It is about time that someone spoke for the bill. All of you nay sayer’s are probably Republicans ticked off because you didn’t get your way. President Barack Obama started out with a good bill, but then the lobbyists got hold of the Congress and had it changed. Now it is a worse then mediocre bill. It is not anyone’s fault. All those involved were hiding from the truth that what works should be left alone. They weren’t doing anything but their jobs is an untruth that caught them all. They were dictating a major bill that would have repercussions throughout the United States. I am also sure the dinners and perks provided by the lobbyists were fine. The lobbyists have no conscience. Neither does Congress. You can’t overlook the “do unto others” philosophy. How many of them have to live with the results of this bill? None. They will only turn off the phones or put on answering machines, tell their secretaries they are out to lunch and take a nap on our money. They have their own insurance coverage. Coverage they can well afford. We should protest the spending of our tax dollars on a Congress that keeps on making more and more and more and more laws. 365 days a year, for over 200 years. Then multiply that by the number of congressmen/women. With more and more and more pork. It is no wonder we have the deficit we do. Just wait until their grandparents get sick or their parents. How they will rue the day.
Love, Peace, Wisdom and Joy.

Bernie Sanders admitted on MSNBC Morning Joe that insurers had indeed won and would be laughing all the way to the bank with this reform legislation that forces all Americans to buy insurance from them under penalty of law. (I believe they have dropped “reform” from the description of this bill.) How easy it is to criminalize hard working Americans, but we can’t lay a glove on criminal corporations. Why not mandate that everyone has to buy stock from Bernie Madoff?

The only people rejoicing over this bill are politicians—the Democrats clearly overcompensating to mask their utter failure to serve their constituents unless they are paid billions of dollars to do so. Disgusting. How many of you keep getting emails from democrats trying to convince you that this is a triumphant, historic moment in our history? Am I stupid?  Lead line is always the reminder that this bill has saved 30 million people from a certain death.

The more things change, the more things stay the same, n’est-ce pas?

How disgusting; this is just like the wall-street bailout; a majority of americans, a majority of physicians and nurses support a national single-payer not-for-profit healthcare.  But the house of lords has produced a bill that is a handout to the insurance corporations that have killed people by denying coverage, and will continue to kill as they stuff their pockets with new subsidies.

You work with what you have—or you give up and walk away.  What we have is a right-wing party loaded with money but short on fairness and vision, and a leftish party with broader knowledge and sympathies but short on organizational abilities. And an awful lot of scared, uneducated people.

Any time a huge country allows itself to be dominated for 40 years by its financial manipulators and military forces, to be intimidated by terrorists to the point where it will permit its Constitution to be sabotaged by Administrative/Congressional cowardice, to engage in one endless war after another—well, such systems do not pass laws willingly that favor the health and welfare of the unwashed masses struggling to be free.

If and when that country’s majority wakes up, they are disunited and at various stages of savvy and know-how.  They require a media that is willing to live up to its vaulted responsibilities to inform all of the people of all of the facts all of the time.  That’s crucial.  But if the media are cowards and refuse their responsibility—then what?

Then it takes longer.  But deep down underneath the foundations of the country is a great strength—endurance—and a great dream—liberty and justice for all.  If we can resist the drug of fatalism (Armageddon, nuclear war, melting ice, terrorism, pandemics, endemic hatreds and fears) and build on new beginnings ... 

I, for one, cannot and will not tell my grandchildren “You are doomed!” It is unfair to them to crap out like that.

Discouraged?  Yes.  But that’s when the real work begins—up close and personal.  You, and you, and you, and me, and ... we and us and them.

We have no one to blame but ourselves, we keep putting these people in office. I never fell for the Obama charade, but people always choose to believe lies that make them feel good than go with the people who are telling them the way things really are. I see no hope for this country. Peace

The mantra from certain Obama loyalists/apologists is that this bill can and will be amended in the future to reduce or eliminate altogether its onerous shortcomings.  Only if the Republicans and Democrats are banished electorally from the government would there be a chance of that happening.  The bill will most certainly be amended in the future.  Any changes, however, will make things worse.  Your insurance will cost more, deductibles will rise and your coverage will be reduced. And when that happens, the people of this country will, as they have for the many decades of The Big Rip-Off, not make a peep.

Nice post TAO, I agree wholeheartedly.  This is really a shame and a travesty of a bill. The United States is a snake eating its own tail, and its almost to the head.  What will happen after we completely swallow ourselves in our self feeding greed is anyone’s guess.

Whatever it was the U.S. Senate “passed” today, it had nothing at all really to do with actual Human HEALTH….or with CARE-ing for it, either.  It ought to put-paid once-and-for-all, though, to that common allamerican CONceit which holds that “health” is something upon which no “price-tag” can be put.  “Health,” like pretty much everything else with any possibility at all of being quantified (which is pretty much everything left in the shrinking virtual world-o’-hurt in which the domesticated peoples slog-out their diminishing half-lives), is now officially designated as one more “commodity” to be “bundled” and traded and speculated-on in “the market,” which itself has effectively displaced just about every other “venue” for respectable Human intercourse of any kind.

Senator Reid’s hollow triumphalism inadvertently (perhaps?) exposes the utter bankruptcy of a terminal-stage “zero sum” dominance paradigm now stripped of even its last vestiges of any presumed “standards” not readily reducible to nothing but dollars-and-cents.  His fear-mongering GOP “colleagues” only CONcur with that judgment, even while they pretend loudly to dissent from it. 

Looks like all theamericanpeople get for Xmas is yet another special-interest-engineered and politically wired-up booby-trap set to explode only when its perpetraitors believe themselves safely away from the blast zone….and the damned fools’ve set the damned things everywhere.  No wonder “armageddon” is looking like such an attractive “option” to so many true believers here in these latter days.

Duck-and-cover, everyone!

Hokahey!

“KA” is a total moron, this bill means more people will die, it is a boon to the
insurance companies, and by focusing on criticism coming from the right,
Truthdig is sending the wrong message. There is no reform in this bill, absolutely
nothing, the left in this country should be furious, but they are too inept.

this graphic says it all!

http://blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876674340970c-800wi

http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.html

this says it all…

http://blogs.ngm.com/.a/6a00e0098226918833012876674340970c-800wi

http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.html