If Obama Cared
If Obama Cared was written in response to the Obamacare sellout to insurance companies. The Democrats controlled all three branches of government and that's what they came up with, a private profit insurance "exchange" program, instead of universal guarantees and price controls. It was a monumental betrayal of what was possible in 2009.
Imagine now, if Joe Biden becomes president and the Democrats control congress in 2021. The same thing would happen. There would be no push for a "public option" to make basic health services free.
Notice how Dr Gupta, at 15:00, says, "It's not fair to say free" and gets corrected by Michael Moore. It's such a good point.
When you need medical care - cost should not be a concern. A public option could make health services free for everybody. Taxpayers save money by reducing costs, and simply by ending the extraction of profits by those investing in health insurance companies.
It's the summer of 2012.
The Supreme Court has just ruled Obamacare is constitutional.
After listening to many of the opinions by the bewildered professional media punditry about the Supreme Court's ruling on the Affordable Healthcare Act known as Obama-care, the most obvious conclusion is the so-called liberal media has moved further to the right than the Supreme Court.
Professional pundits, blinded by the partisan paradigm, can't seem to understand that a Democratic President is fulfilling an old Republican agenda in order to prevent policies that would actually be more affordable and more appropriate for the public, like Single Payer Healthcare, which is long overdue.
Justice Roberts and President Obama have united to provide the biggest injection of socialistic subsidy ever imagined into private for-profit insurance that will guarantee their profitable for-profit status forevermore.
Instead of referencing the law, the confused media professionals all parse the language of government officials in an attempt to determine 'the facts'. If Obama calls non-compliance fees a penalty and the Chief Justice calls it a tax, what is it? They all debate opposing viewpoints and reach no conclusions, as usual.
Yet, they all agree that Justice Roberts has betrayed his partisan political allegiances to serve Obama's liberal ideals. Roberts changed his mind, they say, believing the judge is now either (1) actually concerned with interpreting the law correctly, or (2) a bipartisan hero.
The pundits are either naive or corporate shills, because;
(1) In light of his previous political rulings, the idea that Justice Roberts is concerned with the legitimate interpretation of the Constitution is not credible, especially because of his opinion on the constitutionality of this law is itself absurd. His legal opinions that the government can tax citizens because they don't buy something, and that the Medicaid Expansion provision in the law is somehow coercive and not a legitimate federal function under the commerce clause, are both easily refuted as constitutional misinterpretations and blatantly political.
(2) Proclaiming Justice Roberts to be compromising with liberals because he approved a healthcare system envisioned by the Heritage Foundation, former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, and signed into law by former Republican Governor Mitt Romney, is now a liberal idea because President Obama has endorsed it, is less credible than Justice Robert's legal interpretations.
If you're looking for change you can believe in, try the definition of Liberal, because aside from his continuity of fulfilling the Republican Party agenda, President Obama shutdown the Single Payer Healthcare advocates faster than the police could arrest them for expressing their liberal opinions.
The new health plan as championed by the president is basically the same old plan we've had that already cost the public twice as much as other nations yet still deprives millions of the public from receiving any affordable healthcare services at all.
So the professional pundits should take note, the President and the Chief Justice are on the same side. They are on the side of the insurance companies and attorneys that are firmly planted between the doctors and their patients. The cost that will be incurred for the legal assistance required to navigate the labyrinth of technical jargon, legal ambiguity, and commercial nuance of the Affordable Care Act could easily pay for universal healthcare.
President Obama's resistance to the term 'tax', which the court ultimately used to uphold the legality of this unconstitutional turd of a law, was the key to depriving the public of a public healthcare system, giving the public's money instead to the insurance company middlemen and their shareholders who profit from depriving the public of healthcare and their attorneys who will profit from interpreting the legalese.
President Obama, speaking of the insurance industry, rightfully claimed that they have imposed spending caps to deny healthcare, denied coverage for preexisting conditions, dropped patient coverage, overpaid themselves for administrative costs and bonuses, and jacked up premiums to be more profitable resulting in the deprivation of healthcare for the insured to the point that the insurance companies must now pay rebates to patients for their unethical behavior. His list of grievances didn't even mention the millions of people without any access to affordable healthcare, or those bankrupted for needing healthcare services.
The President's solution to this list of unethical atrocities by the massively profitable insurance system is to give more money to the industry in the form of a captive consumer base afforded by more public debt. Rather than fixing the problem, the plan rewards the insurance companies with more public money in hopes that the continued denial of some of those in need of help will be remedied.
The President could have advocated allocating money to train doctors and build hospitals, adhering to the sound economic principals of supply and demand to lower cost and increase access to healthcare. He could have insisted on legislation that would allow for collective bargaining on behalf of the public for medicine, alleviating pain while reducing public debt.
If Obama cared, he could have allocated hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus funds to create a healthcare infrastructure capable of accommodating patient demand but instead he gave tax breaks to 'job creators' who didn't create any jobs.
Amongst all the confusing legal technicalities and varying opinions about Obama-care, a few things are for sure. If you are against healthcare for all, you already have healthcare. If you are against a non-profit healthcare system, you haven't had to pay any outrageously expensive medical bills that ruined you financially.
And now, instead of paying emergency room claims for those who needed the care and couldn't afford it, the government will be paying insurance companies to cover millions of people just in case they might need it, or some other nuanced distinction that will typically cost the taxpayers more.
Healthcare insurance is an unnecessary obstacle between healthcare services and consumers. It is too expensive for some because it's too profitable for others.
The healthcare insurance industry makes more money for shareholders by keeping health services scarce and unaffordable, for the public, yet available and affordable for corporations and shareholders.
The practical effect of the ACA, including the State's optional participation in the Medicaid Expansion provision, as legislated from the bench, will be the consolidation of insurance monopolies. The biggest customer of the insurance 'exchanges' will be the government paying for those in poverty and for the employees who were dropped by their employers because it's cheaper for them to pay the penalty.
Passing a "federal tax" on uninsured citizens of all states and making state participation in the program optional is absurd, if not outright illegal. Then you add the fact that the insurance is paid for by the public, costing trillions of dollars and what you have is another too-big-to-fail ineffective and bureaucratic institution with a money funnel straight from the public treasury to the bank accounts of the insurance industry shareholders.
The list of problems with this law is too long to consider. The biggest problem with it is that depriving the public of a non-profit health system ensures that the private insurance companies will continue to donate to political campaigns with money legislated to them through this law. This type of quid pro quo is a conflict of interest and another example of why money must be removed from politics.
One law after the next will continue to be passed creating public debt with ulterior motives to fund political campaigns for private profits. That is why we're getting Obamacare and not getting the more affordable, more sensible and humane, non-profit universal single payer healthcare for all plan, run by our government.