Post #322,457
3/6/10 8:39:26 AM
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Letter to my Representative and Senators
Representative Connolly/Senator Warner/Senator Webb:
I am writing to again urge you to work with your colleagues to finish the job on health insurance and health care reform. While the Senate bill and proposed reconciliation changes are far from perfect, they include many important reforms, expand coverage to millions, end insurance company abuses, provide subsidies to the poor, increase the use of science-based treatment methodologies, and reduce long-term growth in costs. Please vote for the Senate bill/reconciliation package, and urge your colleagues to do the same.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don't let the bill be hijacked by those who show through their actions that they will not support any meaningful reform. Don't let single-issue members kill the bill. Passing the bill is too important for tens of millions of uncovered people, and for the future of those of us who presently have health insurance coverage.
Finally, please remember that compromises that do not build support (votes) by members only serve to kill the bill through a thousand cuts. "Bipartisanship" is a means, not an end in itself. Resist the temptation to compromise with those who support the "teabaggers". Those people have shown through their actions that they will not vote for you anyway, and compromising with them only serves to weaken your support among the people who elected you.
Thanks for your time.
Regards,
Me.
Supposedly phone calls work better, but that's not my style. I usually get a form letter back a week or two later.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who notes that the White House gets 65,000 letters per week, 100,000 e-mails, 1000 faxes, and 2500-3500 calls per day - http://www.whitehous...to-the-President/ .)
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Post #322,459
3/6/10 8:54:41 AM
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Oh, and if you're skeptical about what the HCR bill will do.
Check out Obama's address this week - "The Immediate Benefits of Health Reform"
http://www.whitehous...its-health-reform (4:25 video).
(The Transcript link apparently isn't live yet.)
Cheers,
Scott.
(Hang in there, folks.)
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Post #322,461
3/6/10 8:57:19 AM
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we KNOW what the bill will do
raise rates for all of us and impose a tax for some and block any meaningful reform
thanx,
bill
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
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Post #322,467
3/6/10 9:36:53 AM
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Nope.
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Post #322,460
3/6/10 8:55:56 AM
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you are close enuff to swing by
they take much more attention to someone chatting with the front desk than a letter
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
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Post #322,468
3/6/10 9:37:21 AM
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Maybe. Not an option, though. :-)
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Post #322,475
3/6/10 12:45:14 PM
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Last night on Moyer's Journal, it was summed-up concisely
by an ex- felon Suit of CIGNA who went rogue.. ie Human.
It's all right here:
http://www.pbs.org/m...2010/profile.html
Wendell Potter became nauseous about his trade when he stumbled upon a gathering in Tenn. Hundreds of people waiting under a kind of canopy as, in a succession of tents: outdoor surgery and other treatments were being donated to the assembled uninsured/uninsurables. It was their only access to medical assistance. Etc. Anyone not blind/deaf/dumb and Dumb can see, step-by-step how the perps have moved tens of $billions from the massive premiums Big Jar of Money --> into the pockets of the Usual insatiably-greedy Suits, a mere few hundred of these making Croesus look like a piker.
Wendell Potter
Wendell Potter has served since May 2009 as the Center for Media and Democracy's senior fellow on health care in Madison, Wisconsin. After a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, in 2008 he left his job as head of communications for one of the nation's largest health insurers, CIGNA, to try his hand at helping socially responsible organizations  including those advocating for meaningful health care reform  achieve their goals.
Based in Philadelphia, Potter provides strategic communications counsel and planning services as an independent consultant. He also speaks out on both the need for a fundamental overhaul of the American health care system and on the dangers to American democracy and society of the decline of the media as watchdog, which has contributed to the growing and increasingly unchecked influence of corporate PR.
Potter held a variety of positions at CIGNA Corporation over 15 years, serving most recently as head of corporate communications and as the company's chief corporate spokesman.
Prior to joining CIGNA, Potter headed communications at Humana Inc., another large for-profit health insurer and was director of public relations and advertising for The Baptist Health System of East Tennessee. He also has been a partner in an Atlanta public relations firm, a press secretary to a Democratic nominee for governor of Tennessee and a lobbyist in Washington for the organizers of the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, TN.
Wendell Potter first worked as a journalist. When fresh out of college, he worked for Scripps-Howard's afternoon paper in Memphis. He wrote about Memphis businesses and local government before being sent to Nashville to cover the governor's office and state legislature. Two years later he was promoted to the Scripps-Howard News Bureau in Washington where he covered Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court and wrote a weekly political column.
Wendell Potter is a native of Tennessee and a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he received a B.A. in communications and did postgraduate work in journalism and public relations. He holds an APR, which means he is accredited in public relations by the Public Relations Society of America, and is still a dues-paying member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Club in Washington.
(His reservations about what has been gutted by the usual monied Interests (also explained concisely) and why the remaining material simply must get passed -- is best grokked by WATCHING the bloody program instead of mousing around looking another funny skit, bubblegum-for-the-mind, Infotainment Junkies ... IMvhO.)
FWIW, HTH, KMA, TLA, YPB 23-Skidoo
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Post #322,489
3/6/10 5:18:43 PM
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Thanks. It's a good read.
Potter seems like a good Joe.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #322,650
3/10/10 4:43:06 PM
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Right show, wrong interview.
The one you should have quoted was the one with Dr. Marcia Angell.
BILL MOYERS: So, has President Obama been fighting as hard as you wished?
MARCIA ANGELL: Fighting for the wrong things and too little, too late. He gave away the store at the very beginning by compromising. Not just compromising, but caving in to the commercial insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry. And then he stood back for months while the thing just fell apart. Now he's fighting, but he's fighting for something that shouldn't pass. Won't pass and shouldn't pass.
What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the lynchpin of health care reform. And these companies they profit by denying health care, not providing health care. And they will be able to charge whatever they like. So if they're regulated in some way and it cuts into their profits, all they have to do is just raise their premiums. And they'll do that.
Not only does it keep them in place, but it pours about 500 billion dollars of public money into these companies over 10 years. And it mandates that people buy these companies' products for whatever they charge. Now that's a recipe for the growth in health care costs, not only to continue, but to skyrocket, to grow even faster.
BILL MOYERS: But given that, why have the insurance companies, health insurance companies been fighting reform so hard?
MARCIA ANGELL: Oh, they haven't fought it very hard, Bill. They really haven't fought it very hard. What they're fighting for is the individual mandate. And if they get that mandate, if everyone does have to buy their commercial products, then they're going to be extremely happy with it.
http://www.pbs.org/m.../transcript3.html
This thing is a disaster and anyone who has worked in either the healthcare industry or the health insurance industry knows it.
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Post #322,665
3/11/10 2:14:32 AM
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Potter had numerous reservations too, of course
You'd have to watch the show at PBS; whether the actual/Final/At-Last thing provides the means for redress via regulation: when the greed-heads do their predictable lateral arabesques -- seems to be the prime question. Potter made clear that many revisions would have to occur after signing; that these should be anticipated in the final wording. He was well aware that every part of the Medico-Industrial Complex would immediately be setting out to exploit loopholes. (It was his specialty, back then.)
... And it mandates that people buy these companies' products for whatever they charge.
Agreed that, if that is the exact result of the final bill -- then it will be odious. I've lost track of the revision game; certainly it could be a disaster. i had expected that it would, anyway -- we are now dysfunctional in all important matters.
I also don't think that Obama could have, single-handedly, handed the Insurance Cos. their heads, (too many employees turned out at once: for a start.) However brilliantly logical and economical that would have been, logic has little to do with matters involving this much extorted cash. I've aways considered this whole topic to be fraught with thousands of means of subversion -- we Are that corrupt.
Clearly anyone with a 100 IQ would want a Public Option; just as clearly -- anyone with a $100M (2-3 years 'salary' for a Medico CIEIO) -- will spend what it takes (the Company's funds, of course) to continue their parasitic function, no matter what.
I refuse to worry about the death throes of all those possibilities; we are fucked on so many other levels, I'm surprised when my mail (still) arrives just as if we were a normal country. My guess is that Inertia is giving the illusion ... for a time ... that 'we shall overcome' the nuclear damage done by the Bankers, magically solve the perpetual problem of the 50ish Trillion of unfunded mandates (from Soc Sec to Medicare to dozens lesser Official debts) plus the Bush giveaway to Big Pharma of that Part D drug bonanza.
But I don't see How all that can happen, with no manufacturing base left. The US, now a Two Class System, is a mere re-marketing arm of those who still make things. We move around mostly paper in all those offices while rebundling even more 'Financial' papers: that meaningless shuffling is called 'work', now. And if most people are doing inherently useless things -??-
The plebs aren't informed and (too-) many of those are uninformable -- while the Congress lives for its stipends. It's all surreal, so I'm just going to watch; it's not worth emoting about. IMO, anyone (worth less than a few Mil) who gets sick in Murica will at best be bankrupted, at worst die that much earlier. ( I just may have to get my ass out of here yet, painful as are all those details.) But I'll have to leave while healthy and before the rush. Missing temporal data: what is the *rate* of the Murican collapse?
Wish I knew.. because that phrase in Moyers' intro re Obama and "the present climate" suggests it all: the present climate is Stalemate, and not only in med. Unclear if we shall be 'governable' again and, if so -- when.
What Me Worry?
Alfred E. Neumann
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Post #322,669
3/11/10 9:07:32 AM
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I didn't watch, I read the transcript of Potter's interview.
I am old school that way - prefer reading to watching whenever possible. As far as the "we'll fix this later" argument goes, well, surely you have witnessed how ineffective that is. I think in Potter's interview (but perhaps it was the other) Moyer made the point that the initial Medicare bill was supposed to be "corrected" by later legislation as well. And that, by and large, did not occur.
Others have pointed out that this corporate feeding legislation *is* the legislation that Obama wanted. It's what he worked out in advance in collusion with Wall Street, Big Insurance and Big Pharma. I am not surprised by any of this, of course. Early on I recognized Obama as yan corporate toady (as did Ralph whom I wasted my vote upon).
You are quite correct, of course, about "making things." The trouble with "virtual" economies is that they can go away with the flip of a switch and no one will suffer any tangible damage for it. Such is our brand of progress.
The only remaining question for me is whether my daughters will live long enough to see the United States rebound. For all my cynicism, there is some residue of optimism. When the dollar collapses, we will become the new Third World and that might cause the wealthy Chinese and Indians to take advantage of our "cheap" labor. We will, of course, in an effort to entice those wealthy foreigners shed the luxurious legislation fit for wealthier states (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, establishment of the EPA, OSHA, etc.) and that will contribute, possibly, to a rebuilding of our manufacturing base.
That's some brand of optimism, n'est ce pas?
This statement is unprovable.
Kurt Goedel
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Post #322,675
3/11/10 10:46:19 AM
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we have manufacturing
my prior 2 jobs were at manufacturing companies.
http://www.msnbc.msn...30229507/from/ET/
Indeed, the AP writer noted, "For every $1 of value produced in China's factories [in 2007], America generated $2.50." Not bad for a country that doesn't produce anything anymore.
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Post #322,680
3/11/10 11:10:25 AM
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page 37 of the senate bill
transfers taxpayer funds directly to the insurance companies as opposed to providers like we currently do with medicare
If we torture the data long enough, it will confess. (Ronald Coase, Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, 1991)
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Post #322,714
3/11/10 4:36:11 PM
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Just as was planned.
And the point the physician on Moyer made succinctly. ;0)
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