Why does your health insurance cost so much?
Could it have something to do with the staggering profits insurers and HMOs are making? – says Corrente , and –
“30%-35% of each dollar of your premium goes to pay for: executive salaries, administration, lobbying, marketing and other non-health care related costs.” Here.
3 in 10 postpone medical treatments because of cost
Report here.
HR 676 is the universal health care bill unlikely ever to come before Congress
It’s ‘single payer’ (the government pays), like the Canadian and European models; in fact our own military’s health system (the VA) and Medicare are also single payer models. This bill is what we want and it doesn’t stand a chance in Congress . Click here for information website.
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Keeping the pilot light on
Since the late 1970s and Ronald Reagan’s inauguration we’ve seen supply side economics, deregulation, an explosive growth of free markets, the sapping of union power.
The Left’s objective is still vague. Liberalism gets its spirit from equity, justice, and collective action. That spirit is all but broken, witness the precipitous inequalities in America, witness the virtual disappearance from our language of terms like “the common good,” witness unions at their all-time low memberships, witness the Supreme Court retreating from enforcement of anti-trust laws.
During the Bush administration, the Left’s tolerance melted into passivity. Energetic leftists of the 1960s, once in the media spotlight, grew wealthy and cautious.
Not just that. Any spirit on the left was also broken down into fractions. Watch a peace march, a good place to find leftists, and you saw a sea of different banners, for as many different causes. All of them good. But there is no center.
The left reached another crisis point. Since then, an agitated search for what’s to blame.
It’s partly the money. The left needs to find something else besides wealth. Today, everybody in America sleeps safe under a star, the idea that one day, they will be rich. Americans navigate their whole lives by that star. So commercialism dominates everything – and it has saturated even the left. Commercialism everywhere. Lefties worry about their credit score and worry about security.
Sold out.
This President has abandoned any serious atteempts at facing up to the banks. It looks like loss of nerve.
Which way to turn?
After Obama took the presidency, the first order of business was the economic collapse – undoing the money mess created by the Bush administration. Rebuilding our infrastructure. Rebuilding our schools. – But all of those had the tone of cleaning up somebody’s old wreckage. Fixing health care. Job by necessary job. But all that is not ‘forward.’
It’s partly that Liberals have lost their ‘forward.’ This is as deep a crisis as our submission to Wall Street. It is a collective loss of nerve.
There’s no fallen flag to grab up in the Liberal movement because there is no longer any flag.
Congress has no unified ‘forward.’ The American people have no unified forward. Once, we had the Occupy Movement. It suffered from lack of any forward agenda, and caved to police action. So now liberals talk about their frightening college debts or get fearful about retirement. Since we have no more effective restriction on exorbitant interest rates, they sap anybody’s courage.
The heart of the matter is that there is no new ideology.
There’s few leftist commentators, talk show liberals who churn the air like windmills.
But no coherent new theory, to unify.
Except here.
Only on this blog can you read whetherexploitation is ethical. Only here can you read about the contradiction between the American workplace – undemocratic and authoritarian – and the surrounding democracy. Read why social inequality is a killer (there’s new scientific evidence). About the long shadow of materialism. On widening corruption. Here the zero-sum concept is explained. Read how, in the long run, exorbitant greed may threaten democracyitself. A brief summary of opposing Right and Left philosophies here andhere.
Opinion is power.
But every year for the last 30 years, debate has faded; the left almost became mute. Liberals have avoided theory confrontations. Not in Congress, not at beer parties.
Every time that happened, the left’s light dimmed.
Left ideology. This blog is where we keep the pilot light on.
[Comments: click on ‘Keeping the pilot light on’ in the Header, or in Pages, below]
How the Right dominates
People are fascinated by conflict.
The Right wing is energetically shoving blame for the national economy onto the Left. One of the right’s bullies, Bill O’Reilly, dealt out his thrashings on t.v.
Right wing commentators run an ostentatious tyranny. It is the source of the public’s fascination with the Right.
The Left considers itself too nice for this bruiser style. The Left simply doesn’t have head-crushers like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. There is no Fox News on the left, and right-wing radio shows vastly outnumber left-wing. The Left thinks that being morally good, maybe showing a tolerant sense of humor, should be enough to prevail.
It is not, and the Left has no real idea how to push back. So the Left, with its natural compassion, its collective action, its trust, its usury laws, are all being put through the meat grinder.
Surviving a reactionary
One look at this man and you know you’re dead: here.
Civil war looming within the Democratic party?
The Democratic party has lost its soul. Here’s why.
If our children are being raised on Ayn Rand, we’re in trouble
– here’swhy.
Left Blog
Left Blog 
The U.S. has the best health care in the world– you just have to pay for it. The European model of (socialist) universal healthcare may look appealing, but it is far more costly, and less effecient than the American system (as hard as that may to be to believe). When the government pays for your healthcare, the government also gets to decide all the factors involved with you using it: when you want to use it (the decide), who you want to go to (they decide), etc. So if you like waiting in crowded waiting rooms for marginal health care service, be my guest. But move to France. Don’t subject the rest of us in this country to your ill-constructed ideals.
Sure, I’m all for the government taking over health care…….as long as all our polititions have to get in line and wait months to get the same crappy care the rest of us are going to get! Do you really think congress is going to give up their high quality health care benifits to participate in the managed/rationed services they are going to mandate for us? The time has come for the citizens of America to CLEAN HOUSE. ALL these morons need to be removed from office.
The United States has THE model for health care in the entire world. The United States government has no right, constitutionally, to get involved in private business (but what has stopped them so far – we must in this case), and our health care system must not be tainted with government’s idea or standards of what “they” believe our health care system should be to be “fair” to all.
Government-run health care is just ANOTHER intrusion into our private lives. Most Americans have health care, have private insurance and are perfectly happy with the way they have chosen to have THEIR choices. If the U.S. government wants to find a way to provide a system for those who are uninsured or lose their insurance due to unemployment (I believe COBRA is already there) then that is all well and good. But this government-run health care and dismantling of our great medical system is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. It makes no sense and frankly, I will not stand by and let the government run one more aspect of my life. I will pay doctors cash for my health care if I can’t keep my private insurance (which is a damned shame) and will wait for this socialistic democratic party to get out of power and the citizens will undo what they are destroying.
To those who have posted before me, I couldn’t agree more. I’m a proud Canadian but our universal health care system is not the panacea it’s too often made out to be. Waiting lists are ridiculously long. For example, I had to wait nearly a year for an MRI when it was thought that I might have a brain tumour. If I had had a tumour (thank God I didn’t) I might have died in that time. Or it may have got to the point where it was inoperable. Afterwards I learned that are more MRI machines in the city of Baltimore than there are in all of Canada. Canada’s health care system is ranked by (I think it’s) the World Health Org. as 30th in the world. America’s is ranked 33rd. Big deal.
Due to the U.S. involvement in the healthcare market is the major cause for the increased cost of medicine. The creation of Medicaid and Medicare has has a greater increase in healthcare costs. The government has promoted a greater dependence on it by the creation of these immoral organizations. Lobbying has replaced supply and demand determining the price of medical services and supplies.
The special interest groups were able to manipulate the government to redistribute the taxes received by these agencies to the purpose for which they wanted rather than the market demanded. This centralized government control lead to higher costs for the consumers.
doing away with Medicare and Medicaid will significantly reduce the cost of healthcare services and products. eliminating the FDA
Thanks for these kinds of wonderful content material.