How many here understand Karma (the theory of moral causation)?
Do we really want to keep rewarding failure?
What do we deserve if we keep rewarding the same entities that created the problems we’re trying to fix?
I’m all for meaningful healthcare reform, but to support mandatory private health insurance is to reward more failure, the failures of the private health insurance industry (denying care and letting people die to increase profit margins etc.), by giving them 100s 0f billions in taxpayer subsidies, regulations that can be easily circumvented, by over-pricing coverage, denial of treatments etc.
Does anybody but me see the similarity between the proposed HCR concepts and the financial sector bailouts, in which we rewarded the greed and failure of the financial sector? I hope we’re not still expecting those financial sector bailouts to trickle-down anytime soon. In the end we will get what we deserve.
Cutting a healthcare reform deal with the private health insurance industry is as close as you can get (on the material plane) to cutting the proverbial ‘deal with the Devil’.
If we can’t enforce laws against torture, war crimes etc. against the puppets of the military-industrial complex, I have my doubts that we can enforce regulations dealing with denial of care etc, against the CEOs of the healthcare-denial complex. It would cost more to subsidize private insurers and to effectively police/adjudicate their practices, than it would to expand Medicare to everyone, or at the very least set up a government health insurance option. But "our" "lawmakers" are more concerned with how much HCR will cost private insurers (i.e. cause of problem) than how much it will costs (or save) taxpayers (i.e. the ones who want to fix the problem).
Haven’t we learned what happens when we privatize undertakings of government (the people’s) domain?
What do we deserve at this point? The only rights people ever had were based on their ability and willingness to retaliate against corrupt power structures. Many have called for health insurance strikes, suggesting that the cash cows of private insurance (young, healthy, wealthy who can self-pay etc.) cancel their policies, leaving only the sickest and poorest to the private insurers, until they come under enough financial pressure to accept (i.e. quit fighting against) effective healthcare reform. That form of retaliation will no longer be available to us if we get locked in to mandated private health insurance.