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POPSHope, Change, Peace, Universal Health Care…Oh…and Alien Invasion ABC "V" TV SERIES PILOT PROMO TRAILER http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQoSCEMzJYE Kenneth Johnson, who wrote and directed the 1983 miniseries (it spawned a sequel and then a regular network series over the next two years), took his inspiration from a 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel called It Can’t Happen Here that depicted an imaginary fascist takeover of the United States. The aliens in the original V were patterned after Nazis, and, just in case anyone missed the point, an elderly Jewish character who was a Holocaust survivor periodically hammered on the similarities. But ABC’s series takes aim not at a German dictator from the misty past but a sitting " and popular " U.S. president.
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POPSSeeing Through The Lies: The Worst Bill Ever It "pays for" about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, "saving" about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that. • Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare"now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to "pay for" universal coverage. While Medicare's price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.
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POPSWhy does Joe Lieberman oppose healthcare reform? Ask his wife
But her stint at Hill & Knowlton was merely one episode in a professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector. For most of the past three decades, Hadassah Lieberman has been employed by either pharmaceutical companies or the lobbying firms that represent them -- starting with nearly a decade in the "public affairs department" at Hoffman-LaRoche from 1972-81, followed by stints at Pfizer, where she spent four years as "director of policy, planning and communications," and APCO Associates, a major lobbying firm where she served as a "senior associate" in its large healthcare division before retiring in 1998. She went back to work when she joined H&K, an outfit that became notorious for its billion-dollar defense of the tobacco industry. Not long after her contract began, Sen. Lieberman introduced legislation vastly extending patent protection for pharmaceutical companies -- notably including GlaxoSmithKline, a top client of his wife's firm.
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POPS Examples Of What Not To Do at The Heartland Institute. "Not only has it failed to cover many people, but all the false promises surrounding it have distracted Maine from doing anything that would actually help improve the situation." 'Costly, Ineffective Failure' "Maine has one of the highest state and local tax burdens. We should not be adding more taxes for this boondoggle, particularly at a time when Maine families are struggling with record high gas and heating oil prices and an uncertain economy." Past a 'Train Wreck' John Garven, president-elect of the Illinois State Association of Health Underwriters, concurs. "Dirigo is the more 'mature' of the * two programs, and it is already past the train wreck stage ." * Massachusetts 'universal health care' schemes Maine Residents Angered by Expansion of Dirigo Program Subsidy
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POPS Obama's Senior Moment voluntary private contracts and rationing via government. An Atlantic Ocean, in fact. Virtually every European government with "universal" health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn't pretty. The British system is most restrictive, using a black-box actuarial formula known as "quality-adjusted life years," or QALYs, that determines who can receive what care . If a treatment isn't deemed to be cost-effective for specific populations, particularly the elderly, the National Health Service simply doesn't pay for it. Even France"which has a mix of public and private medicine "has fixed reimbursement rates since the 1970s and strictly controls the use of specialists and the introduction of new medical technologies such as CT scans and MRIs. Yes, the U.S. "rations" by ability to pay (though in the end no one is denied actual care). This is true of every good or service in a free economy and a world of finite resources . . .
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POPSShameful! Yet another reason why America needs to dump commerical, for-profit healthcare for a more sensible, fair Universal Healthplan.
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POPSCanadian Doctor Shares True Pros & Cons of Canadian Health Care
Canadian doctor Michael M. Rachlis shares the truth about the Canadian Health Care system in hopes of dissolving propaganda and confusion. The Los Angeles Times posted and Op-Ed article by Canadian doctor Michael M. Rachlis. The whole thing is well worth a read and will provide a much better understanding of not only the Canadian health care system, but that of the U.S. as well. There's been a vast debate regarding a public option in the U.S. and most of it seems to be based on misinformation and fear tactics. Unfortunately, there's been a shortage of informed opinions and solid facts. I think it would be a good idea of many people who enjoy the benefit of universal health care in other countries would come forth and share their experiences. With the vast number of uninsured Americans, and the fact that insurance companies can and do deny coverage on a very arbitrary basis, there seems to be a need of some kind of major overhaul to the American health care system.
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POPS Universal Health Care Mecca In the past, I paid attention to the health care debate as a speechwriter who prepared speeches, talking points, op-eds, and debate prep material on the topic at different times for John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and others. Now, I'm paying attention because I'm a citizen up the creek without a paddle. Since I care more about my country than my personal pride, here's how I lost my insurance: I moved. That's right, I moved from Washington, D.C., back to Massachusetts, a state with universal health care. In D.C., I had a policy with a national company, an HMO, and surprisingly I was very happy with it. I had a fantastic primary care doctor at Georgetown University Hospital. As a self-employed writer, my premium was $225 a month, plus $10 for a dental discount. In Massachusetts, the cost for a similar plan is around $550, give or take a few dollars. My risk factors haven't changed. I didn't stop writing and become a stunt double. I don't smoke.
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POPSMore American Health Insurance Insanity And people are still trying to get people to believe that commercial health insurance is better than government healthcare? Utter insanity. In the victim's native Philippines, she wouldn't have to deal with insanity like this. America, just get over your irrational phobia of socialized healthcare, and get universal healthcare already. The rest of the industrialized world has already realized that a healthcare system based on commercial healthcare is criminal unfair, and utterly flawed in its basic concept. The rest of the industrialized world having healthcare systems that outrank America's dismal 37th place rating is another clue that only lunatics don't want socialized medicine.
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POPSDeath Merchants: Rick Scott profits off the uninsured And this isn't the first time that Scott's warnings about the ills of socialist medicine have found an ironic echo in his own healthcare business. Scott argues that socialized medicine rations care and strangles competition, yet just after his first stint as anti-reform spokesman in the 1990s, while he was running the world's largest healthcare company, he was accused of monopolizing markets and choking out the competition while slashing the chain's costs to the point that it affected patient care. And while he asserts that two of the core principles of healthcare reform are "accountability" and "personal responsibility," Scott ran a company that ultimately pleaded guilty to defrauding the government in one of the nation's largest Medicare frauds ever. Two executives went to prison, the company paid almost $2 billion in fines, and Scott was pushed out of the company. Before he could retake the political stage, he had to build his healthcare business all over again.
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POPSObama: From Savior to Leftist Windbag in Nine Months
Hugo Chavez got a big round of American-hating applause when he said “it doesn’t smell like sulfur in here anymore” in reference to President Bush whom he had previously referred to as the devil. Words are cheap and Obama used a whole lot of them to promote his socialist-light agenda to the nation last year. There might not be much in the ways of original ideas floating around in his head - just a collection of discarded Democrat lost causes from the past half century or so - Obama has convinced himself that as a man of destiny he doesn’t have to bother with trivial matters like telling the truth or keeping his word. In an effort to sell healthcare reform to the nation that it doesn’t want, Obama habitually plays fast and loose with the truth. It’s gotten to the point where he can barely speak on the subject for longer than a few minutes without someone wanting to cough up the word “liar” in the background, just like Rep. Joe Wilson did last week.
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POPSA Preventable Cause of Death: Lack of Health Insurance Dear friends, What would your reaction be if you knew that our nation's priorities directly led to the preventable deaths of nearly 45,000 Americans? I am outraged, and invite you to log onto www.peoplesvisionusa.com to find out why. Peace, Bill J.
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POPSStudies Show Employers to Raise Health Care Costs, Cut Coverage As the Washington Post reported Tuesday, the grim outlook for employer-provided health insurance is growing more dismal still: Forty percent of employers surveyed said they are likely to increase the amount their workers pay out of pocket for doctor visits. Almost as many said they are likely to raise annual deductibles and the amount workers pay for prescription drugs. Nine percent said they plan to tighten eligibility for health benefits; 8 percent said they plan to drop coverage entirely. Forty-one percent of employers said they were "somewhat" or "very" likely to increase the amount employees pay in premiums -- though that would not necessarily mean employees are paying a higher percentage of the premiums. Employers could simply be passing along the same proportional share of the overall increase that they did in 2009.
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POPSWhite America has never liked social insurance for people of color More: Meanwhile, there has been a massive expansion in government-sponsored welfare going disproportionately to the white and affluent. What the political scientist Christopher Howard calls the hidden welfare state includes the tax-favored employer-provided health insurance that most working-age Americans depend on, as well as the home mortgage interest deduction and the childcare and child tax credits. Affluent and educated workers are more likely to work for employers who provide private health benefits than are low-skilled workers and employees of small businesses. Personal tax benefits like the home mortgage interest deduction are available only to the top half of households who pay federal income taxes, and are unavailable to lower-income workers who pay payroll taxes but no income taxes. In many cases, the benefits of this tax-credit welfare state increase with income.
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POPSThe Real Issue: Who Should Control HealthCare? You Or Washington These areas are primarily marginal fixes to the current health care system and do not entail a major restructuring. Reforms where there may be common ground include: subsidizing low income American citizens and legal residents; requiring all Americans to have health care insurance; reform of medical malpractice tort system; permitting inter-state competition among health insurers; portability of insurance; and promoting healthy lifestyles. Obviously, the devil will be in the details of crafting these reforms. If the real issue of reform was to reduce the overall cost of medical care in America, the health care reform debate would center on medical malpractice tort law, promoting healthy lifestyles and dealing with the high end of life costs. Medical malpractice insurance and defensive medicine account for approximately 18 percent of health care costs. Obesity accounts for approximately 9 percent. Alcoholism and smoking account for another large percent.
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POPSThe Bad Medicine of the Republican Doctors Then there's Oklahoma Senator and unexpected Obama confidante Tom Coburn. As a Senate candidate in 2004, Dr. Coburn famously warned that "lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom." Upon his arrival in the Senate, the former obstetrician was elevated to the Judiciary Committee despite having advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions. More recently, Coburn the C Street marriage counselor to John Ensign and Mark Sanford turned Deather:
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POPSCompulsarary Insurance Won't Work and they get caught again. More fines they can’t afford, just like the insurance they couldn’t afford in the first place, and then they go to jail for failing to pay the fines. Now the government gets to provide their room and board and when they get out of jail they no longer have a job. Before long, the state legislatures start cranking out new bills and regulations aimed at coercing more people to buy insurance, forcing the insurance companies to sell insurance to people they don’t want to sell to, increasing penalties for not having insurance, and setting up multi-million dollar systems to track who has insurance and who doesn’t. Finally, the state gets into the insurance business to sell insurance to people who the insurance companies won’t or can’t afford to insure — call it a public plan to compete against greedy private insurers. .
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POPS Proctologists On Health Care Reform The Anesthesiologists thought the whole idea was a gas, and the Cardiologists didn't have the heart to say "no". In the end, the Proctologists won out, leaving the entire decision up to the assholes in Washington. Patterico's Pontifications http://patterico.com/2009/08/25/procotologists-on-obamacare/ Proctologists on ObamaCare … and other decidedly-not-serious medical views. "
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POPSGOP Must Embrace 'The Vocal Majority' A populist movement is any that champions the rights and power of the people over elites. The Left has often embraced populism when it has suited them. President Obama got elected in part by adopting a soft economic populism. He made the implausible promise to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. And he campaigned with populist red meat like: “Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it…” And the Left has often framed their fight for universal healthcare in populist terms, as a campaign for everyday Americans against elite politicians in bed with evil insurance companies.
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