Monday, August 11, 2008

Obama's Healthcare Plan is Worse than McCain's

Obama’s Health Insurance Plan is Worse than McCain’s



Many questions surround the health care crisis in America. The biggest question facing the “health care for all” coverage dilemma is answering the questions: And who will pay for it? Does America want to be just another welfare nation state or shall it persist in being the world’s premiere corporate welfare imperial nation?


Isn’t it supposed to be the job of the GOP to expand corporate welfare programs? When will “O” find the balls to break rank with the “Party of Let them Eat Cake”? During this critical time prior to the Democratic convention when Obama needs to prove to the Democrats that he is seriously the candidate that will best represent the needs of the people, why is Obama instead the poster boy the for the tech lobby sponsored white collar job giveaway? Solving the problem of middle class health care access can not be addressed without solving the problem of American labor practices that refuse to put American workers first. When it comes to solving America’s healthcare accessibility crisis, to say that overdue labor reforms in tandem with healthcare reforms must happen simultaneously would be an understatement.


Obama and McCain offer insurance plans that are more corporate welfare giveaways to benefit corporations (insurance and technology companies), but after reading this article in the Courier-Journal.com by Laura Unger and Patrick Howington with this comparison of the two plans, Obama’s plan is a greater expansion of wasteful technology subsidies that will still leave millions of Americans with little or no access to quality healthcare.


Are you one of the seventy five million people in America without health insurance? It is estimated that over 47 million American citizens and approximately 30 million immigrants are without access to healthcare coverage in the United States. As both duopoly candidates, McCain and Obama, support corporate America in their pledge to hand over white collar jobs to cheap foreign workers by raising or eliminating the H-1b cap, millions of educated middle/upper middle class Americans who are unemployed and underemployed due to this program are now forced to make critical decisions affecting life or death health issues facing themselves and their families, such as cancer, as they are unable to pay for costly health care insurance premiums or are denied coverage altogether. As increasing numbers of middle class citizens are laid off and downsized to Obama backed tech lobby programs, his plan only offers mandatory health coverage for children – but not their parents. This also raises the question: if Obama supports the tech lobby’s H-1b program responsible for millions of lost white collar middle class jobs, how are these middle class Americans supposed to pay for the insurance premiums?


While Obama’s plan is equal to McCain’s in that they both include corporate welfare to the insurance companies, Obama’s plan goes one step further and offers a hefty $50 billion dollar subsidy to the technology industry. No wonder Obama is Google’s prima donna! And guess who gets to pay for all this medical record snoopability? Do you think technology companies will exclusively bootstrap and invent such cutting edge software that will all of a sudden make it possible for roughly one third of this nation’s population to magically have access to healthcare? Why should taxpayers subsidize $50 billion dollars for privacy violating technology that most doctors don't want to touch in order to fatten up an already bloated tech lobby while the rest of the economy goes to hell?

When Obama says he is going to “create a public health-insurance program”, most people stop and say “wow, I like the ‘public’ part” and ignore the fact that this has nothing to do with a single payer program as offered by third party candidate Ralph Nader that would guarantee universal coverage for all. Although McCain’s plan offers no public health-insurance program, Barack Obama’s plan is worse as it seeks to contain costs by subsidizing the technology industry with billions of taxpayer dollars for a wasteful electronic medical records program that many physicians robustly criticize as wasteful, time consuming and cumbersome. The vast majority of doctors aren't taking advantage of electronic medical records. In addition, medical records technology programs have been monitored by citizen privacy rights watchdog groups as an unabashed violation of patient privacy rights.


So it comes as no surprise that privacy rights may indeed not be high on the FISA flipping Obama’s agenda, as according to his plan, he would go beyond McCain’s insurance supporting lobby and also will provide


“$50 billion toward adoption of electronic medical records and related technology to reduce duplication of care, and allowing importation of U.S.-made drugs from other countries, such as Canada."

Bonus for a few Google and Microsoft insiders but what about the middle class white collar workers who are losing jobs and access to health care courtesy cozy corporate welfare arrangements disguised under the banner of healthcare? During this time of increasingly dubious technologies flooding the market that are subsidized by taxpayers offering big returns to only a few inner circle investors, Obama appears to be doing what the GOP does best: Keeping up with the Jones’ and sticking it to Joe Sixpack. So much for the middle class. When it comes to jobs and healthcare, the only “change” you can believe in is Obama’s plan to further eradicate the middle class by selling it out.


The last question to ask about Obama’s so-called healthcare plan is: “Why do“O” and his gatekeeping peeps hate America’s middle class?”


-2Truthy

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why do“O” and his gatekeeping peeps hate America’s middle class?”

I think we've got ourselves a hate feedback loop here, Two. It's human nature to to run down a person you've cheated or wronged in some way - it's the way we rationalize and justify our jerkiness. But a nastier animus kicks in when the object of abuse takes the kick and doesn't fight back. Whence comes that almost pleasurable compulsion jerks feel to stomp some meek guy's head, after beating him to the ground? Who knows? (I think Dostoyevsky had something to say about it.)

And if you think about it, these guys have been pulling crap in the last couple of decades that, among a less inert and clueless populace, would have resulted in riots and tumbrils by 2003, at the latest. Yet here we are. Somewhere in the back of their reptile brains these guys must be thinking, "Man, these people will eat any shit we put in front of them." In sociopaths, that sort of passivity and non-reaction from one's victims tends to stoke the hate and provoke even more sadistic destructiveness. So they keep kicking it up a notch.

So, to mangle, er, paraphrase Mencken, Stop the Hate! Go out and crack some skulls! For common decency!

Just a theory.

2Truthy said...

RO, Ah yes, characters like Dostoyevsky's 'The Underground Man' obsessed with his inability (paralysis) to fight back against the military officer as he confronts his powerlessness in the face of his own mortality...

Twenty years ago I came to SV and saw the transition of smart computer scientists running things within hot startups to being marginalized and downgraded and then literally, physically set off to the side of the buildings (what was left of them as most of the work is now outsourced off site), APART and far away from the finance and marketing departments.

Your comment reminds me of this question: How many sociopaths does it take to disrespect and plunder and ruin an otherwise civil, thriving engineering organization AND get a slam-dunk return on your own investment and those of a few fellow insiders?

Answer: One particular start up I worked at(now a household name)had a small, great group of witty, productive, smart programmers (approx. 8) and one morning I came to the office to find the halls swarming with all of these guys from India who looked as if they had slept in their clothes all night. They did. After a few chats with others in the office, it was revealed that they were living and stashed upstairs in sleeping bags. (This was a heavily backed vc firm.) Not only could most of these guys barely speak or even understand English, but they were introduced at our weekly meeting as the 'bright new team' that would take over the xxx project that at the time, 4 of the exisiting guys were working on. What was also said outside the meeting to the rest of us non-engineers was that we were NOT allowed to mention the fact to anyone that about 15 guys were crashing upstairs in the unfinished office spaces. The frat-boy cult mentality of 'cranking out any old shit to get a quick return for the vc's is the game. NO LONGER QUALITY.

Citizen Carrie said...

Thinks for your SV stories, 2Truthy. Your world is like another planet to someone like me.

Anonymous said...

You are correct about both candidates' plans offering more benefits to insurance and big pharma executives than to the growing hordes without healthcare. To say that McCain's plan is "better" is moot, in that Obama's can't be worse. A wash. Between now and November, Obama is going to have to address how people are supposed to have the ability to pay for his plan while he supports job outsourcing at all levels.

I have not heard him address this, and of course, McCain is not about to, either.

thetownliar said...

Toss up, but am leaning toward McCain's.If Obama had the guts to go with the Nader plan, big difference.The good news about McCain's plan is the elimination of a tax break that employees get if their employer provides their health care.One way or another,in order for it to fly, he is going to have stick it to taxpayers.His plan,like Obama's,will require large subsidies he's not talking about, at least not in this article you reference.
Here is a link that provides how McCain's plan puts the consumer in charge and will save at least a couple of grand per year "rather than a costless entitlement" bloated gov't program that Obama is hawking.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/10/news/economy/tully_healthcare.fortune/

2Truthy said...

"His (McCain's)plan,like Obama's,will require large subsidies he's not talking about, at least not in this article you reference." thetownliar

Thanks townliar for the cnn link.
Specifically, I don't see how Obama's plan to offer $50 billion in subsidies to an IT tech industry committed to offshoring and insourcing jobs to third world companies for cumbersome sw that most physicians are opposed to using which is also opposed by privacy rights groups is NOT going to help millions of American adult citizens who are unemployed due specifically to these crooked so called free trade deals. Until the U.S. reverses these corrupt LEGAL practices (H-1b and green card abuses) of handing American white collar jobs away. Without simultaneous high tech lobby labor reforms, Obama's plan is half-baked window dressing.

Anonymous said...

Single payer for all is the only way to lower medical costs and only Nader supports this. Obama DOES NOT SUPPORT SINGLE PAYER.

Your title reads that McCain's is worse and in the sense that you cite Obama's reliance on technology subsidies, this is true.
But neither one cuts it. You might continue your next article to read
Both Plans Suck or something to this effect.

Single Payer is the only plan that includes EVERYONE. The public is not demanding Single Payer from the Democrats, much less anything else. Aside from both plans leaving people out in the cold, the big problem is that is our health insurance non-system drives small businesses under as costs are not contained. What I don't understand is how the public can think either one of these two status quo supporting plans from McCain or Obama are substantially better than the other. Both leave out people who need it, and both require people to pay for it while both support job outsourcing. This is not what government employees have. We should have the same plan they have. How do Democrats believe as healthcare costs rise, immigration increases, jobs leave the country, are they going to pay for it under Obama or McCain? Sorry, but neither corporate party has a plan.

2Truthy said...

prez, of course Nader's single payer plan is the best, but both mainstream candidate's plans include the insurance lobby. The problem with Obama's plan is government PLUS insurance companies. Why not cut out the insurance companies like Nader advocates? As long as Obama refuses to cut loose the insurance companies, why expand an already bloated federal government bureaucracy that also wants to throw billions at IT industry executives in subsidies? Can you say "more billionaire bailout time"? According tho article cited, Obama's plan is a hand out to IT cronies. The CBO has warned that "by itself, the adoption of more health IT is generally not sufficient to pro­duce significant cost savings."[68]
http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/bg2197.cfm
Obama's plan only supports children and not their parents, where Hillary's plan did.
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/11/28/485291.aspx

Obama's plan is also more costly. As long as Obama refuses to ditch the insurance companies, why will taxpayers/consumers pay more under his plan? And who are the 18 million uninsured who would be covered during the first year of Obama's plan?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122153768171141665.html

Anonymous said...

These are merely campaign proposals. Neither candidate's plan appears to be winning over a majority of voters. In this Business Week article,

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2008/db20081013_312433.htm


a recent poll from Harvard School of Public Health and Harris Interactive, 40% of registered voters don't see either candidate's health-care plan as better for them for the reasons you describe. Until we have Single Payer, only the wealthy win.