And he's got a big deal op-ed in the Sunday New York Times:
We'd best move fast, if we don't want to see more scenes like what we have in L.A. last week and part of this, a kind of "tent city" of health care:In the coming weeks, the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gain. But for all the scare tactics out there, what’s truly scary — truly risky — is the prospect of doing nothing. If we maintain the status quo, we will continue to see 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day. Premiums will continue to skyrocket. Our deficit will continue to grow. And insurance companies will continue to profit by discriminating against sick people.
That is not a future I want for my children, or for yours. And that is not a future I want for the United States of America.
That was impossible last week when we saw pictures of thousands of people waiting stoically outside an improvised clinic in Inglewood, Calif., near Los Angeles. It looked as if it was happening in an underdeveloped country, where villagers might assemble days in advance for care from a visiting medical mission. But it was happening in a major American metropolitan area. This vast, palpable need for help is a shameful indictment of our health care system — one that politicians opposed to reform insist is the world’s best.Here's this week's Presidential address:The operation was run by a group called Remote Area Medical, which was formed to deliver care to Indians living in remote areas of the Amazon basin. It soon found great need here. It started delivering free services in rural America, progressed to medium-sized cities, and last week set up a free clinic at The Forum in Inglewood, where the Lakers used to play basketball.
Teams of volunteer doctors, dentists, nurses and other professionals, using donated supplies, delivered free care starting Tuesday. They saw roughly 1,000 patients on the first day alone, but still had to give hundreds of people numbers to return the next day. By Thursday, they had committed all slots for the eight-day event and announced that they could not take any more patients.
Let's hope the fight is finally on, and that there will be a "good enough" bill or better to start supporting right after the August Congressional recess.
6 comments:
It's pretty hard to see these health fairs as anything other than a national disgrace -- they strike me as a sortof slow motion bookend to Katrina.
I imagine that if nothing changes in healthcare, before too long these fairs will morph into live organ donor flea markets.
This sweeping reform thing, is set up to fail. The President has promised to much and now, instead of working on the reform that everyone is expecting he's going to be trying to manage previous expectations. If he gets anything passed the office will try to spin it as a victory.
In addition the opposition is going at the President with the absolute wrong arguments. They are spreading FUD against his plan, and the arguments I've heard so far is really mostly fear mongering. I think the most important question is though, how do we pay for it? Health care should be the least of our priorities right now, and balancing the budget should be by far the most. We're spending our way out of any economic credibility on the world's stage leveraging away our nation's futures for some ideals to appease the masses. WHY?
I'm guessing Michelle must of also planted a couple money trees as well in the South Lawn. That seems to be the only way to pay for this.
Ways to pay for healthcare reform:
1) Single Payer
2) Cut the DoD budget by 10%.
3) Close offshore corporate tax loopholes.
My work is done here.
You write like you know how much it's going to cost, please tell me, inquiring minds would like to know. I think the DoD's budget is something like 650 billion. That's a lot, so 10% of that would be around 65 billion.
I have my doubts, that it will only cost that much to reform Health Care. That sounds like a drop in the bucket for everything else they've done. I really think the world is laughing at us over this whole debacle. And everytime the President starts losing support over this, we'll see another news story about how X country has the best health care in the world, and how Government run health care is the silver bullet to all problems.
Government is not the answer, it is 9.999 times out of 10 the problem.
Well, that’s part of the whole point. None of the people you see on TV crying and caterwauling about the bill’s cost know what the cost is because there is no bill yet. Based on what’s floating around, the Dems have estimated one number, the CBO has estimated various numbers, outside nonpartisan groups have come up with numbers, and the Republicans of course are throwing around huge numbers derived from thin air. And then there’s the issue of are we talking about gross numbers or net – there are various serious estimates showing scenarios that begin to save money in a few years.
Here’s the number you should know: we spend $6000+ more per head for healthcare than other industrialized countries and we receive no better results.
That’s a tax.
And you’re paying it.
If you’re married, you and your wife pay $12,000 per year for nothing except to fatten the profits of predatory insurers and salaries of their execs. How? Any company that pays for its employees’ insurance passes the cost on to you. I could explain this in more detail, but I think you get the point.
Now as usual, the same people who blew apart the Treasury by giving GWB and corporate America everything they wanted over the past eight years are the ones screaming the loudest about fiscal sanity. It’s a time honored Republican tradition, at least since the early 1900’s, that any government expenses that enrich business or the superwealthy is good, giving anything back to regular taxpayers is bad. This is the real problem with federal taxes in this country. In Europe, taxes are higher, but people actually get something for them (healthcare, college, decent retirement, etc); here in the Land of the Free, you pay your taxes and you get mostly the DoD and not much else.
The rest of the world isn’t laughing at us. They’re horrified…horrified that so many citizens of a supposedly civilized nation are so eager to let 40 million poor and children suffer/die because they can’t afford medical care.
I'll keep this short.
Car breaks down, should the government pay for it? House burns down, should the government pay for it? House gets robbed should the government pay for it?
The government provides Health Care in terms of Free Clinics and other funded programs.
Our life expectancy isn't as high as other countries... This isn't because of health care or lack there of, this is because of a multitude of factors (Diet, Exercise).
Finally we're a civilized nation are so eager to let 40 million poor and children suffer/die because they can’t afford medical care? No. Just no. Those are 40 million people uninsured. Of those 40 million, how many do you think can afford it but choose not to pay for it. Even if was completely wrong about that last statement, these 40 million aren't denied medical care. They just can't walk into any medical office and start asking for any kind of medical procedure.
They won't be able to do that anyways in the UHC plan either. There will be a chart, dictating what you can and what you can't get.
Washington needs to take whatever money, they were going to spend on this Stimulus / HC reform and just pump it into NASA, so someone can figure out how to get me off this rock. We need to find like minded people with the old American Pioneer spirit. Who's willing todo things on their own, and not just wait for the Government to bail them out.
And BTW I like my current health care coverage.
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