Reply #28: I like John & Elizabeth, but their particular endorsement is not a big issue to me.

[SoCalDem]

ANY plan that still allows "for-profit" insurance companies into the mix, is not a great plan.

Obama surely knows that the only thing he could hope to accomplish early-on would be something similar to what he and Hillary have proposed..

John's "cancel congress' insurance until y'all have the same" was very much like the gas tax vacation..un-doable.. A president cannot just do something like that..Congress has to initiate health care.

John is not a super delegate, and is not a big fish...once Obama saw that his endorsement was not forthcoming, he moved on.

We can all argue back & forth about which plan is better and which one sucks, but the facts on health-care are still the same. We ALREADY have several government health care plans in operation now..

1. Federal employee plan
2. VA
3. Medicare
4. Medicaid (varies from state to state)
5. What's left of union jobs

Supposedly, the old people, the poor people, the military and the vast government workforce are already covered, so the only people "at risk" are the ones who currently get coverage through their jobs or are trying to cobble together coverage on their own.. Those people fall into 2 distinct groups..ones with good coverage that's affordable, and ones whose employers offer nothing, and they don't make enough to be able to afford coverage on their own.

IGMSSY comes into play...heavily (I got mine so screw you)

The five indicated groups above are unlikely to protest a lot about the non-coverage or unaffordability of coverage for the two remaining uncovered/under-covered groups.

The people with good jobs & good coverage are just thankful for their own coverage, and probably give little thought to the others who don't, so what we have is one sliver of the population of people probably making $40K or less, who are not offered coverage through work, and who cannot afford to buy it..or it's unavailable to them because of pre-existing conditions.

LIFE is a pre-existing condition, and INSURANCE is the problem...not the solution.

Until the well-paid/well-insured LOSE their coverage, or until it actually becomes ILLEGAL to offer insurance through work, nothing will get done about it..

until then we are basically saying that it's OKAY with us to force bankruptcy and insolvency upon the people in our economy who probably work the hardest.. the ones who prepare & serve our food, wash our vehicles, care for our kids, cut our hair, sell us our plastic trinkets at malls... "those" people..

Believe this.. If the upper middle classes suddenly were NOT getting health care plans at work, there WOULD be an impetus to finally change the way we deliver health care, but since the ones who are struggling the most, have no time OR money to lobby or protest a lot, they have no voice.

Few people know this, but FDR and Truman BOTH had plans for a national health care system.. so did Johnson...Medicare was a START..cover the oldest first. If it had never been intended to be a national plan, it would probably have been called Seniorcare..The seniors were the tip of the spear, but it never went beyond that..

It all comes down to money, and it's not hard to see why.. If you are an employer and you can hire people for $8 an hour with no benefits, why would you pay them $20 so they can buy their own insurance, or offer them insurance along with the $8 an hour?

When you hire something done at your house, you are only looking at the bottom line. Let's say you are having remodeling done, and two contractors are in the running..Both are licensed and have good reputations..One has union workers with insurance, and are paid $15 an hour...His bid is $25K..
The other has equally competent workers, but he only pays them $10 an hour and gives them NO benefits....his bid is 12K.. who will you hire?

We are all to blame, since we have been put into positions that demand that we always look for the cheapest..and the cheapest always means that some employees down the line are getting screwed.


Before any REAL health care can be ours for the asking, several things have to happen in a choreographed way (which is why nothing will happen...in my lifetime, anyway)

1. Employers must be PROHIBITED from offering "company plans".. and the expenses formerly counted as part of the employees benefits, passed on to the employees in the form of salary..real dollars & cents)..Employees , for decades, have been foregoing raises in lieu of ever-escalating costs of health-care...$20 wk raise, but insurance share goes up $35..or the boss "says" you're not getting a raise, BUT your health care increase is being covered by the boss.

2. Insurance companies must be taken OUT of the health care policy business altogether..

3. Hospitals must operate on a non-profit basis

4. Drug companies must operate as non-profits.

5. Proof of eligibility must be as ironclad as possible...paranoid "no damned ID" people reject this idea, but if we are all paying for the cost of coverage for all, we MUST be able to be sure that only US citizens get the care...try going to Canada to take advantage of their national healthcare (as an American)..you won't get far..

6. A national referendum spelling out what we WANT and NEED. We will have to take this out of congress' hands, because all they ever do is put a band aid here and an band aid there, and what we end up with it nothing like we asked for or needed...and a few fatcats & lobbyists get a little richer at our expense.

7. Corporate lobbying HAS to be made illegal. Do we really think that the private corporations have our public best interest at heart?

8. The whole shebang has to be rolled into ONE program MEDICARE.... no more chi-chi policies for some people..and nothing or next to nothing for the rest of us..

Starting to see why we'll never get this done?? Until PROFIT is taken out of the mix, we will never have it.

The wages for doctors, nurses, dentists, etc should be generous, but continuing to pay through the nose for huge windfalls for hospital owners/execs and the fatcats at the drug companies is what is killing us all..

See why we don't have it now?? why we probably won't ever have it??