Hey Michael Moore....Come Out And Plaaaaaayy..........

[freshwest]

24. I blame Obama for putting single payer option in the ACA! VT and soon CA will take advantage of it.

People who truly want single payer had better get busy in their own states and elect the governors and legislatures that will vote this through.

The option is still there, didn't end with the big enrollment push last year, as it was in the law when it was passed in 2010 after Obama nearly broke the arms of every person who opposed any reform at all. The poison pills for private insurers were in the bill, such as their not being able to turn people away, no lifetime caps, no longer able to hide their costs of advertising, profit and administration as part of patient care. The law forced them to give back billions in rebates to the insured.

It also has provisions for the employees of the soon to be less profitable insurance companies to work at equal pay and benefits at government run health care agencies, like single payer. These facts are conveniently ignored by some. The ones not ignoring the ACA are those who would have never gotten care without the Medicaid expansion, which has saved many lives that the naysayers will never see, but they are important to many.

They could not wait for perfection. Life and death is in the now, not in a future that may never happen. Those who can't stop harping on this, seem to count those who would die as collateral damage on the road to utopia. I've had to argue with those who insist on being doctrinaire, when confronted with the fall out from their absolutism and insistence that one size fits all thinking in how programs should be dropped for the greater good and people died.

Those people had names, but now they're dead when they could have had long lives but it didn't fit their vision of utopia. But the ideologically pure have no remorse as long as they can hold on to their version of how things should be, and it doesn't affect those they know. That mentality is cold comfort to the families of the dead. I'm sure MM feels our pain just like all the purists do.