When the Bachmannites shriek about “repealing Obaaahhmacare!” yell back “REPEAL THIS!”
Or maybe not. Nonetheless, this video breaks it down like a fraction and should be shared far and wide:
Check the website, thanksobamacare.org for deets.
Posted in Obamacare? No, ObamaCares!
Tagged healthcare reform, Obamacare, ObamaCares
LA Times featured an op-ed yesterday that is a must-read:
I want to apologize to President Obama. But first, some background.
I found out three weeks ago I have cancer. I’m 49 years old, have been married for almost 20 years and have two kids. My husband has his own small computer business, and I run a small nonprofit in the San Fernando Valley. I am also an artist. Money is tight, and we don’t spend it frivolously. We’re just ordinary, middle-class people, making an honest living, raising great kids and participating in our community, the kids’ schools and church.
We’re good people, and we work hard. But we haven’t been able to afford health insurance for more than two years. And now I have third-stage breast cancer and am facing months of expensive treatment.
To understand how such a thing could happen to a family like ours, I need to take you back nine years to when my husband got laid off from the entertainment company where he’d worked for 10 years. Until then, we had been insured through his work, with a first-rate plan. After he got laid off, we got to keep that health insurance for 18 months through COBRA, by paying $1,300 a month, which was a huge burden on an unemployed father and his family.
By the time the COBRA ran out, my husband had decided to go into business for himself, so we had to purchase our own insurance. That was fine for a while. Every year his business grew. But insurance premiums were steadily rising too. More than once, we switched carriers for a lower rate, only to have them raise rates significantly after a few months. Continue reading
There have been many lies circulated about President Obama over the last 3 years, but the one that seems to have poisoned the water from the beginning is the lie that President Obama struck a deal to keep the public option out of the final health care bill.
It has formed the basis of the “caved” meme that people on the left, most of whom never supported Obama as a candidate, have used to feed their irrational hatred for our president.
The lie has taken on epic proportions as it’s morphed over the years. Recently, I’ve had liberal friends throw it in my face when I’ve shown my support for our very accomplished president. The lying has to stop!
The original source from which the lie was created, is an article that David Kirkpatrick wrote in The New York Times about the active role that President Obama was taking in crafting the health care law. There were two mentions of the “public option” in the entire article, one was in reference to what the Democrats in the house were pushing and the other contradicts the lie completely. Rep. Henry Waxman was quoted in the article.
“The president has said he wants a public option to keep everybody honest. He hasn’t said he wants a co-op as a public option.”
You really can’t get any more clear than that, can you? In the article that is the source for the public option lie, there is a quote from a respected member of the House saying that the president wants a public option. And to be fair to the author, he never even implies that the public option was part of the deal.
He has been called a crook. He has been called a Muslim. He has been called a terrorist, a “lion African,” a Kenyan, an illegal alien, a Manchurian candidate, a socialist, a racist, a Communist, and a dick.
His motives have been questioned. His legislative victories for women’s rights, for gay rights, for children’s health and the health of 9/11 first responders have been called into question, downplayed, excused and opposed even by those who claimed to support the type of change he knew was necessary and thought was possible during his 2008 campaign for the presidency.
The one caveat of his mission, the one point he knew he had to emphasize daily both for those who stood with him and those who doubted him from day one, was that change would not come easily.
During the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial, President Obama renewed his request for patience, persistence and continued dedication in a speech that both honored the Civil Rights hero and contextualized the fight for equality that continues to this day.
The following excerpt of Obama’s speech is worth reading a thousand times over. I ask only that you read it once, and that while so doing you think of the wars, the budget cuts, the attacks on women’s rights, the right’s resistance to both social and economic justice, the growing economic inequality, the opposition to health care reform and financial regulation reform, and the hundreds of other actions he’s taken in an effort to curb the injustices of both the minorities and the masses in America who have been unequally represented in government, and that you put these individual battles into the context they require for fully grasping the real historical significance of electing our first black president.
[Read the transcript and watch the video after the jump]
William Greider, The Nation
Contrary to the growingly popular stance in American politics that common sense is akin to defeatism, “grand bargains” and “pragmatic compromises” do not, as Greider claims, destroy the “crown jewels of democratic reform.” They are the currency of the democratic empire.
In criticizing the debt deal, Greider has amplified the commonly aired grievance from the left that President Obama is insufficiently liberal and uncommitted to the progressive cause.
His claim that Obama “abandoned” core Democratic values during the debt ceiling negotiation misinterprets the president’s priorities and misdirects a grievance that progressives ought to be aiming at themselves.
via Business Insider
They loathe big government and support budget cuts but can’t part with any of the specific programs that contribute most to the national debt.
Polls show a neck-and-neck race when respondents have the option of choosing a generic Republican to go up against President Obama in the 2012 general election, but when forced to pick between the incumbent and one of the eight candidates in the Republican primary race, polls give Obama a much wider margin of victory.
The president’s American Jobs Act received a “lukewarm” reception when it was announced, with 45 percent of Americans supporting it, but the specifics of the bill polled much better:
The CNN debate last night was wretched. It was everything that is wrong with this country — including feckless media and pundunces who should be ashamed for mainstreaming Teabilly bullshit — crammed into a studio so laden with patriotic lights, flags, and other Americana that even the creators of South Park and Team America were likely shocked and awed.
Then came the “cheering for Rick Perry’s high execution rate” moment: The Tea Party audience cheered — actually cheered at the notion of letting an uninsured man die if he didn’t decide for himself to buy Liberty Health Insurance from Liberty Health Associates, using his Liberty cell phone:
Here’s a bit of news that will likely get lost in the Libya Liberation shuffle–
Obama’s joint task force between HHS and DOJ to crackdown on healthcare fraud is bearing fruit.
Health Care Fraud Prosecutions Up Sharply in FY 2011
(17 Aug 2011) Very timely Justice Department data show that during the first eight months of FY 2011, the rate of federal prosecutions for health care fraud is up 85 percent over the previous year. So far, the government has reported 903 new health care fraud prosecutions, which already exceeds the level for all of FY 2010.
The higher numbers can be accounted for by a series of FBI investigations. The data, obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, show that in Puerto Rico alone, 420 defendants have been charged this year. Within the fifty states, the Southern District of Florida (Miami) led the nation in activity, accounting for one out of every nine health care fraud prosecutions. More details can be found in the report at:http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/258/
Here is a chart that tracks healthcare fraud prosecutions over the past ten years:
This is significant news — news which will likely be ignored by the MSM and Professional Left — because this increased effort by the Obama Administration will likely lead to a decrease in wasteful spending:
To commemorate the birthday of healthcare reform, Ron Johnson (Asshole-Wisconsin) wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that is so fraught with bullshit, it compelled me to use the word “fraught” in this very blog post.
To put it another way, it’s a crock. It’s a crock of shit with a shit demi-glacé; that’s what I’m sayin’, y’all.
Calling the Affordable Healthcare Act the “single greatest assault on our freedom in his lifetime,”1 Senator Johnson went on to spin some yarn about how his daughter who had a heart condition (she’s alive and well having been treated under her father’s private insurance) would have been murdered by Obama’s Death (Panel) Eaters, and how sad is that?
I don’t even want to think what might have happened if she had been born at a time and place where government defined the limits for most insurance policies and set precedents on what would be covered. Would the life-saving procedures that saved her have been deemed cost-effective by policy makers deciding where to spend increasingly scarce tax dollars?
Carey’s story sounds like a miracle, but America has always been a place where medical miracles happen.
Nice try, dipshit. The ACA doesn’t set precedents on what will be covered; it sets minimum limits on what private insurers must cover. I mean, if health insurance companies are going to take your money, shouldn’t they spend it on health care? I know. It’s crazy talk. I must be out of my mind.
From Jonathan Chait over at The New Republic:
That’s the argument. Johnson implies that procedures like this don’t happen elsewhere. Does he have any data? No. Does he have any reason to believe that the Affordable Care Act would prevent private insurance from covering procedures like this? No. That doesn’t happen in countries like Switzerland that have systems like the Affordable Care Act, and it doesn’t happen in the socialist hell of Massachusetts.
Indeed, one of the reasons for the law is that private health insurance often contains lifetime caps on coverage, or arbitrarily throws people who develop expensive conditions off their plans, and therefore keeps people from getting procedures like the one Johnson’s daughter received. But asking someone like him to actually take into consideration the actual needs of the tens of millions of Americans without health insurance, as against the completely imaginary threat to his only family, is asking far too much of Johnson’s intellect or moral reasoning.
Pretty much.
But enough talk about Teabilly assholes.
It’s a celebration, bitches! Let’s look back on what Obama said one year ago today: Continue reading
Posted in Angry Black Reader Participation, Balloon Juice Cross-Posts, Body/Health Shenanigans, Obamacare? No, ObamaCares!, Political Shenanigans
Tagged ACA, healthcare reform, It's a celebration bitches!, Louis CK, Obama, poll, President Obama, Republicans are asshats, Ron Johnson, Teabillies, Wisconsin
