[Strangelet]

This is no cause for celebration. This is a farce. The only thing it illustrates is how fractured and corrupt the legislative branch is, not how modern and enlightened its become. I'm actually glad Lieberman will be fillibustering it.

How did we get to this pile of pork and nonsense from a system so simple on paper that it could be used as one of Obama's campaign promises?

1. Inject into the debate the Baucus bill. Max Baucus is nothing less than a health insurance sock puppet and the bill is actually itself worded and written and approved by the lobby. But the media slant is just that the baucus bill is merely "more conservative" than the public option, because he's a "blue dog"

AMY GOODMAN: Congress member Grijalva, I also want to ask you about Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus and his close ties to the healthcare industry. [...]
REP. RAUL GRIJALVA: I think the product that has come out from his committee and himself, I really believe that it has no legitimacy in this debate. It’s an insider product. It’s there to protect the industry. It is not there to try to look for that middle ground. He is key in holding up deliberations, has been key in trying to work on a consensus, but everything you see in his legislation had to be approved by the industry before it became part of the plan. So I don’t think it’s legitimate.
[...] I consider Senator Baucus’s proposal to be essentially an insider trader move to protect an industry and really doesn’t have validity at all, both political validity or content validity.

AMY GOODMAN: [...] Yesterday, the White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Baucus had distributed his healthcare plan to lobbyists on K Street prior to sharing the plan with other members of the committee.
Meanwhile, the watchdog website LittleSis.org has revealed Senator Baucus’s chief health adviser, Elizabeth Fowler, is a former executive for the insurance giant WellPoint.
Fowler has been called the "chief operating officer" of the healthcare reform process.
Baucus’s previous chief health adviser, Michelle Easton, now lobbies for WellPoint.
LittleSis.org also reports that another Senate staffer working on Baucus’s healthcare bill, Cathy Koch, is a former lobbyist for health insurance and pharmaceutical interests, including an insurance industry front group.
Koch worked as the director of global government affairs at the drug company Amgen until early 2007. Before that, she worked at Ernst & Young, where she lobbied on behalf of a number of large insurance and pharmaceutical companies, including Aetna, Blue Cross, Eli Lilly and Pfizer.

2. Let Pelosi run the vast majority she enjoys in the house into the ground by slapping together a house bill along the same structure as the Baucus bill.

Here we compare the financing provisions of the two health care plans; there are similarities and major differences. Both bills would impose a financial penalty on individuals if they do not buy health insurance, although the House penalty is higher. In both plans, employers would have to pay a penalty to either the government or to new "health exchanges" if they do not provide a government-approved health insurance plan to employees, and once again, the penalty is larger in the House bill.


Also, both health care plans are financed by large net cuts to the Medicare program, mostly by lowering what the federal government is willing to pay doctors, hospitals and other health providers. Economists expect such Medicare cuts to be felt by both the health care industry and patients covered by Medicare.

In other words, its the same template, the same structure. It does nothing to fix all of the problems with health insurance, its just made it so the broken industry now has a new bunch of mandatory customers brought on at gun point, and government subsidized as needed.

We've heard that the majority of bankruptsies are medical related. In 2007 2 of 5 americans were in financial trouble from paying medical bills. What we don't hear is that the majority of those medical related bankruptsies, the people started with insurance. It was through all the loop holes and uncovered treatments that they got burned.

"The latest data was from 2007 and at that time more than 2 out of 5 working age adults had had trouble paying their health care bills or were already paying off medical debt," said Sarah Fish-Parcham with Families USA, a national organization for health consumers. "It's a very scary situation that Americans are in right now."

3. Look at prior examples only so far as to see a way to pay for it. They are aware they will have to penalize other government programs like medicare to hedge the costs, which is exactly what happened in Washington and Massachusetts and Oregon when they passed identical bills as state programs. They stopped funding things like free clinics, because average patient costs did nothing but escalate and the number of people getting access to health care remained a zero sum game.

4. Act like corporate collusion is only a GOP tactic, and act like we've solved something by winning the argument that the new bill isn't socialism and part of the new world order plot to subjugate the country.

Seriously, dems and progressives need to stop acting like this is a step forward and a win against the evil republicans.

Why is it that extremists like ron paul and kucinich are the only ones making sense?