mandate To Buy Coverage: Health Insurance Industry's Idea, Not Obama's
Frontline: Obama's Deal

PB

[Puzzledtraveller]

1. You have put this the best I have read so far.

The goals that ACA aimed want to achieve could have been done by other means. This is the complete opposite. We wanted a win so much, this is what we got. Absolute shame, and tragedy.

[Poll_Blind]

2. This was a bipartisan beat-down, too. While shits like Grassley chickend out, it was "Dems" like...

...Max Baucus working to keep single payer off the table and keeping the insurance industry in the driver's seat that really sealed the deal, starting with the kneecapping of Tom Daschle as Obama's pick for Health and Human Services Secretary (and to head the White House's plan for health care reform).

Watered down and chopped up for the likes of Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh and that fucking dog Ben Nelson, this administration wound up taking whatever legislation they could get.

And that's just what they got: What the insurance companies would give them.

I can't recommend the Frontline episode I link to in the OP enough. There are other chronicles of this disaster but the Frontline episode does a good job of presenting most of it all in a fairly short amount of time.

PB

[GarroHorus]

3. Fail thread is epic fail. n/t

[woo me with science]

4. We have been had,... again.

Over and over and over again......and this is a big one.

If the fact that Roberts voted for this does not extract some collective heads out of some collective asses to see what is really going on here, then the state of "healthcare" in corporate neoAmerica in a few years certainly will.

What a despicable scam this was.

[MadHound]

5. Yep, far too many people are cheering this on as a victory for "our side",

To really step back and realize that it is a major loss for the American people. The Dems simply took Republican policy and made it their own. Where is the victory in that?