The republicans are pro-industry. That doesn't sound that
bad in and of itself, does it?
But it is bad when rabidly ambitious, pro-industry
people connect themselves to greedy people who run healthcare insurance
companies. Together they are hell bent on helping one another get richer and more
powerful
"In 2013, the CEO of Aetna
earned $33.7 million dollars. The average health insurance CEO salary was over
$10 million in that same time period. While many will say that is capitalism at
work, I really wonder, as I fight to get another MRI covered for a patient, how
many MRI’s were denied to generate that kind of salary? And 2014 saw great
increases in member enrollment in insurance plans under the ACA. Profits for
these plans jumped up 10’s of millions of dollars...
My patients are suffering. They
cannot afford the premiums they are now forced to pay, often against their
will. They cannot afford the high deductibles most of these plans now carry. I
have seen patients decide between two needed medications and which of their
family members was the sickest to take to the doctor. They could not afford
both....
Do you understand that we have not begun to talk about republican's attempt to destroy Obamacare and Medicaid yet?
Do you understand that the republican backed health insurers are coming for all of us?
The Congressional Budget Office said 22 million people will lose their healthcare under the Senate Healthcare plan (BRCA). You do understand that the republicans are currently taking aim at Obamacare and Medicaid and that our employer paid health insurance is next, right?
The republicans are trying to use
the real need to fix Obamacare to destroy Medicaid as we know it.
The way medicaid works now, even
though it doesn't pay nearly enough in some cases, it DOES move with an index
that measures rising medical costs. The Senate's health care bill proposes to
tie Medicaid to an index that doesn't move up nearly as fast as rising medical
care costs
...which will wind up kicking the
elderly and the poor off Medicaid, as planned for decades.
This is what being pro-industry looks when you are an
ethnoracist CINO with a rabidly ambitious mindset who assumes "poor"
means lazy black and brown-skinned people. This is the root of your deciding
not to care about people being unable to go to the doctor.
CINOs either ignore scripture when it's convenient or, more
likely, legalistically rely on semantics to avoid the obvious meaning of
passages like this one:
"And the King will say, 'I
tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers
and sisters, you were doing it to me!'
from Matthew 25.
This is pretty simple for Christians, not to mention all people of
all other faiths too. You do not gouge the poor.
In my opinion, in 2007 when the
U.S. nearly started a worldwide financial collapse, it started with an attack
on the poor. Those sub-prime loans sold to the black and brown poor were the
first investments to go belly up. Then as the banks scramble to cover up that
mess more investment vehicles that were giant, complicated ponzi schemes.
In other words, we almost reaped what we sowed in
2007.
We didn’t go into the depression the one-percenter's almost set off because President Obama
saved us.
And, in my opinion, he chose saving us over putting those banksters
in jail because he couldn’t do both at the same time the way our financial
system is set up. But eventually, I think, we’re going to pay the piper for not putting them in jail.
If we had put the banksters in jail the rest of the greedy might be a little more reluctant to snarl and bite and tear at the middle class and the poor in order to get even richer...and that includes health insurers.
Do not think REPEAL AND REPLACE is just about poor folks and Obamacare.
The
healthcare industry has been out of control for years. Those of us WITH
employer paid healthcare really haven't seen our premiums go up THAT much over
20 years. Yes, it looks like it's gone up a lot. And it has, cumulatively. But
the continual climb upwards has been slow.
However, what’s been happening a lot faster is that health
insurance company’s pay-outs per procedure/drug has gone down and dramatically.
I have a high maintenance body that
requires repairs form time to time. Not only am I paying a lot more for
medication than I once did, the co-pays for surgery are scary.
And they've got this deeply crooked
sh*t they do now where, if you have PPO type insurance, every single person that gets near you at a hospital,
that is supposedly IN YOUR NETWORK, is charging you separately.
There always seems to be ONE
Provider, PERSON X, that you don't even remember meeting (the anesthesiologist)
that is NOT in your network somehow OR IS in your network if he treats you at
Hospital A, Hospital B, and Hospital C, but not IN YOUR NETWORK if he treats
you at HOSPITAL D -- where you just happened to opt to have your surgery
Whoops
In another instance, I finally told a doctor of mine,
"Look, I did everything I was supposed to in order to make sure everybody
was inside my plan. I even contacted the health insurance company to choose you as my assigned doctor. Therefore, I'm not going to be the one paying for the
"mistake" of doing my MRI in your office because that southeast corner of
your office where the MRI machine sits is outside my network.... somehow.
I'm exaggerating a bit. It wasn't that the MRI was located in the southeast corner of the office. But the MRI machine IN his office was OUTSIDE my insurance network somehow. And they wanted to charge me hundreds of dollars more than my co-pay.
When the doctor's insurance person wanted to argue with me, I said,
“Where is it in writing that the mistakes made between you and the insurance
company will be paid for by me?”
That doctor’s office backed off because I almost
always ask every question I have about costs and what is covered by e-mail. They knew I had them.
Later I found out that my in-network doctor’s office stopped doing business
with yet ANOTHER company between themselves and my health insurance company in
regards to the MRI
LESSON 1 FOR TODAY: A doctor is as good as the person who
handles the insurance for his office.
LESSON 2 FOR TODAY: When discussing what's covered and co-pays, act confused in the office. Ask or re-ask questions by e-mail once you're at home. Get everything you can in writing.
LESSON 3 FOR TODAY: When you cannot afford to hire an
attorney every five minutes, the health insurance company can take your money as easily as a mugger with a gun. And
that's what health insurers are doing --to those of us with “good insurance.”
Our best shot to fix this decades long mess, so far, has been Obamacare WITH
public option. But a republican caucusing democrat, named Joe Lieberman made sure the public optionfailed. And he made sure public option failed because, like republicans, he did not want to do anything that caused health insurance companies to have to compete with a government health insurance provider that was providing care at a much lower cost.
I heard one republican come right out and say they were against providing low priced competition for health insurance companies. And in my opinion, THAT is one of the key answers.
Yeah, I don't like the idea of a
government run health insurance either --as messy as the government is about everything
else. But government healthcare is better than no healthcare. And providing
COMPETITION to the healthcare industry, enough competition to bring their prices down, was likely THE KEY to making Obamacare work.
In addition to pulling the relatively wealthy folks taxes back out of Obamacare, the republicans want to protect healthcare insurers' profit margins not healthcare for everyone. That’s why Sarah Palin ran to the
television cameras and started screaming about "death panels" when
they were discussing the public option. But
trust me, the only thing republicans were scared of was low cost competition
for health insurers.
The Aetna CEO mentioned above would have brought home 12
million dollars in 2013 instead of 33 million if Obamacare had been put into
place with public option AND those penalties were triple what he put in place.
The penalties needed to be ferocious to chase the young into OBAMACARE.
Eventually, if those Trumpthuglican maggots do not fix
Obamacare, as it is, they are going to get their way. I think 22, 24, or 26
million people who have insurance now will not have it in the nearish future.
Obamacare will be effectively repealed but not effectively replaced.
If you don't care about the poor, then care about
yourself.
If the health insurers jump this Obamacare hurdle and don't
have to sacrifice one thin dime to care for the poor what they are going to do
is continue on as they have been. They are going to continue to hike health
insurance premiums while providing less and less coverage. And health insurers were on this greedy path when President Obama was still in high school.
This is not just about Obamacare
This is not just about medicaid.
This is about all of us and our ability to get care at a reasonable price.
If you haven't had an injury or a
disease where you need a procedure done under your employer paid insurance, you
are due for a nasty surprise at some point. You're going to be shocked at how
different your bills look as compared to the promises made when you signed up
for your health insurance.
I got nasty surprises...and yet I
have that "Cadillac health insurance" the republicans used to be
rattling on about. I've seen others get cancer and be surprised about what is and is not covered...then die.
So, imagine what's happening to
people with lesser insurance. Imagine what's going to happen in the near future
if Health Insurance Providers get the republicans stamp of approval to make
money hand over fist no matter how many people you want to kick off your plans.
Obamacare cannot go on the way it
is and neither can the rest of our healthcare system. It's broke. And it's
broke because of corporate greed endorsed by the republicans.
I can’t even envision how much better this country would be
if those evil motherf***ers in the republican party would turn that business
acumen toward trying to make companies remain profitable while also being just as focused on making
sure everybody has the basics -- food, clothing, housing, education, and the
ability to go to the doctor when you are sick.
Conservative white people in other countries are not mad dog mean. I've seen conservatives in Canada say poor people have to have healthcare. And if foreign white conservatives are mean in other ways too, at least they aren't so mad dog mean that they're trying to grind their OWN white tribe to make a few extra bucks... when they are ALREADY RICH.
So what the hell is wrong with our white people? It's like the white folks here are cursed and passing that curse down through the generations.
- Remember rich cheeto-satanettes know the deal. They know they are grinding up white poor most.
- As for the middle class/poor cheeto-satanettes, the numerical majority? For them, this is a YEA-WHITE-TEAM time. 'Grind the non-white folks to dust!" That's why they voted Trump. These "low education folks" ---who haven't learned a thing since junior high school no matter WHAT KIND OF DEGREE they have hanging on their walls -- they do NOT know their toe are already in the same meat grinder as black and brown folks.
By the way, these health insurers claiming they'll go
bankrupt if they provide care for the poor and the elderly through Obamacare?
This isn't the first time these rich folk have cried poor. They cried foul before
between 1997 and 2000 too, the first time they were told that their gouging of the
American public wasn’t going to be a
free for all.
Read it for yourself:
Look, we may not be able to stop these greedy so-and-so-s by voting all the time. But we can sure as hell slow their roll. So get out and vote during the midterm elections in 2018.
Voting democrat slows the rich down quite a bit -- even when there's not as much overt white supremacy being pumped in by Trump. The only thing slowing the republicans down right now is Trump's stupidity.
However, I can see the repugnants putting the wheels back on the cart. Getting rid of that tap dancing Sean Spicer was part of that.
And since they haven't been able to shut Trump's mouth or stop his tweets, they've finally figured out that they should be secretive, which decreases the likelihood of saying anything that directly contradicts Trump within a 24 hour news cycle. This alone has made their party look less like a clown car -- a clown car full of evil, red-eyed, blood drenched, shark-toothed clowns.
So I think the republicans are about to do what they do best. They are going put aside all their differences for the good of the team.
This means Repeal and Replace will pass the Senate and the House. It's only a matter of when and how bad it will be. I still think we're looking at Obamacare-light though.
The logical thing for the repug-nicans to do would be to drop their hard right wing and reach across the aisle for right leaning democrats -- which again leads to Obamacare-light. But maybe a better version of Obamacare light would pass than what republicans would pass on their own(?)
The only way we stop the republicans from executing their decades long agenda is to vote them out.
They way this union if currently formed, the one-percenters either move fast or slow. Stopping them from moving fast, by keeping republicans out of office, for now, is JOB #1 -- not Job# Only because the democrats have too many problems to be borne too.
Vote in 2018
