Chances of health compromise continue to fade

HOPE BLOSSOMS that the Obama, Reid, and Pelosi takeover of the American health care system and the OBAMA, REID, and PELOSI elimination of freedom, liberty, and wealth of generations to come WILL FAIL!!! Praise the Lord and God bless America and the US Constitution.

Yawn. It's over. We won.

DonkeyRidder

"Praise the Lord and God bless America and the US Constitution"?!? Really?!? If opponents of health care are ready to declare victory in the battle for health care, then they should know they've won a pyrrhic victory. (Remember King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who famously said "Another such victory and I shall be ruined?")

Read the following from the Executive Summary from the Commonwealth's annual 2008 edition of its "National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance," which you'll find here.

[T]he U.S. health system is on the wrong track. Overall, performance has not improved since the first National Scorecard was issued in 2006. Of greatest concern, access to health care has significantly declined. As of 2007, more than 75 million adults—42 percent of all adults ages 19 to 64—were either uninsured during the year or underinsured, up from 35 percent in 2003. At the same time, the U.S. failed to keep pace with gains in health outcomes achieved by the leading countries. The U.S. now ranks last out of 19 countries on a measure of mortality amenable to medical care, falling from 15th as other countries raised the bar on performance. Up to 101,000 fewer people would die prematurely if the U.S. could achieve leading, benchmark country rates.

You think that fighting for a status quo in which 75 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, and upwards of 100,000 Americans die prematurely is patriotic? And achieving that abysmal result while spending more than other industrialized nations is a positive for the wealth of this nation? Please. Spare me the sanctimony. You are fighting for your own self-interest, since clearly you are concerned that under health care reform you'll be paying more, or that your own access to health care will be diminished. Whatever. Just please don't try to cast your willingness to throw 75 million of your fellow countrymen overboard as patriotic.

Why Not Make the Doctors and Insurance Companies Bid for the health care policies and premiums from Insuree Groups by state Insurance policy Holders every year , this plan would Include all citizens , and the winning bids would then be paid for by the people being covered under their group policy . Foreign citizens would have to apply for a state plan which they would pay for when the enter the country for their period of time they would stay in the country . People Immigrating too the USA would be in country paid for by taxpayers until , this way the states and feds would be encouraged to make a citizen legal ASAP to save the tax burden .

By Law Under the Freedom in Contracting Act of 1984 if the Government has any involvement in issuing and regulating contracts or any type of involvement for monetary gains by the private sector , the process has to be put out for bid by Industry to be fair and free from Bias , and , have tort reform , interstate access and portability , with the choice of Bidding by Doctors and Insurance companies for health care policies from all Groups of Insurance policy Holders within a state pool and these pools be made up of all the people in the state , this would allow for all people to be averaged and included in the Bid of the state health care needs , and would create a competition the industry has never seen before .

You know we make Industry Bid on everything in Contract work , so why don’t we make the health care insurance a Bid for policy premiums ever year an annual event for the American Insurance Policy premium ??????? Take about Free market Competition solutions !!!!!! Doctors and Insurance companies should have to Bid for Patient care Insurance policies ever year , so that their costs and general accounting can be set for a year at a time . This would give greater competition to the system .

I really think that this Bid idea on Groups of policies , that were allowed across state lines would really work to bring in all who would want health care , and push a quality factor that would drive innovative solutions from the innovation creative process that would lower overall costs but maintain quality , and the Bid by such a Organization would be made based off their ability to show their innovations competitiveness reaching the goals of quality and cost cutting measures . If the different categories of health care were divided up and bid on based on their specific averaged costs that are based off the history of costs that these areas of care show on the record , then a better competitive process would evolve and allow more doctors and their staff to take challenges on and compete for the care of a patients needs .

The Bids would be made every year , for the patient policies , and the patient policies and group policy plans if accessible across state lines , would give greater competition to the way the Bids would be placed by the doctors and insurance companies on their care areas and the Bids would be subject too Federal assurance of Interstate Cost Averages of competition Bids across the USA , that would allow the price for premiums to be grouped and averaged so that uninsured people could have a shot at getting into the plan every year at bid time . I think this would work to include all that want a health care plan , if the the Bid for health care premiums were a part of this health care process . I believe that establishing Premium costs should be done with the Bid Process , and it include everyone . The portability and competition across state lines to establish even cost parameters for the various health conditions , along with tort reform , will bring stability to the escalation of costs .

Some way we need to encourage healthy living principles for people to consider all the time , while carrying out their day to day routines , and create an incentive process , like that would give discounts to the individual , as their care record would reflect lower costs overall , to the industry . But the Bid process is the way we handle all other forms of Contract business in the Country , so we should be considering this industry and ways we can incorporate the process of Bidding for Health care Premiums , so the costs can be managed for affordability and Quality .

Please take the Bid idea and rework it to make better sense if you wish because its by concept only a ” Proto Type ” , but something that could restructure the industry to where the Consolidation of the wealth generated for the Quality of care , which is inflating faster than economic growth can sustain this growth , is like how all segments in our economic is not working , because of the large consolidations in distribution of societies durable needs , which was the sole purpose of the FTC , was to keep markets from becoming consolidated by the Corporate sector , but instead since the bringing of the WTO free Trade agreement , the Multi-National Corporate Machine has been consolidating the market sectors distribution , and the wealth with it , and today we see the results , thats then in turn altered the way Infrastructure support and sustainability is past through to state and local communities , effecting schools and retirements bond accounts etc etc etc .

I believe the Change of Tariff Law back in 1994-95 was the brining of this demise we see today , and the Giant Sucking Sound Ross Perot talked about in the 1992 Presidential Campaign , http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011231/greider , has come home to roost , and its not just the USA its every country that cannot compete with the way that Asian Countries manipulate their currencies lower than the Trade partners that are Higher , which is a direct example of " Gresham's Law of the 14 th Century , http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Gresham%27s-law , which you should argue with economic gurus that , without a counter balancing measure to deal with different valued currencies like how tariff law revalues a product par to the post of calls currency value , so the currency is not undermined of its value , and defeats its support of its working peoples ability to be competitive , " When 2 different valued currencies trade in the same markets , the Lower valued currency will drive the higher down and out of circulation " , so by what is said in that valuing currencies in terms of Commodity values , the currencies of China and the USA should be way closer in value than they have been over the past 15 years of WTO trade , because Commodities are traded in par valued international markets .

So to consider that before we had the WTO trade agreement of 1994-5 , we had Balanced Trade deficits and a sound dollar , and a healthy Manufacturing base in the USA , the very support structure for wealth creation , that then feeds the secondary markets and infrastructures , a debate on how we can use a Bid Concept for all forms of Imported goods , like if we take the effective cost of what it would cost to manufacture a product in a given nation , and the price of raw materials is based off the international Commodities price indexes , so that the vale to produce in one country is equal to or is reflective in what kinds of trade agreements can be made to keep all trade nations currencies sound should be the way in which a price for a product should be arrived at , as well as our domestic needs should be the new economy fundamental we seek in our Country , to go with this health care renovation .

Maybe the re-establishment of the old Bretton Woods would be a direction all International trade partners could debate as a direction of Re structure , http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Bretton-Woods-Conference .

The Bid process keeps the structure more equal in opportunity , by the Quality being offered up for the right to do the service , instead of the way it works today , where you are only offered a service for a price with no way to compare the quality for the costs . Regulations of Standard is where the Government needs to be involved in the process , not be the Chief , Cook , and Bottle washer , all rolled into one . If we want sustainable results for our infrastructures , like health care , and the roads to get to the clinics and hospitals on , then we have to fix the process of what Values our Efforts to sustain life , liberty , and the pursuits of happiness , and that starts with a trade Policy that is a Fair Value of arriving at a cost of effort , thats been missing , for the past 15 years .

The same Multi-National Corporate Importers that favor this trade policy are the same ones that have consolidated the wealth of the retail sector by the benefit of taking advantage of this simple currency exchange rate as the primary profiting tool , wiping out over the years the mom and pop retail sector , and with the equality of wealth redistribution , we had before this trade policy , and if you look up the donor lists of these Corporate interests , they are very supportive of the ones in Government that keep this devaluing trade policy in place .

The Bidding of Commodities , that takes place every trading day on the floors of exchange floors , is not being fairly reflected in the trade currencies that is what is made up in the goods and services in today's trade of goods and services , like the reason for a company relocating a products manufacturing based off a simple exchange rate in a nations currency , because one is lower valued than another , this is a direct assault to the integrity of all currencies , when the commodities that these currencies buy are par value . , there is no way a Quality can arise from this type of trade , only consolidation of wealth that then leads to International conflict . So we need a healthy debate one this as well as the health care debate . Thanks for your time and have a Great day in the USA .

Donkey

Yes, my gran's perforated ulcer was her fault, even though she had been to the doctor twice that week. My mom's lump on her breast was her fault for not seeking a second opinion when the doctor sent her home and told her not to worry about it. My dad's blown esophogus must have been his fault. The doctor who told me to terminate my child at five months, must have been my fault. Thank goodness I rarely listen to the quacks who call themselves MD's, my child is thirteen now.

When you walk into a chidlren's hospital, I can't see how it is the fault of these kids who get all manner of terminal illnesses. Never mind the millions of adults that can't AFFORD to seek care and so may die prematurely because there is NO preventative care.

Then it will get done without the repubs and when it works and ALL the outright lies are shown over and over during the next several campaigns the repubs will be finished. The commercials will start with the repubs saying healthcare would be the dems waterloo.

repubs are the fakest christians on the planet.

Norman Mattoon Thomas
(November 20 1884 - December 19 1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.

The Socialist Party candidate for President of the US, Norman Thomas, said this in a 1944 speech:

'The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism'they will adpot every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.' He went on to say: 'I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party.
The Democrat Party has adopted our platform.

Good Riddance to the Republicans. They've been nothing but total obstructionists on healthcare reform anyway - because they work for the insurance companies.

As much as I favor health care reform, I realize we can't afford it. The national debt is now over ten trillion dollars and as I look around, I can't begin to understand what we spent it all on. Then it occurred to me that maybe we're not getting the biggest bang for our buck. Maybe our priorities are all screwed up. I thought about health care. Why are we spending so much money on a bunch of old folks, myself included, when we're sick all of the time anyway and we never know if we're going to see the sun rise again.

After all, it is the young people who really need the help. They're starting families and raising kids, which creates a lot of expensive medical bills between pregnancies and childhood diseases, inoculations, and healthy child care. Plus, they're just beginning their lives when money is really tight and they have all of the other expenses of furnishing a home. Moreover, considering that they represent the future of America and that they need to be kept healthy and productive, wouldn't it make more sense to cover young people with medicare than me and my old cronies. Hell, if you're my age and you still can't afford to pay for your own health care, and I can't, then you probably don't deserve it. Since we can't afford to insure everyone and we have to ration health care, give it to those can do the most for their country. So what do we do with all of the old people? Two words - Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why should America risk the lives of strong healthy young people in war when we have so many of us old folks who are great at sitting around and doing nothing? We can drive, we can shoot, we can cruise around and get ourselves blown up just as well as the young kids. And what do we lose? Maybe 10-15 years of our lives, living in the pain and agony of our aging disease ravaged bodies. If I get killed my kids might shed a tear and say, "well at least he led a good full life, but it was his time to go." At least we'll have one last chance to die with honor. Just think about how much it will benefit Social Security. Dig out your khakis boys and girls, we're going to war and we're gonna show those terrorists that we mean business. I've got dibs on Osama.

/sarcasm

This charade, used by the obstructionists, is not about heath care. It is the same old scorched earth tactic used against President Clinton to regain control of Congress. There nothing the obstructionist will agree on. Their negotiations are nothing but a cynical ploy to stall, until they can inflect a major defeat upon the Obama administration. After heath care is past, they will focus on another issue, to try to get traction for their obstructionist agenda.

You know, changing Healthcare was always Hillary's dream. Why did Obama make her Secretary of State so she can't help? Or, again, why can't she help? I hope the Democrats don't just win this because they can.

Why can't they just do this a little at a time? Why is understanding this so hard? Why is the document 1000 pages long? This is scary. How many people are going to die because of this mess?

Rest assured if we can't get help from those who have retired or are nearing retirement on this bill, there will be enough people who have given up completely on benefiting from such programs that we will stop paying taxes for medicare and social security and bring an end to these programs in an effort to save that money for ourselves. Those who have paid into these prgrams will receive a check for the exact amount they have paid in to invest as they like without another dime of help from those who have no hope of retiring or paying off our governments debt or receiving security in our medical care because these people didn't pay enough in taxes to cover their bills. How can the government's debt be thrown in our faces? Does that debt not belong to those who are getting close to retirement? Surely there should be enough money, enough jobs, enough medical care to cover young hard working parents in this country. Do those retiring care more about how their life's will end or how their children's lives will play out? Why not take a little less in order to make sure the next generation and there children aren't left with nothing? What will it really hurt to make a few cuts in Medicare? Was it not a good life while it was good? Shouldn't it stay that way for the next generation or is that all gone with those few who will get into these programs before they run out of funding?

It was actually war that caused most of our debt. And whether we agreed with those wars or not we have to pay for them. The debt of WW2 was so great many countries became so poor from their debt they wanted to give up the gold standard. They saw the American economy as a secure investment and they started using the dollar as a resource to back up their money in place of gold. We then decided our economy was as reliable a resource as gold and we got rid of the gold standard and we started printing money without anything to back it up other than the wealth of our country. President Herbert Hoover's said in 1933, "We have gold because we cannot trust governments." The Bretton Woods agreement that ended in 1971 was the last time we had anything of true value backing up the dollar.True value of our money comes in the form of resources like oil, and gold, and other goods that are in high demand outside of our country.

Now that we are without these resources, without anything that they want to buy, the table has turned and other countries no longer see any value behind our currency. Rather than a seller, China has sought to turn us into a purchaser, a country with no resources of their own. A country who must depend on others to survive. While there is nothing wrong with fair trade, China did not trade fairly with us. They would not help us with the Iraq war yet they are now buying up Iraq oil, a resource we could have used to back up our money. They refuse to sell us the resources we need to make American products like steel and ingredients to make rubber and the list goes on and on. They swore they would raise the value of their currency yet they never did. They insist we not tax their products yet they tax ours to high heaven. These deals have put us in such great debt to them that we actually have to borrow money from them just so that we can make our payments to them, if that makes any sense. We are left in a sitution where it seems we now feel we need to kiss the boots of this communist country who essentially owns us. Now they are getting together with other countries to decide how to dumb the dollar once and for all.
http://www.russellmeansfreedom.com/2009/china-russia-india-meet-to-dump-the-dollar/

China, Russia, India meet to dump the Dollar.

Chris Hedges speaks of a meeting between the largest and most populous countries on the planet, as they seek to organize and consolidate interests by dumping the U.S. Dollar and collecting on the U.S. Debt. The fact that the United States was not invited to the meeting, despite their expressed interest in attending, shows just how late in the game things have progressed.

The following first appeared on Truthdig.org:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090614_the_american_empire_is_bankrupt/
Posted on Jun 14, 2009

By Chris Hedges

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.

“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”

The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism … there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.