Another short one and I’m gone.
I’ve noticed that a lot of partisan Democratic blogs have kinda sorta stepped away from the relentless cheerleading of the ACA. Now, the message is, “Well, the GOP plan is nothing so Obamacare *HAS* to work”.
I’m guessing that a lot of researchers have been there. You spend months, years on a project and the sucker just refuses to go anywhere. There are no breakthroughs. Generally, it’s the biologists’ fault but what are you going to do? You don’t want to abandon the project so you keep propping it up. Unless you have a really talented project leader who can reassess and has the courage to take a new approach, the project is doomed to being terminated the next time it comes up for review.
That would be 2014.
Look, guys. I’m talking to YOU, Democrats. I don’t know what your project manager has been telling you but if you don’t get your shit together and offer a radical and effective alternative to the ACA, you’re all going to be laid off in the next round of restructuring. You may get laid off anyway because that’s just the way things go these days. There’s always some political asshole gunning for your job and trying to steal credit. But as long as you are employed, you might as well do your f&*(ing jobs.
There should be THREE health care reform plans: the non-existent GOP plan, the Obamacare “let’s give the insurance companies everything they want and guarantee a hefty profit for them for eternity!” plan and YOUR plan.
Your project manager is incompetent. He got promoted too soon before he even ran a single project on his own. If you don’t want him to take you down with him, you’d better figure out a way of digging yourself out of this hole. And let me make this perfectly clear to you, because you don’t seem to be getting it: protecting your project manager with phrases like “it’s not his fault, it’s the policy” is not helping you. Of course it’s his fault because it is his policy but he and his friends are going to point the finger at anyone but himself.
And may I remind you that every other country in the developed world has figured out how to do this without impoverishing the citizens who through no fault of their own have been forced to seek insurance on the independent market. And here’s an update for you: back in 2009 this might have been a tiny segment. It is tiny no longer. More and more people are unemployed or underemployed and don’t get health benefits. Stop calling us a tiny fraction. We are legion these days. That’s why there has been so much outrage over this stupid, ill-conceived policy and it’s disastrous implementation.
There is no excuse for failure here. There are a lot of templates to choose from. Pick one and get on with it.
You have a year.
Filed under: General | Tagged: ACA, Democrats, lay offs, Obamacare, project manager, Republicans |
The Confluence 
Seriously – the moderate Republicans (the few that are left) could stage a big coup by proposing Medicare for All – and then the Democrats will be gone. Every “civilian” I speak with doesn’t understand why we don’t just do that….
The moderate Republicans work for the same upper class that the Catfood Democrats work for. Neither of those groups will permit the repeal of Obamacare.
I couldn’t keep my plan for coverage of three people, because the premium hike made was too great: $2,300.00! OUCH! Now, I have the cheapest plan, at the cost of the best plan, with $50.00 copays and $500.00 for ER visits and hospital days are about a grand a day!
No one is talking about people like be that couldn’t keep their plan. What irritates me is that the Democrats stayed silent when Obama and his minions blocked the Public Option HR 676, which was the only competition and the only plan that was affordable…OH, and people trust it MEDICARE FOR ALL!
I have been truly ticked off at the Democrats and at their Republican counter parts for giving insurance companies the legal right to swindle us while saying they are doing something for us.
They only recently discovered the Mini plans and other excuses for insurance, yet when we were discussing them, we were called names.
Maybe the only way to get their attention is to start voting them out of office!
Thank you RD and Katebird for keeping up the good fight and keeping people informed. Had the press done their job, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Washington D.C. is a mess, but in part because the press is reporting on their buddies, and not covering the news for the ‘little people’, US.
A real print and broadcast media would have looked how health care is delivered in other nations, informed us of the good and bad then left it to us to decide if a Single Payer system was the way to go. Only thing is they wold have lost all that insurance ad revenue.
Your Democratic Senator and Representatives are being paid handsomely to keep us in thrall to Wall Street/Big Insurance and Obama has decided giving inspirational talks in Gospel Churches won’t keep him in the style hes grown accustom so he sold us out.
Is it true that there is an item in the Obamacare law that makes medical-expenses debts non-dischargable in bankruptcy the same way that student loans are non-dischargable in bankruptcy?
I don’t know. It sounds possible. And I’m not sure how to find out. At least how to find out for sure.
Thomas.gov has the texts of all bills.
I know that. But, it’s configuring a definitive search that has me stumped.
I read the bill in its entirety over a mere hour and fifty minutes last night. Although the word bankruptcy appears once, no mention is made of any provisions eliminating bankruptcy or discharging debts.
If that is so, that is good. I could never read a 2000 page bill in an hour and a half. I still hope the Smith Lambert Group has someone who can devote time to reading it real slow to hunt for this or other hidden easter eggbombs.
Ha! Me neither! I can’t imagine what I’d retain if I tried to read the entire text of the PPACA in a little over an hour!
Perhaps Yves Smith and/or Lambert over at Naked Capitalism can find the answer. If the answer is no, then they might consider it worth saying so to shut down an ugly rumor when we have so many ugly facts. If the answer is yes, they might well want to highlight this as yet another odious debt-trap in the developing debtcropper society currently under construction.
Those Democrats who are more after-office-payoff driven will stay loyal to Obamacare so as to get their after-office rewards. They cannot be reached. Those Democrats who are more driven by personal ego-investment through continuing in office may be reachable.
The bigbiz Republicans will not seek any genuine repeal of Obamacare. It something about it somehow reaches the Roberts Court, that Court will strike that effort down for the same pro-upper-class reasons that they upheld the Forced Mandate.
It’s telling that the Roberts court left O’care in place while eviscerating res judicata in every other res.
Sometimes Lambert scares me to death. This piece is awesome.
I’m going to have to read more Dick.
Wait, that didn’t come out right…
Yeah. Philip K. Dick is the author.
Stop using annual costs to refer to insurance premiums. In america, we pay month to month. The insurance companies are getting screwed by this bill, because they can no longer raise your rates when you get sick, drop you from your plan cause you get laid off, and can’t deny you coverage cause you have health problems.
Let me give you sample of what it was like under the old system:
“You have cancer? Guess we better double your premiums.”
“This guy was in a motorcycle accident and lost his job. Better cancel his insurance. Notify him? What for?”
Then why don’t we just cut them out of the money stream?
The insurance parasites add 1/3 additional (in overhead) to the medical costs (doctors have to add staff for the billing and consult with “clerks” to get care), and these costs do not go to improving health. My doc who went boutique and would now cost me $18,000 a year (she got sick of being forced to see a stream of patients each day, slighting most of them), told me that insurance clerks were practicing medicine without a license when they told her what she could do or not do with her patients. The insurance execs and higher ups allocate lots of money to buy politicians. The average insurance worker is paid a pittance. The insurance companies involved in supplemental for Medicare make a big profit in covering the Medicare “gaps.” Someone needs to ask the basic question–how are insurance corporations benefiting the average American citizen (non-insurance company investor)?
How are corporations of any sort benefiting the average USAmerican citizen?
If they organize the making of useful things, they are benefiting us while benefiting themselves. Alcoa makes aluminum, for instance. We need New Deal 2.0 type laws and regs to make the corporations stop harming us along the way. (And we need to abolish pro-corporate free trade as well).
Your doctor is incorrect about the clerks at the insurance company. What they are doing is just relaying information. The actual decisions are made by the insurance company execs. The peons at the insurance companies are given a script that tells them what to say about every situation. It’s predetermined before it even reaches them. They are just the ones who happen to be the ones stuck telling the doctors what the insurance execs have decided.
Kev darling, I believe this belongs to you… 😈
http://s175.photobucket.com/user/drkarma/media/ObamaISMST-shirtMP_zpsc5ca2570.jpg.html
Why would they agree to participate at all if they were getting “screwed”? Nobody’s forcing them to.
And BTW, Mr. Obama, shouldn’t you be out playing golf or something? According to you, this whole insurance thing is a little too complex for you.
The insuracos wrote the bill. Are you saying they were too dumm to write a bill to screw us instead of them?
I’m also for Medicare for all.
The rich and powerful can keep their private insurance and feed each other’s money.
Healthcare should be a social service not a business.
I don’t mind healthcare being a bussiness. What I mind is insurance being a bussiness. Insurance should be a taxpayer-funded social service not a bussiness. “Socialize the coverage and keep the practice private” as they do in Canada. Or if we want to socialize healthcare itself, we should recognize it will take a long time to create and grow a VA socialized medicine style system big enough to treat the rest of us.
The Catfood Dems and the BigBiz Reps are committed to preserving
Obamacare at any and all costs. Obamacare won’t fall of its own weight. It will have to be actively undermined. How important is it to pull Obamacare down and disinfect the earth it grew on so that Single Payer or Medicare for All who want it may be planted in its place?
During WWII, Churchill did not like Stalin or Communism very much.
But when Hitler invaded Russia Churchill (and Roosevelt) welcomed the alliance of convenience with Stalin to defeat the deadlier menace.
Are we prepared to ally-of-convenience with people we don’t otherwise like in order to defeat the deadly menace of Obamacare? I ask that in leadup to offering this link.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/11/rubio_will_introduce_bill_to_prevent_insurance_company_bailout.html
What this link is about is a starting-effort to disarm another one of those easter eggbombs hiddine in the law. Apparently Obamacare legislates for a TARP-style bailout to the insuracos if they don’t make the profits they expected under Obamacare. Someone found that item and would like to disarm it.
Nancy Pelosi and band doubled back and are on the Obamacare Express once again…short lived regret per today’s press/photo boost.
Pelosi is only in it for Pelosi and her millionaire friends and working people be damned.
I see two fatal problems to getting the Dems to act. The first is that Obama remains our first black President, and that is enough by itself to keep many Dems in line. The other is that there simply aren’t that many seats in play in either party-most members of Congress could eat babies on live tv and still win.
If any Democrats support Senator Rubio’s ” no TARP for Big Insura” bill, I could consider supporting those Democrats. If any Democrats join a successful winning effort to kill and destroy Obama’s TPP Obamatrade agreement, I would support them.
[…] Democrats are screwed next year if they can’t figure this out riverdaughter. I said a week ago they ARE screwed […]
And the disaster that is the ACA/Obama is overshadowing the disaster that is the Core Curriculum. This is the signature “improvement” of Obama’s Sec. of Education, Arne Duncan. It has been rolled out quickly with no time to teach the teachers about the program, especially math. There are no textbooks. My 5th grader comes home with a math homework work sheet that may specify a specific method for solving problems, but without instructions for the method. Or I receive a photocopied handout for each new module, but it does not show step-by-step how the problem is solved.
It may seem off topic, but this is another instance of how Obama lacks the depth to see through people such as Geithner, Summers and now Duncan.
And as frustrated parents try to help their children, Duncan saw fit to criticize them. I have included a link to the Washington Post story concerning his remarks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/16/arne-duncan-white-surburban-moms-upset-that-common-core-shows-their-kids-arent-brilliant/
No President could complete the daily homework including Thomas Jefferson, allegedly the smartest. FDR or Lincoln, the greatest Presidents, couldn’t do it either.
In fact, the greatest geniuses (more or less) in the history of the world couldn’t do it. It took Sir Isaac Newton a year and a half of seclusion to invent calculus.