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I haven't written much about health care insurance. A lot of bloggers have been covering this, including Susie, DCap, Jill, BadTux and others. Most of the progressive bloggers on my blogroll (hint, hint) have written extensively about it.
I have not, because I do not believe that health care reform will happen any time soon. Republicans are against it, because it would neither make rich people richer nor result in people getting killed. Republicans don't give a fuck about health care, anyway, they are opposing it because they think that they can cripple the Obama Presidency by defeating it. Let's be honest about this: If President Obama proposed an energy plan that would result in gasoline costing 75 cents a gallon, Republicans would oppose it as being government intrusion on the right of Big Oil to rip you off.
A number of Democrats, such as Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, are taking huge amounts of
What really disgusts me, though, are the lying motherfuckering conservatives who keep bleating about "you'll have health care rationing if the government supplies health insurance" and "you'll have a bureaucrat between you and your doctor." Anyone who has ever had any sort of health condition knows for a fact that health insurance companies ration health care. If you need a procedure, you have to get approval. If the person at the health insurance company doesn't think you need it, you don't get it paid for, and oh, by the way, that person is not a doctor or a nurse and gets paid more for denying people coverage. Or say you wake up in the middle of the night with screaming abdominal pain, your ER visit won't be paid for unless you first call the health insurance company and get approval to go.
Add to that my suspicion that there are some Democrats who think that if they let the GOP kill health care reform, now, they can use that as a club with which to beat the GOP in the elections next year. If so, those fuckers are even lower than Republicans, for they are playing politics with our lives.
I hope health care reform passes, I really do. But I fear that there are too many special interests aligned against it. If we have learned one thing about the Congress, under either political party, is that they serve the special interests and their own petty concerns. If legislation comes out of Congress that actually benefits most Americans, you can be certain that benefit was an accidental by-product of someone raping the Treasury.
So no, I am not holding my breath on this one.
Not sure where you're getting this one: "Or say you wake up in the middle of the night with screaming abdominal pain, your ER visit won't be paid for unless you first call the health insurance company and get approval to go."
ReplyDeleteI have fairly crummy health insurance (United health's PPO) and I have had a number of unplanned ER visits, the most recent one '07 ("chest pains," tunred out to be post-tramutic arrgh from a car wreck) and incuding one in an ambulance in '06after I destroyed my right knee that resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in chages, and I didn't get jacked around for not clearing them in advance. I paid my deductible and did a lot of paperwork.
Not gonna argue with you over the merits of a government-run and tax-funded health care system, about which we disagree (I am a heartless libertarian, after all; I think your bete noir, the Republicans, are too soft). However, you are overstating the nit-pickiness of private insurers.
Also, I can't afford spell-check. Doesn't Uncle Sam owe me one?
ReplyDeleteRoberta, I got that from personal experience. It was a pretty crappy health plan; the provisions were that "you can go to the ER without calling us, but only if it is a real emergency and we get to deny you if we think you were wrong." It took two calls to get that visit justified, first was "take two tums and two tylenols and call back in 90 minutes if you're not better."
ReplyDeleteAs for spell-check, that's non-existent on typewriters. :)