The high price of scrapping Obamacare

[Prospero]

This is a good short and powerful indictment of the GOP position on healthcare in the US.

Of course Obama's plan is Communistic! Good old Vladimir Illich Osama bin Obama.

BEWARE OF ROMNEYCARE
BY JAMES SUROWIECKI
OCTOBER 29, 2012

Mitt Romney can be a hard man to pin down. But there is one thing that he’s been clear about: if he becomes President, he will repeal Obamacare. That simple promise, more than any other that Romney has made, illuminates what is most at stake in this year’s election. The campaigns may spend most of their time talking about taxes and jobs. But health care is where the election’s outcome will have the most immediate and powerful impact on how Americans live.
Abolishing Obamacare would eliminate subsidies for people buying insurance and rescind regulations requiring insurance companies to guarantee coverage and benefits (for instance, to people with preëxisting conditions). Romney’s proposed alternative is to give individuals a tax break when they buy insurance and to push them toward high-deductible insurance plans, which he believes will make them more rigorous and price-conscious in choosing doctors and treatments. Romney also wants to reform Medicare by encouraging more competition among private insurers. The details are skimpy, but the core principle is that unleashing the power of the free market will bring down costs and raise quality.
This is an appealing vision. In most areas of the economy, free-market principles insure that products and services keep improving, and that consumers get better and better deals. But the free market, though it may be the best way of allocating new TVs and cars, falters when it comes to paying for bypass surgery or chemotherapy. The reasons for this were established nearly fifty years ago, by the economist Kenneth Arrow, in a classic article entitled “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.” Arrow showed that health care is distinctive in ways that limit the power of the market. Because people don’t have the expertise to evaluate doctors, hospitals, or treatments, it’s hard for them to comparison-shop. Because they can’t pay for major care out of pocket, they must rely on insurance, thereby often losing the final say in what to buy or how much to spend. More fundamentally, markets work only when consumers have the power to say no if the price isn’t right. Yet it’s very hard for people to say no in the case of things like end-of-life care or brain surgery.
The evidence for Arrow’s thesis is all around us. Take the idea that high deductibles will transform the health-care system. It’s certainly true that giving consumers more skin in the game can make them better shoppers. But Americans’ out-of-pocket health-care spending is already higher than it is in most developed countries, and our over-all costs still aren’t any lower. And while a well-known study called the Rand Health Insurance Experiment showed that higher co-pays can encourage people to forgo unnecessary care, the same study showed that higher co-pays also encourage sick people to forgo necessary care, which raises costs in the long run. Increasing co-pays sometimes makes sense, but it’s no magic bullet.

As for Medicare, it’s not clear why Romney believes that competition among insurers will bring down costs. In the wider market, after all, that competition already exists, and yet it has done little to reduce health-care costs. Indeed, over the past forty years, government-controlled Medicare has been better at holding down health-care inflation than the general market has. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Every other developed country in the world has far more government involvement in health care than the U.S. does, and in every one of those countries health-care costs are much lower than ours and have risen more slowly over the past three decades—with medical outcomes that are as good as or better than ours. The economist Austin Frakt has demonstrated the close relationship between public-sector involvement and lower health-care costs, and calls the evidence “overwhelming.”
But the truth is that, despite the rhetoric, Romney’s main concern isn’t to bring down over-all health-care costs. In fact, he has regularly attacked one of the Affordable Care Act’s most aggressive cost-cutting measures—the independent board that can make binding recommendations on how to cut Medicare spending. What he wants is just to have the government less involved in health care. Insofar as his plans would lower federal health-care spending, it’s not because of the power of the free market; it’s because a Romney Administration would simply have the government do less. Romney would eliminate the Obamacare subsidies for health insurance. He would turn Medicaid into a block grant to the states and trim its annual budget, with the result that its funding would lag behind the rise in health-care costs. And, if he adopts his running mate Paul Ryan’s premium-support plan for Medicare, he would make Medicare recipients pay higher premiums. With these changes, the government would spend less, but only because it would provide less, and Americans would get less. It’s like saving on defense by protecting only two-thirds of the country.
Of course, plenty of people don’t think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government. These days, Mitt Romney seems to be one of them (though things were very different back when he was the governor of Massachusetts). But plenty of people take the opposite view, and the premise of Obamacare is that health care is a collective good, like national defense—something that government has to help provide. The real issue, come November 6th, isn’t about who has the best ideas for controlling health-care costs. It’s about who has the right idea of what government should do. ♦


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2012/10/29/121029ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz2ACiM3YY4

[Ben]

Why Are People with Health Insurance Going Bankrupt?

Dr. Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese: Obama care will not put an end to medical bankruptcies - 80% of people going bankrupt due to healthcare costs had insurance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2ZSWLY7GwEE

[Ben]

Did RomneyCare Really Have No Effect on Medical Bankruptcy in Massachusetts?

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/03/did-romneycare-really-have-no-effect-on-medical-bankruptcy-in-massachusetts/72179/

[Ben]

Just Why are Republicans so Against Obamacare? - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxnQ-TI7N2Y)

[paulclifford]

>>>Obama care will not put an end to medical bankruptcies - 80% of people going bankrupt due to healthcare costs had insurance.

Additionally, the study on bankruptcy from medical bills that appeared in the American Journal of Medicine — authored by 4 leading supporters of a single-payer system — had the following statement:


http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(09)00404-5/abstract

"Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income,"


The study never asks whether those who declared bankruptcy apparently "due to medical reasons" might also have been deeply in debt for other reasons: school loans, home equity loans, car payments, credit cards, etc. The study points out that the debtors were well-educated, owned homes, and had "middle-class occupations," so it's doubtful that a debt of $5,000 by itself would put them into bankruptcy.

As an example of the kind of spin the authors engage in, see:

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/vol0/issue2005/images/data/hlthaff.w5.63/DC1/Himmelstein_Ex2.gif

Notice that the author (Himmelstein) conflates data on bankruptcies from medical bills with data on missing work due to illness . . . . . . even if there were no medical bills during the time spent away from work. So the problem here was not necessarily that they had high medical bills; the problem was they had no income.

That's certainly a problem, but it's not a particularly exciting one ideologically. It's much more exciting to try to mobilize people for a "make government pay for it" campaign in healthcare if you can spin and conflate the data in such a way as to make it seem that "high medical bills", in and of themselves, "cause 60% of all bankruptcies."

Now that's the kind of news that can launch email campaigns to your senator!

[trish]

As an example of the kind of spin the authors engage in, see:


?..because they proved they were already stupid enough to vote for Hussein Obama..._paulclifford, the author of the above post. http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=1374021&postcount=165

Spin? Racism? Or both?

[broncofan]

"The study never asks whether those who declared bankruptcy apparently "due to medical reasons" might also have been deeply in debt for other reasons: school loans, home equity loans, car payments, credit cards, etc. The study points out that the debtors were well-educated, owned homes, and had "middle-class occupations," so it's doubtful that a debt of $5,000 by itself would put them into bankruptcy."

http://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(09)00404-5/fulltext

This is why you have to delve into the article and not just read the abstract. The average income of the participants was about 30,000 dollars a year. So 5,000 dollars out of pocket would indeed be a strain. The article stated that they were trying to determine the cases where medical bills strongly contributed to bankruptcy. They never stated in the article that medical bills were the sole cause of bankruptcy and they did regression analysis on the subset of medical bankruptcies and found a statistically significant group had gaps in their coverage that led to large bills.

"Teasing causation from cross-sectional data is challenging. Multiple factors push families into bankruptcy. Yet, our data clearly establish that illness and medical bills play an important role in a large and growing proportion of bankruptcies."

This is in the body of the article, not the abstract.

There was also another section that used the exact same criteria for bankruptcy over time which was a time trend analysis. Therefore, if you did not like their criteria, as long as it was consistent there would be an accurate time trend analysis. They found that the percentage of bankruptcies based on these criteria had a 48% (relative) increase from 2001 to 2007.

[broncofan]

"Out-of-pocket medical costs averaged $17,943 for all medically bankrupt families: $26,971 for uninsured patients, $17,749 for those with private insurance at the outset, $14,633 for those with Medicaid, $12,021 for those with Medicare, and $6545 for those with Veterans Affairs/military coverage. For patients who initially had private coverage but lost it, the family's out-of-pocket expenses averaged $22,568."

This is also from the American Journal of Medicine Article. Debts of $5,000 does not mean their expenses were not much higher. If someone who makes about 30,000 dollars a year has to pay 20,000 dollars out of pocket, they might come very close before having to declare bankruptcy.

[paulclifford]

>>>Racism?

Of course I'm racist against Obama . . .

. . . but it's the white part of him I detest — the Marxist part — not the black part.

No, the black part be cool.

(Sigh. Obamabots always forget that the President's mother was white.)

[Prospero]

_paulclifford, the author of the above post. http://www.hungangels.com/vboard/showpost.php?p=1374021&postcount=165

Spin? Racism? Or both?


Racist in my view - and mr Clifford will face censure if he posts more racist remarks.

[trish]

>>>Racism?

Of course I'm racist against Obama . . .

. . . but it's the white part of him I detest — the Marxist part — not the black part.

No, the black part be cool.

(Sigh. Obamabots always forget that the President's mother was white.)
Bullshit! This doesn't even address the issue.

...because they proved they were already stupid enough to vote for Hussein Obama...Why fling "Hussein" out there as if it were an insult? It's not a puzzle. Your tactic is to irrationally rally anti-Islamic and racist prejudices against affordable health care. Why? Because any sleezy method you can think of to support your cause, from cherry picking statistics to exploiting prejudices and hatreds, is fair game, right?

[broncofan]

Yeah I don't see how it helps debate to show that one woman thinks Obama is going to give her a phone, and then mimicking her dialect and grammar. Does it show that some people support Obama's health program for the wrong reason? Should we post videos of Republicans threatening doctors in front of abortion clinics, yelling about the President being a Muslim (redundant in light of PC's insinuations), a Communist, or from Kenya? Are any of these falsehoods proper grounds for opposing whatever he does?

PaulClifford was indeed dipping his toes in the waters of racism, taking off the ku klux clan training wheels on his bicycle and trying to get serious. I'm glad you called him on it Trish.

[paulclifford]

>>>I don't see how it helps debate to show that one woman thinks Obama is going to give her a phone

She didn't simply think it. The "Lifeline Assistance" and "Lifeline Link-Up" phone programs are real, and she really did get a phone at taxpayer expense. The programs pre-date "The One's" arrival in the White House, but they literally exploded under his administration. I mentioned the famous "Obamaphone Lady" not because she was mistaken about getting a free phone, but to highlight a moral stance that is popular today and defended by spokespeople on the Far Utopian Left: "I need, I want, I deserve, THEREFORE my neighbor has to provide it for me."

That's the same moral stance underpinning socialized healthcare in its hard form (NHS) or its soft form (Obamacare).

>>>Should we post videos of Republicans threatening doctors in front of abortion clinics

I have no problem with that. Just be sure to post videos of abortion butcher Dr. Gosnell in Philadelphia, too. Let's hear women talk about his "procedures" of gently snipping the spines of late-term fetuses. He'll go to prison for a long time for that little "public service."

You might also post videos of the long-gone Margaret Sanger, who founded "Planned Parenthood" originally as a eugenics society for the sake of ensuring that blacks didn't procreate. In her autobiography, she referred to them as "human weeds."

>>>the President being a Muslim (redundant in light of PC's insinuations)

Insinuations? Sorry, but POTUS was the one who insisted on using his middle name, "Hussien", during his first inauguration and swearing-in. It didn't "leak" out from the right-wing press. He wants everyone to know that his middle name is Hussein by using it at a public event like a sweating-in? Fine. that means we-the-people get to use his middle name, too, when mentioning him. Obviously, he wants that. You're actually being disrespectful by NOT using it.

That Barry grew up for several years in Indonesia (after being adopted by his mom's 2nd husband, Lolo Soetoro, a native Indonesian and a Muslim) and that 1) it is customary for the children to be Muslim if dad is Muslim, especially in a country with a great majority Muslim population, and 2) he attended public school in Jakarta, and his admission form (available online) states that his religion is "Islam" — all of this is irrelevant, of course. After all, Barack (formerly, Barry) spent 20 years in a hate-church pastored by that wingnut racist, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, so that proves he is not (and never was) Muslim.

(this is why I love the left. It's not that they won't or can't "connect the dots"; it's that they go into deep denial-mode over the very existence of dots. "Dots? What dots? I don't see any dots? I only acknowledge the existence of dots when Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Markos Melitos, NPR, PBS, WBAI, Paul Krugman, or The New York Times tell me there are dots.")

>>>a Communist

I doubt he's a communist but he's certainly a Marxist. There's overlap between the two but they're not the same thing. In any case, Obama was a member of a Marxist political party in Illinois called "The New Party" before and during the time he was a state senator. The New Party's newsletter even openly congratulated "our member", Barack Obama, for having won the seat. It's available online — and if it was removed (as much embarrassing information regarding "The One's" past has), you can check "archive.org."

>>>or from Kenya

No, of course not! He was born in Hawaii, just as he insists, and as his completely legitimate online PDF of his birth certificate proves beyond any reasonable doubt! Electronic documents like PDFs can't be forged, we all know that! Of course, there's no record of his Hawaiian birth at either of the major hospitals there, but who cares? And there's still the mystery of why the press release for his first exercise in serious narcissism, an autobiography titled "Dreams From My Father", issued by the publisher, claims that this young, brilliant, author — president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review — "was born in Kenya, and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii." And when you look at the application for submitting works to the publisher, it requires that the author either write his own biographical paragraph, or at least supply factual information that an editor can then stitch together into a biographical paragraph. Hmmm. I wonder who supplied the data that Obama was born in Kenya if not the young Barack himself? Why would an editor simply invent it? The publishers originally claimed it was simply an error by the original editor . . . yet, according to "archive.org" which has all iterations of the biographical paragraph until 2007, that "uncorrected" paragraph remained, edition after edition. And why did that paragraph expunge the statement that he had been born in Kenya only after 2007? Because that was when senator Obama declared his presidential aspirations, and he (as well as his handlers) knew that admitting to Kenyan birth would automatically invalidate his run, as per the Constitutional requirement that POTUS be a "natural born citizen" of the US.

Nothing to see here, folks. No dots to connect. If Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews don't believe there's anything weird (if not downright suspicious), then I believe them!

>>>Are any of these falsehoods proper grounds for opposing whatever he does?

What falsehoods? Fact: He belonged to a Marxist party as a state senator; Fact: his own biographical sketch for his own book claims he was born in Kenya — a sketch that persisted through many iterations (including other text changes in the biographical information) and printings of his autobiography, and which wasn't expunged until 2007 when he declared his intention to run for POTUS.

You're taking the same attitude toward facts as NHS supporters take toward costs: if we simply don't look at them, and don't acknowledge their existence, we can pretend they don't exist. Then when others challenge our position by reminding us of the existence of facts and costs, we can instead impugn their motives, rather than debate their arguments. We can claim those who oppose Obama are simply "racist" (even if they greatly admire Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, Dr. Benjamin Carson, etc., and would support any one of them for public office), and those who oppose socialized healthcare are simply "heartless" and don't want "affordable healthcare" (even if they point out the great inequities under socialism, and the superiority — in terms of cost, access, and quality — of freedom).

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=paulclifford;1376860]
I mentioned the famous "Obamaphone Lady" not because she was mistaken about getting a free phone, but to highlight a moral stance that is popular today and defended by spokespeople on the Far Utopian Left: "I need, I want, I deserve, THEREFORE my neighbor has to provide it for me."

That's the same moral stance underpinning socialized healthcare in its hard form (NHS) or its soft form (Obamacare).
--What is 'socialized healthcare in its hard form (NHS)'?? The NHS is available to all, even those who have private health insurance plans or work for companies that provide their employees with one -and unless you can find the evidence, who in the UK wants a service paid for from salaries, to be abolished and replaced by a wholly private service? I don't think it would catch on here.
We need, we deserve, we share the burden of the costs.

That Barry grew up for several years in Indonesia (after being adopted by his mom's 2nd husband, Lolo Soetoro, a native Indonesian and a Muslim) and that 1) it is customary for the children to be Muslim if dad is Muslim, especially in a country with a great majority Muslim population, and 2) he attended public school in Jakarta, and his admission form (available online) states that his religion is "Islam" — all of this is irrelevant, of course. After all, Barack (formerly, Barry) spent 20 years in a hate-church pastored by that wingnut racist, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, so that proves he is not (and never was) Muslim.
--Indonesia then and now has a more relaxed attititude to Islam than exists in your one-size-fits-all concept of it patented perhaps in Saudi Arabia -Obama's mother married Lolo in Hawaii, as often happens with inter-faith and multinational marriages, which are not forbidden under Indonesian law--the co-existence of different religious communities in Indonesia has made the law on marriage controversial and often poorly drafted as it has attempted to satisfy Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and pagans, etc. Obama went to a Roman Catholic school -it's even called St Francis of Assisi in case you don't get the connection and Obama prayed with the other Catholics as a Christian.

I doubt he's a communist but he's certainly a Marxist. There's overlap between the two but they're not the same thing. In any case, Obama was a member of a Marxist political party in Illinois called "The New Party" before and during the time he was a state senator. The New Party's newsletter even openly congratulated "our member", Barack Obama, for having won the seat. It's available online — and if it was removed (as much embarrassing information regarding "The One's" past has), you can check "archive.org."
--The New Party was not a Marxist party, most of its rank and file were drawn from community activist groups which were in part a legacy of the radical action that was pioneered in Chicago by Saul Alinsky, a man ridiculed by Marxists. If you really think Obama is a Marxist, I would be fascinated to read your definition of Marxism. Or not.

You're taking the same attitude toward facts as NHS supporters take toward costs: if we simply don't look at them, and don't acknowledge their existence, we can pretend they don't exist. Then when others challenge our position by reminding us of the existence of facts and costs, we can instead impugn their motives, rather than debate their arguments.
--In my other posts I have again and again acknowledged the costs of the NHS, not least because I paid into it -your problem is that you never clearly state your own argument, which is that it is morally wrong for people as a collective to fund healthcare, you believe the national health service should be replaced by private health insurance which individuals choose and pay for -I have no quarrel with your free market utopian idealism, I can argue that it doesn't do what it says on the tin, but I don't know if you really are up to the argument bit. After all, we had private health before the NHS was created -and it didn't meet the needs of the people.

One of the many curious lacuna in your perception of Obama is that you pay no attention to the links that both his father and mother had to the CIA, nor to the implication that Obama himself worked for the CIA in the 1980s. Even a nutcase like Alex Jones is now wondering if he was wrong all along. I can't find the link but there was an interesting discussion on Obama senior at an important moment in Kenyan history though I suspect it would pass you by. Would it be surprising, shocking, a major conspiracy to discover that a US President had links to the CIA? Whatever next, that a British Prime Minister and half his cabinet graduated from Oxford?

[paulclifford]

>>>What is 'socialized healthcare in its hard form (NHS)'??

It means a "single-payer" system, as opposed to the "thin-end-of-the-wedge" strategy of Obamacare. They're all based on "I want it; you pay for it."

>>>I don't think it would catch on here.

Soviet peasants said exactly the same thing about bread production. ("You want to privatize ownership of farmland? Of wheat cultivation? Of harvesting? Milling? Baking? You're crazy! If we had that system, only the rich would have bread!") Right. And yet everyone in the US can buy all the bread, crackers, cakes, cookies, muffins, cupcakes, etc., he wants — from low-cost to high-cost and anything in between — yet there's no "Bread Czar" in charge of production and distribution of bread.

Guess what? The same systemic organization that works so seamlessly with bread could also work with healthcare, if only government got out of the way. And when government gets in the way even in bread production, you have the situation the USSR had for 60 years: severe shortages, even in Ukraine, which has some of the richest agricultural soil in the world.]

Re: the New Party


http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/226147/life-new-party/stanley-kurtz

OCTOBER 30, 2008 9:40 AM
Life of the New Party
A redistributionist success story.
By Stanley Kurtz

A variety of evidence now indicates, with a high degree of likelihood, that Barack Obama was a member of the far-left New Party, which also endorsed him in his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. Obama’s New party ties graphically illustrate the connection between his troubling “associations” and the core economic issues of the presidential campaign. The New Party’s agenda was radically redistributionist. More important, the New Party’s specific strategy for achieving its economic goals precisely paralleled Obama’s now infamous 2001 radio remarks on “major redistributive change.” So let’s take a tour of New Party ideology, after which we can explore the ever-increasing evidence that Obama himself was in fact a New Party member.

Left of Liberal

Obama’s New Party-endorsed first run for office began in late 1995. So it’s of interest that New Party co-founder Joel Rogers published an essay describing the Left’s need for the New Party in the March/April 1995 issue of The New Left Review. (The New Left Review, can fairly be described as a prestigious outlet for writing that is largely Marxist/Socialist in content.) Since the revelation of Obama’s New Party ties, Rogers has striven to paint his outlook as mainstream and moderate. Yet this 1995 article, contemporaneous with Obama’s run for office as a New Party-endorsed candidate, gives the lie to that claim.

It’s notable that New Party supporter and left-extremist Noam Chomsky is one of the few readers thanked in Rogers’s acknowledgments. From there, Rogers quickly links his political prescription to the claim that there are fundamental problems in the way American society is structured. Above all, Rogers expresses disdain for liberals, who characteristically refuse to take steps to gain “social control of the economy” or to put “serious constraints on capital.” Mere liberals (embodied for Rogers by Bill Clinton) are corrupt tools of “unconstrained capitalism.”

Incremental Socialism?
Does this make Rogers’s a socialist? Arguably, yes. But the answer to that question is not a simple one. Rogers hopes to avoid the socialist label. Like many on the far left, he couches his ultimate goals in euphemism and convoluted language. So instead of calling for socialism, Rogers demands “economic democracy.” That sort of euphemism produces locutions that would strike most Americans as odd: “The biggest ‘rule’ and barrier to democracy, of course, is capitalism–private ownership of the means of production…and what follows does not seek to change that rule directly.” In this passage, the word “democracy,” serves as a virtual synonym for socialism, to the point where capitalism itself is described as the greatest “barrier to democracy.” What Rogers seems to want to say here is that the entire capitalist system is blocking his ultimate socialist goal. But of course he can’t afford to say that out loud. So instead he simply calls capitalism “undemocratic.” Yet in the same phrase, Rogers notes that his strategy for undermining capitalism is long-term and indirect (“what follows does not seek to change that rule [i.e. capitalism] directly”).



Etc. Sounds Marxist to me.

Also see:


http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7434

Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers, the New Party (NP) was a socialist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials -- most often Democrats. Cantor and Rogers wanted NP to be “an explicitly social democratic organization, with an ideology roughly like that of Northern European (e.g., Swedish) labor movements.” NP's short-term goal was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of a new socialist third party. According to author Stanley Kurtz, NP "is best understood as an attempt to build a mass-based political front for a largely socialist party leadership." Around the time of NP's founding, Joel Rogers himself penned a piece in the Marxist journal New Left Review, wherein he made it clear that the organization was a socialist enterprise at its core.

The initial strategic meetings to plan the New Party were held in Joel Rogers' Madison, Wisconsin home in the very early 1990s. Present at these gatherings were Rogers and his wife Sarah Siskind; Harriet Barlow (who would later become an IPS board member); Dan Cantor; Steve Cobble (affiliated with the Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS); Barbara Dudley (then-executive director of Greenpeace); ACORN leaders Jon Kest, Steven Kest, Zach Polett, and Wade Rathke; and Sandy Morales Pope (of the Teamsters union).

In the fall of 1994, a New Party publication listed more than 100 activists “who are building the NP.” Of these, fourteen were affiliated with the IPS, twelve with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), six with the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and five with ACORN. Notable names among the list of 100+ were John Cavanagh, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Randall Forsberg, Maude Hurd, Manning Marable, Frances Fox Piven, Zach Polett, Wade Rathke, Mark Ritchie, Joel Rogers, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Quentin Young, and Howard Zinn.

The New Party's influential Chicago chapter began to coalesce in January 1995. Its members consisted mainly of individuals associated with ACORN, DSA, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Committees of Correspondence.

NP also had a front group called Progressive Chicago, whose purpose was to identify candidates whose agendas the New Party and its sympathizers might support.

NP's modus operandi featured the political strategy of “electoral fusion,” where it would nominate, for various political offices, candidates from other parties (usually Democrats), thereby enabling each of those candidates to occupy more than one ballot line in the voting booth. By so doing, NP often was able to influence candidates' political platforms. (Fusion of this type is today permitted in eight states -- Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont -- but is common only in New York.) NP's overriding goal was to elect leftist Democrats rather than third-party candidates, as evidenced by a 1994 New Party Executive Committee announcement that said: "Joining the New Party doesn't end your relationship with the Democrats, it changes it."

Though Illinois was not one of the states that permitted electoral fusion, in 1995 the political neophyte Barack Obama nonetheless sought NP's endorsement for his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of NP volunteers as campaign workers. By 1996, Obama himself had become a member of the New Party. (Obama also had been a prominent member of the aforementioned NP front group, Progressive Chicago.) A key figure in NP's Chicago chapter was Carl Davidson, a Marxist who became one of Obama's earliest political supporters.



Etc.

Regarding Obama's possible connections to the CIA, I'm aware of the allegations but hold off judgment for now. In any case, even if true, what makes you think the CIA is some great supporter of the Constitution and defender of individual rights? That whole apparatus — CIA, NSA, etc. — is clearly out of control, and has been for a long time.

[paulclifford]

More on Obama and the New Party:


http://www.powerlineblog.com/NewParty117-thumb.jpg

"October 1996 Update:

New Party members are busy knocking on doors, hammering down lawn signs, and phoning voters to support NP candidates this fall. Here are some of our key races:

Illinois: Three NP-members won Democratic primaries last Spring and face off against Republican opponents on election day: Danny Davis (U.S. House), Barack Obama (State Senate) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary).


Also see a blurb from "Democratic Socialists":


http://www.powerlineblog.com/DemocraticSocialists212.jpg

"Barack Obama, victor in the 13th State Senate District, encouraged NPers to join in his task forces on Voter Education and Voter Registration."


A key part of his "task force" on voter registration was a group called ACORN, which engaged in fraudulent voter registration. ACORN was finally exposed when a libertarian "activist/videographer" performed a "sting" operation at one of its branches in Brooklyn, NY:


http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/item_Js4YPEcsCcxLZhAEehLhmL

The scandal surrounding the left-wing activist organization ACORN has spread to New York, with employees at its Brooklyn office caught on video helping supposed ladies of the night get loans for their dream houses of ill repute.

Rather than reminding the women that prostitution is dangerous and illegal and advising them to change their careers, counselors at the social-services group shockingly offer suggestions on how they can launder their earnings.

"Honesty is not going to get you the house," a loan counselor at the offices told two activists posing as a mortgage-seeking pimp and prostitute.

There are videos on YouTube of Obama speaking before ACORN, and telling them what an important part they will play in his upcoming policies as POTUS.

[Prospero]

The Marxist part of Obama... good grief Clifford. You are a veritable Goebbels aren't you. Eloquent screeds of right wing piffle.

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=paulclifford;1376912]
>>>What is 'socialized healthcare in its hard form (NHS)'??

It means a "single-payer" system, as opposed to the "thin-end-of-the-wedge" strategy of Obamacare. They're all based on "I want it; you pay for it."
--As I have told you, the NHS isn't free, we pay for it; but we don't hand people a bill for treatment when they are about to leave hospital because the costs are paid incrementally month by month. It's not that hard to understand.

>>>I don't think it would catch on here.
peasants said exactly the same thing about bread production. ("You want to privatize ownership of farmland? Of wheat cultivation? Of harvesting? Milling? Baking? You're crazy! If we had that system, only the rich would have bread!") Right. And yet everyone in the US can buy all the bread, crackers, cakes, cookies, muffins, cupcakes, etc., he wants — from low-cost to high-cost and anything in between — yet there's no "Bread Czar" in charge of production and distribution of bread.
--If farmers in the USA had to operate in a free market you would be importing your bread from Canada, because the farms growing wheat would collapse: the agricultural sector in the USA receives $20bn worth of subsidies, which probably means your farmers are more closely tied to the central government than Igor and Ivan in the now defunct USSR.

Re: the New Party Etc. Sounds Marxist to me.
It would appear that you know little about radical politics in the USA, most of which have been organised around community-based groups and which, in the ideological sense of the terms, have been both 'left' and right' if you accept that the Ku Klux Klan was a radical organisation. It suits people of a particular political persuasion to characterise this or that group as 'far left' which is in reality a meaningless phrase, and not just in the USA. As you should know, there have always been community-based groups which organised protest meetings, voter registration and campaigns, all of which are legal, and allowed under your Constitution -indeed, one of the strengths of Alinsky's activities in Chicago was that he was arguing that what people were demanding from City Hall was their right under the Constitution rather than some special privilege. Martin Luther King's moral authority came from the same source -the Constitution, yet MLK was regularly portrayed as being, in effect, a Communist or a Communist sympathiser.
But if Barack Obama is or was a Marxist, why would he be part of the New Party anyway rather than the Communist Party of the USA? Angela Davis made that choice; while ACORN was an effective organising body until it collapsed under the weight of allegations of criminality -which is not how the vanguard of the working class is supposed to behave, and by which time Obama was out of the loop anyway.

Regarding Obama's possible connections to the CIA, I'm aware of the allegations but hold off judgment for now. In any case, even if true, what makes you think the CIA is some great supporter of the Constitution and defender of individual rights? That whole apparatus — CIA, NSA, etc. — is clearly out of control, and has been for a long time.
--In other words:
Obama is unacceptable because he is a Marxist;
Obama is unacceptable because he is a CIA plant;
Obama is unacceptable because he is a Democrat
Obama is unacceptable because he is a ---fill in blank as you wish, it doesn't matter, the first part of the clause is all that you think matters.

You could present a coherent argument about the modern state, and whether or not we have too much or too little government; you could present an argument about taxation and freedom; about private property and freedom; you could discuss the concept of the 'military-industrial' complex in the USA; you could challenge the scientific 'establishment' on climate change or Genetically Modified Crops; you could analyse US trade relations with China; US relations with Israel and the Middle East; you can criticise the Obama administration on the use of drones, the handling of the deficit, economic and industrial growth, etc etc: yet it seems to me you are obsessed with one man as if Barack Obama were the cause of all your problems; it does rather limit the quality of your statements.

[thombergeron]

You might also post videos of the long-gone Margaret Sanger, who founded "Planned Parenthood" originally as a eugenics society for the sake of ensuring that blacks didn't procreate. In her autobiography, she referred to them as "human weeds."

This is simply false. Margaret Sanger opposed abortion. She (mistakenly) believed that human life began at conception. She promoted increased access to contraception, which, according to about a century of evidence, liberates women and helps to lift them out of poverty.

Sanger never referred to blacks as "human weeds," neither in her autobiography (which I've actually read), nor anywhere else. James Hubert, president of the Urban League and a black man, specifically asked Sanger to set up a birth control clinic in Harlem in 1929. W.E.B. Dubois, founder of the NAACP, served on the board of Sanger's Harlem clinic.

The remainder of your post is similarly characterized by outright falsehoods, so obviously I won't spend any more of my precious time on earth specifically refuting each of your distortions. I just wanted to briefly point out the fact that you are plainly a liar and a dissembler.

I continue to wonder, though, why it appears to be impossible to construct a rightist argument in 2013 without simply lying.

[thombergeron]

Soviet peasants said exactly the same thing about bread production. ("You want to privatize ownership of farmland? Of wheat cultivation? Of harvesting? Milling? Baking? You're crazy! If we had that system, only the rich would have bread!") Right. And yet everyone in the US can buy all the bread, crackers, cakes, cookies, muffins, cupcakes, etc., he wants — from low-cost to high-cost and anything in between — yet there's no "Bread Czar" in charge of production and distribution of bread.

Strangely, you seem entirely ignorant of the fact hunger and poverty exist in the U.S.

Speaking of bread:

http://www.bread.org/hunger/us/

Done with you now. Go propagandize elsewhere.

[broncofan]

This is simply false. Margaret Sanger opposed abortion. She (mistakenly) believed that human life began at conception. She promoted increased access to contraception, which, according to about a century of evidence, liberates women and helps to lift them out of poverty.

Sanger never referred to blacks as "human weeds," neither in her autobiography (which I've actually read), nor anywhere else. James Hubert, president of the Urban League and a black man, specifically asked Sanger to set up a birth control clinic in Harlem in 1929. W.E.B. Dubois, founder of the NAACP, served on the board of Sanger's Harlem clinic.

The remainder of your post is similarly characterized by outright falsehoods, so obviously I won't spend any more of my precious time on earth specifically refuting each of your distortions. I just wanted to briefly point out the fact that you are plainly a liar and a dissembler.

I continue to wonder, though, why it appears to be impossible to construct a rightist argument in 2013 without simply lying.
Excellent in every respect. I suspected there was something wrong with that statement but basically was working with an unloaded gun so to speak. I have not read anything about Sanger, and unfortunately I don't have the wherewithal to look it up at this time (it's either doing that or reading fiction). So bravo for exposing his lies about this woman's legacy.

Even if he continues to post here as it's not clear whether he's on self-imposed exile, he will ignore your post, as he does whenever he makes a dubious claim and it's debunked.

[thombergeron]

She didn't simply think it. The "Lifeline Assistance" and "Lifeline Link-Up" phone programs are real, and she really did get a phone at taxpayer expense. The programs pre-date "The One's" arrival in the White House, but they literally exploded under his administration. I mentioned the famous "Obamaphone Lady" not because she was mistaken about getting a free phone, but to highlight a moral stance that is popular today and defended by spokespeople on the Far Utopian Left: "I need, I want, I deserve, THEREFORE my neighbor has to provide it for me."

I know I said I was done, but given the mouthbreathers' obsession with the idea that Obama somehow "bought votes" with a small-scale program that he didn't implement that provided low-income people with discounted -- not free -- telecommunications services, this article published yesterday by Bloomberg has some salience:

Food Stamp Cut Backed by Republicans With Voters on Rolls (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-14/food-stamp-cut-backed-by-republicans-with-voters-on-rolls.html)

“Among the 254 counties where food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican Mitt Romney won 213 of them in last year’s presidential election…. Kentucky’s Owsley County, which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote, has the largest proportion of food stamp recipients among those that he carried.

…

“More than half of the Owsley County’s population -- 52 percent -- received food stamps in 2011, the most recent yearly number available. The county … in 2012 was 97.6 percent non-Hispanic white…”

So if Brobama was trying to “buy votes” with expanded social services, looks like it kind of backfired on him. All those poor white people who receive the bulk of SNAP assistance voted for his opponent.

A dark and stormy night, indeed, Captain Clifford.

[dderek123]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/542254_604571076264814_2074304474_n.jpg

[martin48]

So the Republicans are hell bent on stopping ObamaCare - a pretty tame attempt to extend basic healthcare to tens of millions of Americans who cannot afford expensive private healthcare – by freezing the US and perhaps the World economy. They are just blackmailers. Am I missing something?

[Prospero]

I think you are missing something martin when you describe them as just blackmailers. They are obsessive idealogues of the worst kind hellbent on seeing their agenda whatever the impact on the rest of the US and the wider world - and spreading pernicious untruths (sometimes known as lies) about affordale health care.

[Ben in LA]

Well it's September 30th...all hell might break loose tomorrow...

[martin48]

I think you are missing something martin when you describe them as just blackmailers. They are obsessive idealogues of the worst kind hellbent on seeing their agenda whatever the impact on the rest of the US and the wider world - and spreading pernicious untruths (sometimes known as lies) about affordale health care.

I didn't as a Brit like to say this but it's fucking true.

[Silcc69]

It's also great to have some of these conservative cocksuckers on a tranny porn site.

[martin48]

It's also great to have some of these conservative cocksuckers on a tranny porn site.
I didn’t know there was a Democrat – Republican split on tranny porn

[Prospero]

Nailing some lies by the right in the US on affordable health care...

This is from the Wall Street Journal (hardly a house mag of the Left)

ObamaCare In Plain English: What It Means For You
AUTHOR: MOLLY GUM MARCH 29, 2013



There’s a lot of hype going around about ObamaCare, and by now you are probably getting mixed information about what the law actually is and how it will affect you. The purpose of this post is to lay out the basic facts in plain English so you know exactly what to expect as this reform takes effect over the next few years. However, before we get started, allow me to clarify a few very important things about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “ObamaCare.”

ObamaCare will not use your tax dollars to fund abortions
ObamaCare is not and will not lead to a government takeover of health care
ObamaCare will not increase the national debt or deficit
ObamaCare does not hurt health insurance companies, but actually increases their business
ObamaCare is not unconstitutional
ObamaCare is not socialism
ObamaCare is NOT Government-Run Health Care

This is the biggest, and perhaps most dangerous, misconception about ObamaCare, and I want to debunk this myth from the very beginning. Despite what many Republicans and Tea Party members are claiming, ObamaCare is not government-run health care. The politicians and pundits who are misrepresenting it in this fashion are acting irresponsibly and are purposefully misleading the American public. Government-run health care would involve a health insurance program that is entirely implemented and managed by the government: i.e., Medicare and Medicaid. ObamaCare is actually designed to promote a competitive free market for private insurers to offer their services to the American people, so one could actually argue that this is a highly capitalist endeavor. If ObamaCare fell under the title of government-run health care, then all of us would be getting Medicaid and there would be no option for anything else. That is not what ObamaCare does. Instead, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a federal mandate (meaning a federal law) that requires all Americans to have health coverage by 2014. Just like you are required to have car insurance to drive, you must now have health insurance to live and work in the United States. Before you get upset or frustrated by this new expense, let me explain how ObamaCare makes this a much more attainable reality for everyone while increasing the quality of available health care and saving billions of dollars in the process.



How Will ObamaCare Affect my Insurance Costs and Available Coverage?

Prior to ObamaCare, your health insurance premiums (the price a company charges you for coverage) were determined by several factors, including age, health, and geographical location. Furthermore, insurance companies could deny anyone coverage due to health status, genetic information, pre-existing conditions, evidence of domestic violence, and essentially any other reason they saw fit. If they believed you would cost them too much money, they would either charge you an outrageous premium or deny you coverage and send you on your way. With ObamaCare, new regulations prohibit such actions. As of September 23, 2010, insurance companies are no longer allowed to deny coverage to children under the age of 19 who have a pre-existing condition. Additionally, insurance companies can no longer place a cap on a child’s lifetime coverage. Prior to ObamaCare, many children who were born with life-threatening illnesses used up their lifetime coverage before the age of ten. Thanks to ObamaCare, insurance companies can no longer end coverage for these children or anyone else by implementing a lifetime cap. Beginning January 1, 2014, these same protections will be extended to all Americans above the age of 19.





Under ObamaCare, premiums will be determined solely by family structure, geographical location, tobacco use, participation in a health promotion program, age (by not more than three to one), and actuarial value. Actuarial value is the percentage of medical expenses covered by the insurance plan. For example, if the actuarial value is 80%, your insurance plan would pay for 80% of your medical costs while you would be responsible for 20%. The higher your actuarial value, the higher your premium. However, you will no longer be charged a higher premium due to your current state of health or pre-existing conditions. Your insurance company can still deny you coverage of a particular treatment, but only if that specific treatment is not offered to anybody enrolled in the plan. For example, if your policy does not cover a specific prescription drug, you will be required to pay out-of-pocket for the medication or seek a different prescription from your doctor. This stipulation cannot single out individual members, and must apply to everyone or no one.

What if I Already Have Health Insurance?

If you already have an insurance plan that you are happy with, then most likely, nothing will change for you. Despite the myths and rumors that might have you worried, you will not be forced to switch or buy a new plan. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was designed to make quality health care affordable and available to everyone, and this simply means that all Americans will now have the ability to purchase health insurance rather than just those who can afford it. However, many of the new policies under the law will apply differently to health plans that existed prior to ObamaCare’s implementation. In other words, these “grandfathered plans” are not required to follow some of the new policies as long as they meet certain requirements. Congress designed the law in this way so that individuals who are satisfied with their current health care plan can keep the coverage they currently have. As it says in the White House Blog, “The bottom line is that under the Affordable Care Act, if you like your doctor and plan, you can keep them. But if you aren’t satisfied with your insurance options today, the Affordable Care Act provides for better, more affordable health care choices through new consumer protections.”

Can I Still Choose My Own Doctor?

Yes. In fact, the new protections under ObamaCare will make it so that you will have access to more doctors and better doctors. If you are enrolled in a health plan that requires you to designate a specific primary care provider, the new law guarantees your right to choose that doctor yourself. The only stipulation is that the doctor must be enrolled in your plan’s provider network and must be accepting new patients at the time. Not all health plans require you to designate a doctor. In those cases, you will be able to visit any doctor who is enrolled in your plan’s provider network.

Will I Still Get Quality Care From Medical Professionals?

Absolutely. In fact, the new law gives doctors more power to make decisions about your treatment than ever before. In the past, doctors were hesitant to utilize certain treatments for fear that insurance companies would target individuals with certain medical conditions and raise their premiums. Under the new law, health insurance companies can no longer discriminate against individuals due to health status or pre-existing conditions, giving doctors the freedom to utilize whatever treatments they see fit.

One of the most important outcomes of the mandate is that hospitals and medical professionals will be better compensated for their services. Hospitals accrue up to $49 billion in unpaid hospital bills from uninsured patients each year. Because they are legally required to treat all patients, hospitals are forced to provide care even when the patient is uninsured and cannot pay their bill. This causes hospitals to increase the costs of their services in order to make up for the money they lose treating uninsured patients. While some of these costs will never be compensated, the federal, state, and local governments currently cover the remainder of these unpaid bills in the form of disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments. More specifically, the government pays hospitals around $40 billion per year to cover the care provided to uninsured patients who couldn’t or didn’t pay their bill. Because all Americans will be required to have health coverage under ObamaCare, hospitals will be compensated for their care and will no longer need to increase the costs of their services to offset lost income. This will also save the state and federal governments billions of dollars in DSH payments each year.

How Do I Get Coverage, and What if I Can’t Afford It?

First of all, companies with more than 200 employees will be required to automatically enroll new full-time workers in a health plan; however, employees are free to opt out and purchase their own private insurance if they are not satisfied with their employer’s plan. Companies with 50 or more full-time employees will be required to provide them with health coverage or will pay a tax penalty for each employee. Once again, employees are free to opt out if they would like to purchase a better plan than what their employer offers, but they must offer you something, otherwise they will face a penalty of at least $2,000 per employee.

Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees who choose to provide coverage for their workers will be eligible for a tax credit of up to 50% of the employer’s contribution towards employee health premiums after 2014 (the credit is 35% up until 2014 and will increase thereafter). This is because they are not required to provide health coverage under ObamaCare since they have fewer than 50 employees. In other words, the government will reward them for stepping up and providing coverage anyway. See the chart below for more details on employer requirements or move ahead to learn more about private coverage.



Health care exchanges will be set up at either the state or federal level depending on the decisions of each individual state. What this means is that people will be able to go online to these exchanges and shop for a health plan that meets their personal and financial needs. Think of it like Amazon.com for health insurance. Some states have decided to run their own exchanges while others have passed on the responsibility to the federal government. Other states have decided to set up a hybrid exchange that is run by both the state and the federal governments. See the map below to find out how your state has decided to handle their exchange.

People who have income between 100-133% of the federal poverty level will either be exempt from the mandate, or will be automatically enrolled in their state’s Medicaid program. States are allowed to opt out of the Medicaid expansion, and some have already elected to do so. This means that people with incomes at 133% of the federal poverty level or lower will be exempt from the ObamaCare mandate if their state has opted out. They are still free to purchase private health insurance through the exchanges, but they are not legally required to do so. Individuals and families with incomes between 133-400% of the federal poverty level will be eligible for premium and cost-sharing credits that will help pay for their health plans in order to avoid imposing an unfair financial burden on the person or family. These credits will be applied to your federal income tax return each year.





What if I Choose Not to Get Coverage?

If your income is greater than 133% of the federal poverty level and you do not have health coverage (through work, Medicaid, or private insurance) by 2014, you will be charged a penalty tax each year that you are not insured. This penalty tax will be phased in from 2014 to 2016, and will work as follows: you will either pay a flat fee or a percentage of your taxable income, whichever is larger. For children under the age of 18, the penalty will be one-half the amount for adults.



Won’t This Cost the Government A Lot of Money?

Yes, ObamaCare will cost the government a lot of money, but it will end up saving the government far more money than it will actually spend by implementing the mandate (although Republicans will argue against this until they are blue in the face). In fact, Obamacare will save $200 billion in Medicare expenses by 2016 and $208 billion for Medicare patients by 2020. ObamaCare is designed so that the money the federal government invests in the mandate is offset by savings in other areas. For example, as mentioned above, ObamaCare will save the federal government billions of dollars in DHS payments to hospitals each year since they will no longer have to foot the bill for uninsured patients who can’t afford to pay.

While this article covers the basics of ObamaCare, there is far more information available at www.healthcare.gov. I hope this provided you with enough to help you better understand the mandate and how it will affect you as it goes into play over the next few years. Look for more posts in the coming weeks regarding changes to Medicare, costs to businesses, and political arguments regarding this legislation.

- Molly Gum, The Blue Street Journal

[trish]

ObamaCare will not use your tax dollars to fund abortions

But...

ObamaCare is not and will not lead to a government takeover of health care

But...

ObamaCare will not increase the national debt or deficit

But...

ObamaCare does not hurt health insurance companies, but actually increases their business

But...


ObamaCare is not unconstitutional

But...

ObamaCare is not socialism

But...

ObamaCare is NOT Government-Run Health Care

But...but...doesn't it increase the poverty rate by making it harder for poor people to die?

[Ben]

US employers slashing worker hours to avoid Obamacare insurance mandate:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/us-employers-slash-hours-avoid-obamacare

[Ben]

Obamacare Is Another Private Sector Rip-Off Of Americans:

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/10/01/obamacare-another-private-sector-rip-americans/

[Ben]

Would Hayek Have Approved Obamacare?

Would Hayek Have Approved Obamacare? - YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmrpMfTT1MY)

[Ben]

Suzanne Somers Calls Affordable Care Act A 'Ponzi Scheme' In Wall Street Journal Piece:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/29/suzanne-somers-affordable-care-act-ponzi-scheme_n_4173148.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics

[Ben]

The high STOCK price of Obamacare...

The Markets Go Mad for Obamacare:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-20/obamacare-investors-bet-billions-the-aca-will-succeed

[Ben]

Many 'Obamacare' Critics Accepted Its Subsidies:

And from the article: "Among the corporations is a familiar Democratic nemesis, Koch Industries, the giant conglomerate headed by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/obamacare-critics-accepted-subsidies-23245556