Garth, Grayson was referring to the other end of the Republican health plan when he talked about “die soon.” Which is happening now anyway with an average 271 people dying every day from lack of proper or timely health care in our corporate system.

Who needs the unnecessary drama of “death panels” when it is being done at the cost level? Accountants between your life and death. What a country!

Sounds as if Medicare Advantage is treated like the ‘large group’ private plans (and for the same reason).  If so, then 85% of every dollar taken in will be required to be paid out (modulo the shenanigans the insurer will attempt to pull to make internal payout look like external payout).

The legislators claim this is a victory, because it limits the percentage of insurer overhead.  However, it also eliminates any incentive for insurers to negotiate lower provider prices (as they do now), because every additional dollar they pay providers means another 20 or 25 cents that they can keep for themselves.

The CBO estimated that premium prices would be no lower under the new bill than they would have been without it, but that coverage would be a bit better.  Just how much they allowed for price increases to reflect that improved coverage is not clear, and prices may be worse than they estimated.

Some people will get better coverage than they could have, others will still be unable to afford treatment (even if they can afford minimal policies, the deductibles may make actually using them unaffordable), 20+ million will STILL be uncovered by the end of the decade, and it’s hardly clear that the program will last that long given how much it may cost.  But the insurers will continue making money hand over fist, which was the primary motivation for passing it rather than actually reforming the process.

I was talking about Medicare Advantage.  That’s the part of Medicare that was left for the insurance companies.

In “Medicare and the New Health Care Law—What it Means for You” it states the following:

“Beginning in 2014, the new law protects Medicare Advantage members by taking strong steps to ensure that at least 85% of every dollar these plans receive is spent on health care, rather than administrative costs and insurance company profits.”

I’d say that means the insurance companies can raise rates to the extent that they can get away with.  And when it talks about “every dollar these plans receive” sounds like they’re talking specifically about the Federal money, not the premiums paid by the elderly.

We’re right back where we started only worse off because of the insanity that is still coming from the Republicans and Tea Partiers about tort reform and more free market capitalism. 

I met some who might be here illegally and they love the law and love Obama.  I wish them well and I’m happy that their children can now get coverage.  What bugs me is the propanda that we’re supposed to embrace about this right-wing mythology about free market capitalism.  If you stop and think about it from the point of accepting the nonsense as truth, you come to realize this is a form of torture, where one deprived of the truth and is driven crazy by the preponderance of lies.

Premiums will rise. Health care quality will remain about the same, except for a few mailers that will be sent out by “your” physician, which, by the way, I have received notice that the insurance company has re-aligned its levels of service, unilaterally.

I got sick a few months ago and called “my” Dr.  He was on vacation.  If I went in to to see his associate, I would’ve had to pay for the whole thing out of pocket.  I barely have a pocket, so I decided to ride it out for a week.

So as they say in the news biz, “That’s entertainment.”

garth (re:  the rest of your post):

You don’t seem to have been paying much attention to the details of this issue.  Private insurers (not ‘Medicare’) will (by 2014, IIRC) be required to pay out 85% of their premiums from large-group policies and 80% of their small-group and individual premiums (to the degree that they fail to mask their internal overheads as payouts).  This is around the same amount that they were paying out in 2008 (though it’s entirely believable that decades ago they were paying out 90%, since private European insurers routinely pay out over 90% and Medicare pays out about 95%), though they took advantage of the ‘reform’ brouhaha to increase profits recently.  I.e., the bill legislates pretty much the 2008 status quo in terms of per-policy profit, and they get 30+ million more customers to help sweeten the deal.

garth -

Again, if you were paying closer attention you’d have found that while Potter did advocate passage of the bill as an apparently necessary step (given that the alternative seemed to be continuing the status quo indefinitely) this was the ONLY reason he supported it and he did so only after passage of anything better was no longer a possibility.  While I don’t happen to agree with that position (I think that no bill at all would have kept pressure on for something better), it’s an entirely reasonable position to take.

Are you one of those people who likes to change the argument after your initial premise has been proven false?

Just goes to show:  Wendell Potter’s a one trick pony that they’ll no doubt drag him out again to the center ring the next time single payer comes up.

Days before the final passage of the bill, Potter was on several shows and said the reform bill was a good bill.  So I think they decided to keep him around and have him do speeches and have a ghostwriter write a book, which they will buy by the boxload, and when the issue comes up again, voila.

I just saw a mailer about Medicare.  It said that 85 percent of the paid premiums will go to medical service, 15 percent goes to the insurance company. Potter said in one interview that the insurance companies started out getting 10 percent.
The son of former Senator Goldwater said on some cable show that if they want to improve insurance coverage, they should lower the amount that goes to service to 65 percent and reward the insurance companies with thirty five percent.  That’s the direction for change in the health insurance business.

Days before the final passage of the bill, Potter was on several shows and said the bill a good bill.  So I think they keep these guys employed with speeches and books unless and until the issue comes up again.
The act works like a charm.  Americans seem to like to be agitated.

I still think Alan Grayson’s ideas were the best.  One was a Medicare buy-in, the other was, in case any single payer effort fails, die quickly.

garth -

You’d know where Wendell Potter is now if you were involved with Progressive Democrats for America or Democracy for America (and probably other progressive organizations as well):  he’s still speaking out for implementation of single-payer health care.  A quick search of PDA (DFA isn’t as easily searchable) came up with 3 appearances at their events since passage of the bogus ‘reform’ bill (and the search was far from exhaustive).

But my question remains.  Where is Wendell Potter now?

That is simply the ploy.  Get a believable source, a whistleblower, for example, like Wendell Potter, to start out in the opposite camp, the single payer believers, the ones who are “schtruggling” as Bernie Sanders would say, and then move the argument back to the staus quo, and when the bill goes through, say that well this is it.  It’s the best we can do ... for now.

Well, the time is now.  It’s all over for the Obama cake walk.  We’ve got a lot to fight about and we’ve got a lot to fight for.

Half-assed solutions that turn around and reward white-collar criminals is not even moving the ball forward.

A note in passing.  Netanyahu began his spiel about the Israeli Piracy with a remark of once again Israel is defending itself against hypocrisy.  Imagine if our beloved clown said that after he invaded Iraq and Afghanistan?  Makes absolutely no sense.

Soon, crying wolf and pointing the finger will confront a deaf ear. 

As George C. Scott said in Patton, “Americans love the sting of battle.”

The misdirection of emotions a la social scientists need only backfire once. The kindling is set.

That’s why Obama met with Admiral Thad Allen in Nebraska over the Memorial Day weekend.

I wonder what Wendell Potter, the Pied Piper of Obama’s health care surge, thinks about d’em apples? Garth

You do know that Wendell Potter had been critical of the business friendly actions of the Congress and the president don’t you? He had been inside the belly of the beast until he saw the truth and it appalled him. No Pied Piper he.

News item from Massachusetts:

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, the state’s biggest health insurer, is requesting increases averaging 12 percent. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is requesting increases ranging from about 9 percent to nearly 12 percent.

Now, we are right back to where we started—unaffordable premium rates. 

An interesting note is that Charlie Baker the Republican candidate for Governor of MA was the CEO of Harvard Pilgrim.  As a CEO and a graduate of Harvard Business School, he’d look out over the working class and say, “You know something, Chauncey?  We might not have to insure those people after all.”

Three-buck Barack, or Boom-box Obama, along with the conservative right and the neo liberal left, are hell bent on bringing the running dogs of an equitable democratic government to heel.

I wonder what Wendell Potter, the Pied Piper of Obama’s health care surge, thinks about d’em apples?

By Seriously Now..., May 30 at 12:16 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)

All Obama had to do was fulfill one campaign promise, just one… not just pretend like the health care bill.

He did fulfill one campaign promise, we are now concentrating our money and military forces in Afghanistan to take care of stuff of 2001 in 2010!

John Ellis what FDR did benefited both the working man and woman but the corporations and their elites who own them with the New Deal. Without him we would never have had a Middle Class which saw its best times from 1945-1980 then it has been disappearing ever since as the oligarchs, the top 10% that own 75% of the USA (alone) plus much more world wide, make their move to destroy the middle class to return to those halcyon times of 1920 or even 1880. (At least in the legal and work realm.)

“Jonathan Alter: Health Care Puts Obama in FDR’s League”

Frankly, I was stunned to see this headline on truthdig! IMHO sycophants such as Alter have no place on this site.

This was the first truthdig! podcast I have listened to. If it is representative of the quality of all truthdig! podcasts, I don’t have to worry about missing anything. Not much digging for truth going on there.

Bill Clinton ‘reformed’ Welfare.

Barrack Obama ‘reformed’ Health Care.

What more do you need before you realize the Democrats are as useless as the tits on a Boar-Hog. They’re kind of like the balls on a Jack Ass. Now, if your sole interest is generating lots of noise, [the jack-ass], while destroying the environment [the boar-hog]...

Both major Political Parties do those things quite well. Bull elephants fit the metaphor too. Lots of noise, and even more destruction of fragile environments, with those big feet. Not that I have anything against either, or any, of these animals. But, they are better off on their own turf, rather than mucking up the lives of millions who just want to feed their kids.

@John Ellis, May 29 at 6:23 pm

Yes, but that’s where Codex Alimentarius, Monsanto, and both Sen. Russ
Feingold and Rep Rosa DeLauro come into the picture (not meaning to leave
out Durban, McCain, or that whiny-ass Liebermann).

It seems all this “legislation” to keep us safe has done nothing more than
support a system to take over the food and water supplies. Commercial
agriculture depletes the soil profile and creates plants with compromised
immune systems. Since we evolved relying on nutrient dense fruits and
vegetables, our population has become progressively more immune
compromised ........ but they know all that; that’s why they continue as they
have.

DeLauro sponsors a “food safety bill” addressing, and I quote, “the known
hazards of recreational and subsistence gardening”, and Feingold sought to
turn every farm-based agricultural watering hole into federal property. Couple
that stupidity/cunning with NAFTA/CAFTA and Codex and what you have is
what the representatives of I.G. Farben admitted they had forgotten to do at Nuremberg, and that was to control the food supply.

So, in short, in frog-boil fashion, there won’t be any farming outside of
corporate farming because hardly anyone will be left who owns there own land
and it will be illegal to farm on land that isn’t your own. The story will go
something like that.

It is the fast carbs, not fat, that puts on the fat-pounds in the body. It is the slow to absorb carbs that allow the body to metabolize them instead of hurridly storing them as fat because they can’t be used all at once. That along with the body’s craving for fat, salt and sugar as the conveyer for over eating also plays into it. Large plates, large amounts of food encourage it as well. Then Big Pharma creates drugs to control eating and fat production instead of having healthy diets. Fast food and overly manufactured food also does us in—-that is Free Enterprise at work.

Obama speaks like FDR but acts more like Hoover such is the cycle of internal sabotage of our Republic continues. The end product? The Republic falls and the empire will rise from its ruins. From what is overseas will become law here. If you think things are bad now it will get worse.

Well, I confess, I smelled a rat in politics a while ago and voted for Perot. Bush
the Elder went on to make his “New World Order possibilities” bullshit speech,
condescendingly smiling to try to convince the masses that his NAFTA/CAFTA
plan would be good for us. It was all BS and mirrors.

What Bush couldn’t accomplish, that freak show Clinton obligingly completed,
PLUS Clinton then tested the public waters on the wire tapping issue so that
Bush the Lesser could complete the deal, but not before Clinton renegotiated
the US/Paraguayan extradition treaty, where Bush the Loser would then buy up
99,980 acres, thus managing to infuriate a whole bunch of people down there.
(see La Prenza)

It just doesn’t stop. This crowd of traitors has been sabotaging our economy
for going on three decades now. Obama isn’t calling the shots. He never was,
but just imagine if he made a TV speech one day and started naming names. I
think there’d be a lot of Americans who would be willing to change their tune
about him ..... well, at least a little bit, anyway.

The Obama administration is more a tribute to the Bush family.  Consider this:

In 2000 Gore won the election and Bush became President.

In 2004, Kerry won the eletion and Bush became President.

Then in 2008, Obama won the election, and Bush became President, despite the fact that he wasn’t running.

Obama is more like James Buchanan than he’s like FDR.

It’s amazing what the Obama apologists come up with.
Some say he’s a chess master, or an Aikido expert, or a real cool operator. 
Listen to his answers to questions in the nationally televised press conference, his first in about 9 or 10 months, and it becomes painfully obvious that he’s in over his head.

He handed 30 million Americans over to the mercy of the health insurance and drug companies.  The CA insurance company pulled back on a 39 percent rate increase because they said they made a mistake in calculations.  Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?
You mean to tell me that CA insurance holders would be paying 39 % more on premiums, if it weren’t for the stink that arose.
But wait.  Next year, they’ll be asking for another rate increase.  Any fight against it won’t be covered in the news and, therefore, it doesn’t exist.

911truthdoctorg:
Obomba has 2 choices to “save” the Empire’s bankrupt finances. 
Eliminate Social Security or cut war spending in half.
Now class, do any of you remember just what happened to the last
president who got the crazy idea to cut war spending?
Stumped?  OK.  Here’s a hint.
Pink mist—-Dallas.

That is not off topic in the least little bit!!!!

Slightly off topic, but in the same vein….

Obushbama is scum.

Obama’s Crazy Plan To Cut Social Security

Is Obama’s new “debt commission” about to savage Social Security for no reason? Sure looks like it.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/146970/obama’s_crazy_plan_to_cut_social_security/

They saw that health care was coming, just like they knew a conservative could not get elected president after Bush.

So they gave us a faux, health care reform bill, to stand in the way of real reform, by a faux president.

But it’s getting harder to sell, because people aren’t buying it anymore, they’ve been swindled one too many times.

Thanks to so many here (I only read about half-way down the first page of comments - the unanimity of opinion was inspiring) for saying all the things I would have said had I taken the time to do so.

Alter is an establishment shill, pure and simple.  Was back in 2003 when he helped derail Dean’s candidacy for Bush-Lite Kerry (thus eventually losing the presidency altogether), still is today defending the indefensible.

I agree:  what the hell’s he doing on TruthDig?

“Barack Obama is now a certified Nobel War Criminal, Corporate Lackey, who is doing everything he can to hasten the disintegration of The Empire.  If Mr. Alter thinks that the moronic health reform had something to do with “care”, he is as
stupid as he is delusional.  Pieces like this crap do not serve the goals of Truthdig-
—Robert.”

I agree except for one significant change. Replace the word “Empire” with “Republic because we haven’t had an empire yet. just a Republic/Empire kluge which can’t stand. One or both will fall. Which?

Alter‘s assertion of Obama as up there with FDR is laughable.  We are seeing just a continuation, unbroken of a growing regime of crypto-fascists since Reagan that has been eating the republic from the inside out and it still goes on. The wound has been staunched, new blood put in but hasn’t been sewn up to heal, nor the bullet removed. It could still bleed out. We are in a slow code blue with a chance of sudden death. We are still in the ICU, don’t forget that.

I am disappointed that the interviewer didn’t press him on more of the items we see as not so good. Like the Health care support bill for corporations that will make things worse for most of us. War goes on and is expanding as is the 57% of our GDP going to it. The continuing merging of corporation/fundamentalist Christian/state is a danger to us all. Just a few things he continues for his masters, the same ones as GWB is.

Putting Obama in the league with FDR and Johnson, both of whom passed legislation that truly altered America is ludicrous on his face.  Obama’s health industry reform is a sellout to the corporations, and on many other issues Obama has shown himself as being a privatizing corporatist.  He is Clinton to the second power when it comes to selling out the American people.

Truthdig, there are many respondents here whose writing talents and
knowledge base far outweigh the caliber and slant this idiot, Alter. You be
better off encouraging input from the outside. This garbage is, well, garbage.

Secondly, I noticed the size of the crowd waiting for Obama outside the plane
exit photo, above. Which group of people is his waving intending for, those
who see only the photos and assume there are crowds of immigrants and
welfare recipients who still think they’ll be be able to hang on under “Hope and
Change”?

By the time Obama gets done with this country, we should hope we do have
some change, ..... in our pockets. You know, all this interloper Obama had to
do was follow through with his campaign promises and he could have been
known as one of the most popular and loved presidents in history. Instead, he
has only shown us how political integrity can reach yet another all time low.

Think of all the trees that are being chopped down to print this drivel!

“Just by getting health care through ... [Barack Obama is] now standing alone with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in terms of domestic achievement.”

It is impossible to comprehend the corruption and stupidity of the MSM.

Regarding the complicity of the press.
  What I caught of Obama’s press conference earlier, seemed like they were smelling blood in the water.
And that sappy line about how he thought about the disaster every night (after the fundraising cocktail party at the the Getty’s), and how his daughter was asking him every morning: “Daddy, did you fill the hole yet?”, was as bad as Nixon’s “Checker’s speech”.

Jonathan Alter is a joker.  Americans are not forced to buy Social Security or Medicare that is overpriced by private insurance companies.

Truth Dig…. I promise this time to control myself from
now on…..

but it is crap like this that makes my fingers do all
those multible posts and get called all sorts pseudo

Not one person got covered, you understand !!!!!

Even the 16 million that were supposed to get covered
immediatly was a lie and a myth.
A give away of public money with no returns to the public
at least FDRs programs came back to the public in some
form/

Truthdig.  Please…no more Jonathan Alter.  Barack Obama and FDR???  OMG!!

Barack Obama is now a certified Nobel War Criminal, Corporate Lackey, who is doing everything he can to hasten the disintegration of The Empire.  If Mr. Alter thinks that the moronic health reform had something to do with “care”, he is as
stupid as he is delusional.  Pieces like this crap do not serve the goals of Truthdig-
—Robert.

At a time when Obama’s numbers are on the verge of an unprecedented slide, this dude spins furiously to sell his book.

He actually laughed off Obama’s cracks about predator drones as something to joke about.

Vote Green.  There is no other option.

I can only think of two reasons for the health care bill lacking a public option: Obama is either way too willing to compromise with the right, or a complete cynic who never had any intention of giving us a public option and merely used the threat of it as a bargaining chip.

A domestic achievement of fakey do bullshit.

Dear Democrats:

Forget Alter and the rest of the spokestools just for a second.

Would you have supported a “Health Insurance Reform” bill that mandated every citizen buy insurance from for profit companies, without a public option, if it was proposed by a Republican? By Bush or McCain?

Really?

Come on now, no one is looking. You can be honest.

Hope you’re proud.

I’m not the only one for which this was the last straw. I’ll never support a Democrat again. Laugh until the end of October if you will. Har de Har Har. And I won’t be supporting any “Republicans” that don’t take the Constitution seriously either.

And I am Not Alone.

Alter is just repeating weak Limousine Liberal crap. If we want to advance we better stop licking the boots of power and daydreaming to corporate propaganda.