Didn't see another thread on the healthcare debate. Last posting here was back in September. But the issue's back in the news:
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Looking to push the "long and wrenching debate" over health care into its final stages, President Barack Obama asked lawmakers to schedule an up-or-down vote on overhaul legislation "in the next few weeks."
What I find interesting is how the far right and the far left agree on this issue. On the right, the LaRouche people say:
None other than Mr. Peter Orszag himself took to the pages of today's Financial Times to assure London financiers, that "once health-care reform is in place," Social Security is next on the Obama administration's chopping block. The pledge by President Obama's Office of Management and Budget Director is made in the concluding paragraph of a signed op-ed touting the Obama administration's fascist health-care reforms as "A Medical Plan to Boost America's Fiscal Health;" not to secure human health, but that of the financial system.
On the left, the World Socialist Website says: ...a comment by budget director Peter Orszag last week in the Financial Times. In an opinion piece titled, "A plan to boost America's fiscal health," he wrote, "Reducing the number of tests, procedures and other medical costs that do not improve health presents an enormous opportunity." Orszag then elaborated how the Obama administration would be taking advantage of this "opportunity," through Medicare and Medicaid "efficiencies," with proposals to slash more than $600 billion from the programs. ... "Once health care reform is in place," the budget director wrote, "the US can then focus on other aspects of fiscal sustainability, including Social Security reform." ... antithetical to a system that would provide high-quality, affordable health care to the broad mass of the American people.
Lots of countries have good nationalized healthcare systems, but the one being proposed in America is a government/private industry partnership. Fascism. And it's being pushed because the private insurance industry is dying, same as the banking system was dying before the Bush/Obama Bailout/Stimulus giveaways. Insurance companies have invested heavily in the collapsing derivatives market, and their only hope now is for a government handout. That's no way to set up a compassionate healthcare system.
Or so it seems.
Wasn't there a furor about mammograms since last September? The government used to say women should begin getting them at age 40 (for decades we were told this), and now the government is saying to start at age 50? Yeah. I googled it. That was back in November:
So, if the president is so ignorant on the topic of insurance (he said he was a COLLEGE GRADUATE when he went through the liability thing), and if the government is already pushing a change that will lead to no telling how many deaths from breast cancer, can we trust ANYTHING that comes from Washington in the healthcare "debate?"