And so, the Obamacare Death Panel Armaggedon begins! As said Brad on polliesnark blog Sadly, No!:
If my grandmother if still alive tomorrow morning I will feel betrayed.
From the Australian/British/French etc perspective, these insurance reforms seem like the tiniest little start towards a proper plan for universal healthcare, but to Republican diehards this bill marks the descent into socialist totalitarianism. The SN! crew also rounded up an entertaining set of links to conservative culture warrior bloggers having a meltdown over the news.
Tangentially related, one of the biggest “the end of freedom for America is coming” conspiracy theorists is Fox News’ Glenn Beck. This clip of Jon Stewart parodying Beck’s “proofs” for his conspiracy of the week demonstrations is a hoot.
This whole ‘nightmare’ would be pretty funny if it weren’t true, wouldn’t it? The funniest (and most relevant) placard I saw waved about in this whole beat-up was:
IF YOU THINK HEALTH CARE’S EXPENSIVE NOW … JUST WAIT UNTIL IT’S FREE
Oh, how us socialist nations have robbed decent men, women & children of ‘Free Choice’ in health cover.
Interesting links tigtog.
As I wrote elsewhere:
From Bernard Keane at Crikey:
The ALP retains a commanding lead over the Coalition according to this week’s Essential Report, and Kevin Rudd has attracted strong support for his health reform plan.
Essential Research’s poll, conducted from 16-21 March, shows no change in the ALP’s high level of support, with a 2PP outcome of 56-44. Kevin Rudd still holds a strong lead over Tony Abbott as preferred Prime Minister, 50% to 30%, but Abbott has improved on his 25% from immediately after he became leader.
—————–
But we must remember this poll is not gospel. It ain’t Newspoll.
Rudd’s popularity 50% eh? Interesting. Obama’s popularity rating is apparently 50% too.
Healthcare reform anyone?
Shows that centrist reformers w/ “incremental road to fairness” objectives take a hit in the popularity stakes…but still can get the essential bills thru if they compromise a bit…and have fire in their belly.
The American health system still has a long way to go tho.
A “public option” would help. Real “choice”.
But I guess Obama is working in an environment where the yelling & threats of protestors backed by the likes of cock jocks & Faux News…and the political strings that lead to private healthcare company donors…and poorer folk bred on paranoia about governments bein’ creepy backdoor commies to the point of voting against yer own interests…leads to virtual “constipation” in both houses when it comes to passing “fairness” bills.
So unfortunate compromises have to be made.
And yet Republicans still jump up & down like spoilt bullies in the classroom who have to share the resources.
N’
We should not forget, at least those old enough to remember, how the Fraser government tried to unravel Medibank (yes, that was the original name of Whitlam’s Universal Health Care scheme).
It wasn’t until the 1984 Hawke government that Medicare was reborn according to the Whitlam mandate.
CMMC, I’m not an expert on the subject, but from what I know Fraser and co. weren’t very successful at disappearing Medibank, despite having a senate majority for five years. This is probably because they were fundamentally a do-nothing government.
I wonder if the US have just passed their own entryist policy towards a Medicare-for-all system. This healthcare act (now Obama’s act) might work like our original Medibank, or perhaps Tommy Douglas’ Saskatchewan system in Canada. Both led to versions of universal, taxpayer funded Medicare.
Hooray. That’s a big win in the strangest democracy on earth.
As to disassembling Medibank. My recollection is that prior to Medibank and the beginnings of bulk billing many GP’s, in fact a majority, carried a huge amount of debt from unpaid accounts. The rebate system disposed of the problem. Significant support developed amongst doctors for rebatable payment as GP’s, essentially small businessmen and women, found that they didn’t have to write off bad debts any more. That is why, despite their terrible whining from time to time and the appalling up front payment some (most?) of them now demand, there is nevertheless still immense political support for Medicare from the major businesses running incorporated medical centres. They get paid.
No, this isn’t right. Medibank was the original version of Medicare. Fraser killed it off progressively. Hawke relaunched Medibank as Medicare, and turned Medibank into a government owned provided of optional extra cover.
See here.
Folks: people who want to see the full Jon Stewart clip (in its 13+ minute glory) can see it here.
provider
Dumbo & The Dingbats: Well-edited; tres cool interviewer.
N.B.the shortage of black folk amongst interviewees.
I’m happy for Obama, all people should count, in a democracy, however I really couldn’t care less about the US in general because of the, imo, power down envy syndrome the supposed greatest democracy on Earth exhibits toward it’s minorities.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe less emphasis on wealth and more on ability would bring them up to the level of humanity that is so sadly needed for their poor, unemployed and racially downtrodden.
Obama talks the talk and with these few steps perhaps he will walk the walk. The rest of the world hopes so and if the GOP could get their eyes away from the mirror maybe they could join in.
I’m content with Obama’s performance, but I’m far, far happier with Nancy Pelosi. Looks like the speaker did most of the legwork for the bill.
SJ, the Fraser government only killed the practice of universality—as much as they were able to restrict access to bulkbilling and hospital services (because Australians hadn’t even begun to fully utilitise this programme by the time of the Dismissal?) they weren’t able to do away with the whole structure. That made Blewitt’s job easier than Hayden’s, as the eighties Labor government didn’t have to start from scratch. Nor did they believe government-run health should lead towards an NHS, the underlying principle of the Whitlam government policy.
This is actually a pretty good example of how an entitlement not yet fully implemented can’t even be done away with.
The Republicans won’t be taking power in the US Department of Health a mere four months after the new consumer protections and subsidies take effect over the whole population. The earliest they can realistically dismantle Obama’s system is 2013—more likely 2017.
They won’t ever have the chance to get ahold of a newborn programme.
Um, yeah. If you’ve got a point, I ain’t seeing it.
I clicked on the steyn opinion piece linked to by Sadly No. Apparently global armageddon is the final consequence of universal healthcare in the US.
I’m sure if I bothered looking I would be able to find a post by the Steyn complaining about “global warming alarmists” using fear to get their message across.
haha.
also that John Stewart video is just wierd.
Read Chris Hedges about the US Health reform. On Common Dreams. It’s pathetic and shows Obama is caving in to insurance companies.
I just hope Mark Steyn is correct on this. If America did begin to pour resources into the health care of it’s own people, there will be very much less money available for tools to blow up the rest of us.
So, in a way, Obama may have inadvertently achieved a big step toward Universal World Health Care.
(Mind you, I should note that Australia runs a commie style Health Care system and still seems to find an inordinate amount of cash to splash on military kill toys. Most of which do not work)
@ 5 – Anthony, right now US doctors under the
presentold system carry an enormous bad debt burden that sounds like the mirror-image of the pre-bulk-billing days here in Australia.Many US doctors operate on a presumption that around 30% of their bills will go unpaid – by the insurance companies, and a further 20% by the patients. That’s part of the reason doctors’ fees are so high over there – about half the work they do is (involuntarily) pro-bono. The new system makes it far more difficult for insurance companies to wriggle out of paying, and mandates I think a minimum of 80-85% of their premiums that must be paid out in benefits. That alone will change the reliability with which the doctors are paid, which will encourage them to bring down their fees.
What this US Health fight has highlighted is the different industrial landscapes in the US and Australia. Here in Oz the doctors wield a fair bit of political clout in the form of the AMA. No equivalent catch-all umbrella organisation exists in the States, so Big Pharma and the Insurance Companies run the health legislation agenda of both parties…
@ 11 – Down and Out – of coures Pelosi did the legwork. She’s the Speaker of the House! Congresscritters don’t take kindly to being strong-armed by anybody, least of all the President, and US voters don’t like the President getting too directly involved in Congress votes, for obvious reasons!
“That alone will change the reliability with which the doctors are paid, which will encourage them to bring down their fees.”
Or they’ll just make more money in areas where there are shortages, like GPs and those specializing in geriatrics. That might not be such a bad thing if it encourages more people to enter those areas.
This is good news for the US which was becomming embarressing. As Michael Moore said on Oprah, it doesn’t matter how rich you are. If your insurance company pulls the pin on you due to the risk benefit analysis of you dying before you can legally challenge then money or not you are dead.
And to think the right were going on and on about death panels. Insurance companies have been running death panels for years unofficially.
It’s odd given this backdrop that Abbott is choosing to challenge Rudd on TV over health. Wrongfooted? Bad timing?
Doesn’t matter though. If Rudd wins the debate the media can just change the narrative.
This is a right-wing cartoon that I’ve been following in mingled amazement, awe and horror at its sheer awfulness, for over a year now. This isn’t the first time that it’s hinted at some kind of uprising being necessary to overthrow Teh Oppressive Socialist Obama govt. Un – effing-believable.
OK. I’ve just popped over to a conservative blog (on the DT’s website) so I could (as a clueless lefty) get a clue about why this is so bad.
I know it’s bad, all the responses over there are going on about how it’s not only going to ruin the US and the world.
Can someone explain to me how the compromise deal is different to the reforms Howard put in where all Australians were encouraged to take up private health care.
Can someone point me to some detail please? Just trying to work out why this is causing such a call to arms.
I hope the Wingnuts take control of the Death Panels in order that the demonic power delegated to the office doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Katz
Twitter was hilarious this morning: Things like “must sign up for death panel”, etc
America sure is a perplexing place.
Some of the best science, the noblest of people, the most innovative music, literature and art has its origins in the United States. Some of the world’s most inspiring people have been Americans. Yet within the bounds of that jurisdiction lurk also the ugliest and darkest of human passions. I can’t imagine how you could count it but as the recent hysteria over health reform reminds us, they surely punch above their weight in numbers of unhinged and misanthropic people per capita.
In America, it seems every group of psychopaths imaginable has a support group. There are “birthers”, creationists, open racists, gun nuts, states’ righters, anti-abortionists, death penalty proponents, people still fighting the Cold War, anti-tax populists, global-warming conspiracy-mongerers, people who think the Jews did 9/11 and now, the people who think giving access to health care to millions of fellow Americans before they are on death’s door in a plan that looks like the Republican responses to Clinton in 1994 is the flagstone of the international socialist revolution. The latest rubric for this is the so-called “tea-party” movement, which is kind of apt, because watching on the TV last night, some of them did look like extras from a scene out of Alice in Wonderland.
I’ve often wondered why this is so. America, as most know but forget, is not nearly as secular as one might suppose. One tends to think of countries like Iran or Saudi Arabia when one thinks of religious absolutism, but American fundamentalism is surely every bit as rooted at the level of the populace as in either of these places. The intersection of this religious foundation with slavery and the broader colonising and pioneering ethos has left scars which are still not healed. Watching the braying mob outside the Congress, and recalling those hurling racial epithets at John L Lewis the other day, one can see that there are people who aren’t happy if they can’t be part of a lynching.
In June of 1933, Trotsky in a pamplet entitled What is National Socialism? wrote the following:
The program with which National Socialism came to power reminds one very much – alas – of a Jewish department store in an obscure province. What won’t you find here – cheap in price and in quality still lower! Recollections of the “happy” days of free competition, and hazy evocations of the stability of class society; hopes for the regeneration of the colonial empire, and dreams of a shut-in economy; phrases about a return from Roman law back to the Germanic, and pleas for an American moratorium; an envious hostility to inequality in the person of a proprietor in an automobile, and animal fear of equality in the person of a worker in a cap and without a collar; the frenzy of nationalism, and the fear of world creditors … all the refuse of international political thought has gone to fill up the spiritual treasury of the new Germanic Messianism.
Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.
These people are not (yet) for the most part fascists, but that, in the midst of this profound disturbance in US and world capitalism, they have found their voice and congealed into what we have seen on our TV screens portends something quite ominous and tells us much about the unfinished business of modernity in America.
Great article by a republican, criticising republicans:
David Frum article on FrumForum
Hey you’d like John Gray’s latest stuff, Fran. Have a read of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia if you haven’t already.
There’s a Collingwood joke here asking to be made, but I’ll refrain.
This isn’t the first time that it’s hinted at some kind of uprising being necessary to overthrow Teh Oppressive Socialist Obama govt.
Helen@20: I’m not too worried about it. Uprisings generally occur by the actions of the young, the active and the energized (even if their leaders are generally older). Since the United States military are content with the government paying for their health care, who else is going to rush the barricades in defense of the revolution? Your typical elderly Teabagger – overweight and diabetic after a lifetime of corn syrup additives in their food? Don’t make me laugh.
“Yet within the bounds of that jurisdiction lurk also the ugliest and darkest of human passions.”
That is true everywhere.
Fox News et al are part of the United States of America, but they are not a synonym for the United States of America.
From this distance it’s difficult to fathom what could drive someone to react to the healthcare reform like this:
(From here.) I mean … what? Obviously whoever wrote that is an articulate and thoughtful person, but they’re overreacting so much as to seem disconnected from any reality I can recognise.
I think it backs up what Frum says in the piece linked to by SCPritch: the problem with all the vastly overheated partisan rhetoric being pumped by Glenn Beck et al is that there are people who will actually believe it, and so now do truly think that the sky has fallen on top of them. And if they think that is the case, well, what happens when they decide to do something about it?
From the Free Republic site to which Brett links
“ObamaCare must be resisted by any means necessary. The Congress has committed Treason and Treason must be resisted immediately, not merely at the ballot box.”
Hmmm … I wonder if the FBI monitors these people.
Anyways, the funniest wingnut reaction comes from those who think that if the Republicans do well in this year’s mid term elections they’ll be able to repeal the Act.
Alas, they forget that the President can veto any bill passed by Congress. But Congress can override the veto … yes, with a two thirds vote in both Houses.
Among other things, this would require the Republicans to win more Democrat Senate seats this year than the Democrats are defending.
Doh!
Odd as it may seem – some people – including a lot of the Tea Baggers prefer nightmares to dreams:
Its just shows the limits to BS fear and smear campaigns when reform is approached boldly, clearly, with an explicit mandate.
A lesson the centre-left around the world, I should think.
From the US Declaration of Independence:
When a nation’s foundational document is a conspiracy theory, that habit of mind tends to persist.
SJ, what part of “Fraser kiled universality” do you not understand?
That’s my point, professor.
Heh, it’s not like you’ve actually contributed anything enlightening to this thread other than “no. look at this link for my argument about the early days of Medibank.”
And what is your opinion of my analysis that it will be harder for the GOP to get rid of Obama’s policies after 2/6 years than it was for the Libs to try and gut Medibank after getting into power a mere four months into that programme?
Perhaps you’ll furnish us with a link to someone else so they can explain your opinions on the electoral appeal of long established entitlement programmes for you.
Seeing as your can’t actually write anything for yourself, Mr Link.
And 62% of all personal bankrupts in America have “can’t pay medical bills” as the main reason for going under.
It really is a mad system. I don’t see how even the insurance companies think they can continue to milk it—it’s just not sustainable.
“No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.”
Also from the article linked above by Frum. Republicans don’t seriously believe they will be able to repeal this thing.
“Republicans don’t seriously believe they will be able to repeal this thing.”
Sensible Republicans (an endangered species) don’t think they can repeal it.
The Limbaugh/Beck/FoxNews/Redstate.com wing, which controls the Republican Party, thinks it can.
Enemy Combatant @9, that video is an amazing piece of work. Wonder if the interviewer needed a shower afterwards to get the ignorance off. There are some good points made in the discussion Down & Out mentioned @31. I was particularly struck by this point by Chris the Cynic:
This is the Pauline Hanson demographic, isn’t it? Just that there’s more of ‘em.
From Dailykos.com, reporting on a Harris poll
Wow.
Sam, has anyone been able to work out what the Yanks think a socialist is? And what they think Hitler did? Or indeed what characteristics of the Antichrist Obama manifests? (I guess they’ll all get very nervous if he visits Jerusalem!)
Sam@39
I can’t comment on the other figures but this last one was for New Jersey republicans, IIRC. It may be a fair sample though. I’d like to see the figures for Utah or Nebraska Republicans though.
Mind you, none of these match the figures for those who believe in alien abduction, angels play an active role in our lives or the Bible is literally true.
I caught the latest amusing Jon Stewart show feature in which he takes a swing at Glenn Beck who argues the policy of seatbelt advocacy leads logically to toalitarianism and mass murder. That segment entitled conservative libertarian was amusing, telling and rather depressing all in one go.
On Hitler, as far I am aware, Obama hasn’t invaded Poland, so it must be something else. Both their mothers died of cancer, so maybe that’s got something to do with it. Who knows?
Google Obama antichrist and you’ll get any number of sites which explain why he’s the Antichrist. It is quite entertaining, if you like batshit crazy. Although, that 24% of Republicans (14% of Americans) are batshit crazy is slightly disturbing.
Fran, New Jersey is a sane state. If it’s that many there, you can double it for Utah, Arkansas etc.
Obama isn’t the Antichrist. He’s just a very good boy.
That was my rather sad reason for mentioning them Sam.