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July 12, 2010
Obamacare: Other Than These Small Problems It's Great!
The 2,000-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least 23 million people without insurance,
- a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care.
- It will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to 10 percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance,
- although this coverage will only pay for about 70 percent of our medical expenses.
- Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes and cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage.
- And at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms.
- We will be forced by law to buy their defective products.
- There is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health care costs.
- The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young.
- Companies with predominantly female work forces can be charged higher gender-based rates.
- The dizzying array of technical loopholes in the bill—written in by armies of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists—means that these companies, which profit off human sickness, suffering and death, can continue their grim game of trading away human life for money.
Posted by Vanderleun at July 12, 2010 3:19 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
The least the government can do is offer cyanid pills for those of us who would rather end it. What a SNAFU.
Posted by: Cilla Mitchell, Galveston Texas at July 12, 2010 4:25 PM
Some proponents of this monster claimed that a bad bill was better than no bill at all. I can't wait to hear what they have to say next.
Posted by: Harry at July 12, 2010 6:53 PM
Anyone who thinks that the pharmaceutical industry plays "a grim game of trading away human life for money" is either posturing or crazy.
The pharmaceutical industry earns its profits by preserving, prolonging, and improving human life.
Has any group of people done so much to improve the lives of so many people as the workers of pharmaceutical industry have done in the 20th century?
Posted by: Punditarian at July 12, 2010 7:32 PM
Punditarian is right. If Big Pharma kills off the pill takers to profit, to whom do they sell their product?
That ObamaCare is a boondoggle in a nightmare wrapped in a catastrophe is proven. Repeal it.
Stop redistributing wealth and insure the uninsured. Far cheaper than what has been attempted. Make it for citizens only, illegals get out or pay your own way just like your own country makes foreigners do.
Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at July 13, 2010 6:19 AM
Small forgotten item in list of complaints: Death Panels.
Posted by: Western Chauvinist at July 13, 2010 4:56 PM
Woodchuck,
To the for-profit pharmaceutical industry, a dead patient is a revenue loss.
To the National Health System, a dead patient is a cost savings.
'Nuff said.
Posted by: Punditarian at July 14, 2010 3:04 AM
Punditarian, A dead patient in the NatHealthSys is also a lost taxpayer. (revenue source) If they're young, that is a real burden on the revenue stream.
Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at July 14, 2010 4:34 AM
The story goes that the English once calculated that the amount they'd have to spend to treat lung cancer would be offset by the amount they'd save on pensions, therefore no reason to discourage smoking.
Posted by: Punditarian at July 14, 2010 7:44 PM
These are all features, not bugs, the goal being not to insure the uninsured or make health insurance affordable, but to compel a single-payer system.
Posted by: RC2 at July 15, 2010 8:29 AM