Health Insurance Rate Shock-California Obamacare Insurance Exchange Announces Premium Rates

[woo me with science]

79. No, because it *entrenches* the for-profit system.

Last edited Mon May 27, 2013, 02:32 PM - Edit history (3)

They will fix it later. This is the mantra we are always fed. But the promised "fixes" and "improvements" NEVER happen.

You have to understand what has happened here. We did not get this "D-minus" plan because nothing else was possible. At the time of the negotiations, the country polled heavily in favor of a public option. It would not have been difficult to rally the country to pressure for something better than this, if Obama and corporate Democrats had wanted to do so. It would not have been hard to design a plan that focused on the aspects of health care delivery that REALLY needed fixing: cost control. They didn't. Obama did not fight for a public option. There are no serious cost controls in this plan, and there never were, which is something that does not happen accidentally. Obama chose to make backroom deals with the health insurance companies, because this administration is corporatist and has been corporatist since the day they got into office. If you tune out all the propaganda and simply look clearly at what is being DONE, over and over again, you will see that what we got was entirely consistent with every other decision this administration has made in the corporate arena. The corporate Democrats did not push for something better, because what we got was precisely the goal: a sop for the One Percent.

We are on a road of austerity budgets and Social Security cuts. We are on the road to privatized schools. We are on the road to the Keystone pipeline. We are on the road to the Trans-Pacific job and wage killing agreement. And we have a brand spanking new health insurance program that mandates the purchase of an obscenely overpriced product that vast numbers of Americans still will not be able to afford to use.

They are not working on our behalf. That is a truth that people need to get their heads out of their nether regions and face. We have a broad, systemic problem of corporate money in our government and in our elections, and both parties are working for corporate interests, not ours. This plan is an ironically named insult to and assault on Americans. There is no serious affordability here at all, nor any serious plan to provide affordability, and there never was. The point of the plan is, was, and has always been The Mandate: a captured market for an obscenely overpriced corporate scam of middlemen and thieves.