US Healthcare Reform

[Guest alex]

 

Did you mean to post the Sicko trailer

 

I've still not seen Capitalism like.

 

It's good. One of the best bits is when Reagan is making a speech and the bloke standing next to him (chairman of Merrill Lynch) tells him to "speed up"...Spine chilling how controlled he was by the bankers and money men. Of course the biggest de-regulator of all time Reagan. Err it's available from the usual sources now.

And Nancy and, by extension, Frank Sinatra.

[Happy Face 29]

MY health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?

 

Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection could soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/opinion/24reich.html

 

This is how politics is supposed to work. Well, not really — in reality, you’d like to see your leaders actually lead, i.e. do the right thing first, before being forced into it by circumstance. But we’ll take the latter.

 

The sequence: Obama and the Dems got whipped in Massachusetts and it suddenly occurred to them that they might want to start doing things that would be popular outside their Rolodex of campaign contributors. A bailout tax was one early idea. They started searching the landscape for outrages they could get on the other side of and found a good one: Anthem Blue Cross in California raising rates by 39 percent.

 

Suddenly the Obama administration decided to come out against the antitrust exemption for the insurance industry. Like they only just noticed the problem.

 

The insurance antitrust exemption has been an outrage for over fifty years. The original bill formalizing the industry’s exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, was dreamed up by two Hollywood villains. Nevada Senator Pat McCarran was the inspiration for the “Senator Pat Geary” character in Godfather Part II (”Senator… my final offer is this: nothing” — that guy), while Homer Ferguson was the inspiration for the Lloyd Bridges character in Tucker who whored himself out for the auto makers to get Tucker’s new car struck from the market. These two gigantic assholes teamed up to help the insurance industry avoid the albatross of competitive pricing.

 

McCarran-Ferguson was supposed to be temporary. Franklin Roosevelt clearly thought so when he signed it into law in 1944, saying that after “a moratorium period,” the antitrust laws “will be applicable in full force and effect to the business of insurance.” The law was supposed to expire in 1947. It didn’t.

 

As a result, all the evil shit that made for such high drama in Kurt Eichenwald’s book The Informant – about a bunch of agricultural firms who get together to fix prices for an additive called Lysine — that’s actually legal in the insurance business.

 

This is why insurers (especially insurers with large market shares in small states) are easily able to gouge customers and deny coverage. There’s really no legal mechanism for preventing the firms from getting together and arranging price-fixing and other outrages. In a normal market customers would be able to get better coverage and cheaper rates from a competitor, but insurance is really more like a series of competition-free fiefdoms where the customers can’t go elsewhere for a better deal. State Farm even denied coverage to Trent freaking Lott after Katrina and got away with it because State Farm has Misssissippi by the nads. It’s crazy.

 

 

This is, again, another reason Obamacare was such a joke from the start. The White House vision clearly called for “health care reform” without a repeal of McCarran-Ferguson. Which is technically almost impossible, but they tried it.

 

 

That didn’t work, naturally, so now they’re finally getting around to doing the obvious. They’ll fail — every attempt to repeal McCarran-Ferguson inevitably does, mysteriously — but at least they’re talking about it. But Jesus, why does this stuff take so long?

 

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/

[Park Life 71]

Such dimwits the yanks, they could create a half a million jobs by expanding state sponsored (free at source) healthcare to the masses. Pretend healthcare is like a war and put hospitals down instead of tanks and missiles, buy into the economy and drive the money supply with jobs. Bulkbuy drugs from around the world thus driving down costs and terrorising the pharma cartels. [/Parky/Lenin]

Edited February 26, 2010 by Park Life

[Renton 18049]

Such dimwits the yanks, they could create a half a million jobs by expanding state sponsored (free at source) healthcare to the masses. Pretend healthcare is like a war and put hospitals down instead of tanks and missiles, buy into the economy and drive the money supply with jobs. Bulkbuy drugs from around the world thus driving down costs and terrorising the pharma cartels. [/Parky/Lenin]

 

I'd think that was rubbish Parky. Americans (on average) are amongst the biggest consumers of healthcare in the world, they spend twice as much as their GDP on healthcare as we do (with no better results). I would think rationalizing their system to something resembling the NHS or most other European countries would result in massive job losses. Not that that would be a bad thing, particularly for the middle men.

 

Seems a bit strange you're advocating this anyway giving your views on medicine?

[Park Life 71]

Such dimwits the yanks, they could create a half a million jobs by expanding state sponsored (free at source) healthcare to the masses. Pretend healthcare is like a war and put hospitals down instead of tanks and missiles, buy into the economy and drive the money supply with jobs. Bulkbuy drugs from around the world thus driving down costs and terrorising the pharma cartels. [/Parky/Lenin]

 

I'd think that was rubbish Parky. Americans (on average) are amongst the biggest consumers of healthcare in the world, they spend twice as much as their GDP on healthcare as we do (with no better results). I would think rationalizing their system to something resembling the NHS or most other European countries would result in massive job losses. Not that that would be a bad thing, particularly for the middle men.

 

Seems a bit strange you're advocating this anyway giving your views on medicine?

 

They spend more on healthcare as per gdp cause they don't know what they're doing.

[Renton 18049]

I think this amazing graph from the National Geographic perfectly illustrates why The US desperately need Healthcare reform.

 

Sorry I can't embed this for some reason but follow the link - it provides food for thought.

[Cid_MCDP 0]

Such dimwits the yanks, they could create a half a million jobs by expanding state sponsored (free at source) healthcare to the masses. Pretend healthcare is like a war and put hospitals down instead of tanks and missiles, buy into the economy and drive the money supply with jobs. Bulkbuy drugs from around the world thus driving down costs and terrorising the pharma cartels. [/Parky/Lenin]

 

I'd think that was rubbish Parky. Americans (on average) are amongst the biggest consumers of healthcare in the world, they spend twice as much as their GDP on healthcare as we do (with no better results). I would think rationalizing their system to something resembling the NHS or most other European countries would result in massive job losses. Not that that would be a bad thing, particularly for the middle men.

 

Seems a bit strange you're advocating this anyway giving your views on medicine?

 

They spend more on healthcare as per gdp cause they don't know what they're doing.

 

Nah, we spend more on healthcare because there are too many hands between my wallet and the doctor's.

[Renton 18049]

Such dimwits the yanks, they could create a half a million jobs by expanding state sponsored (free at source) healthcare to the masses. Pretend healthcare is like a war and put hospitals down instead of tanks and missiles, buy into the economy and drive the money supply with jobs. Bulkbuy drugs from around the world thus driving down costs and terrorising the pharma cartels. [/Parky/Lenin]

 

I'd think that was rubbish Parky. Americans (on average) are amongst the biggest consumers of healthcare in the world, they spend twice as much as their GDP on healthcare as we do (with no better results). I would think rationalizing their system to something resembling the NHS or most other European countries would result in massive job losses. Not that that would be a bad thing, particularly for the middle men.

 

Seems a bit strange you're advocating this anyway giving your views on medicine?

 

They spend more on healthcare as per gdp cause they don't know what they're doing.

 

Nah, we spend more on healthcare because there are too many hands between my wallet and the doctor's.

 

See the Graph.

 

Americans get much less bang for their buck than any comparable country, and ironically this is down to your shunning of social medicine and your love of the free market. It simply doesn't work for healthcare.

[Park Life 71]

Such dimwits the yanks, they could create a half a million jobs by expanding state sponsored (free at source) healthcare to the masses. Pretend healthcare is like a war and put hospitals down instead of tanks and missiles, buy into the economy and drive the money supply with jobs. Bulkbuy drugs from around the world thus driving down costs and terrorising the pharma cartels. [/Parky/Lenin]

 

I'd think that was rubbish Parky. Americans (on average) are amongst the biggest consumers of healthcare in the world, they spend twice as much as their GDP on healthcare as we do (with no better results). I would think rationalizing their system to something resembling the NHS or most other European countries would result in massive job losses. Not that that would be a bad thing, particularly for the middle men.

 

Seems a bit strange you're advocating this anyway giving your views on medicine?

 

They spend more on healthcare as per gdp cause they don't know what they're doing.

 

Nah, we spend more on healthcare because there are too many hands between my wallet and the doctor's.

 

See the Graph.

 

Americans get much less bang for their buck than any comparable country, and ironically this is down to your shunning of social medicine and your love of the free market. It simply doesn't work for healthcare.

 

Yeah that as well.

[Cid_MCDP 0]

Such dimwits the yanks, they could create a half a million jobs by expanding state sponsored (free at source) healthcare to the masses. Pretend healthcare is like a war and put hospitals down instead of tanks and missiles, buy into the economy and drive the money supply with jobs. Bulkbuy drugs from around the world thus driving down costs and terrorising the pharma cartels. [/Parky/Lenin]

 

I'd think that was rubbish Parky. Americans (on average) are amongst the biggest consumers of healthcare in the world, they spend twice as much as their GDP on healthcare as we do (with no better results). I would think rationalizing their system to something resembling the NHS or most other European countries would result in massive job losses. Not that that would be a bad thing, particularly for the middle men.

 

Seems a bit strange you're advocating this anyway giving your views on medicine?

 

They spend more on healthcare as per gdp cause they don't know what they're doing.

 

Nah, we spend more on healthcare because there are too many hands between my wallet and the doctor's.

 

See the Graph.

 

Americans get much less bang for their buck than any comparable country, and ironically this is down to your shunning of social medicine and your love of the free market. It simply doesn't work for healthcare.

 

It isn't ironic in the slightest. It's good old-fashioned corporate greed, just in a different industry than it normally is found.

 

I think the main problem my countrymen have with socialized medicine is how the govenment and media package it. I apologize if I've already told this story, but there's a guy I work with. He's probably around 50 or 55. This guy has two kids who are about my age. Neither of them have managed to do much with their lives other than my co-worker's daughter has 3 kids apparently. They all moved back home and now my co-worker has like 10 people under his roof because the son's wife and her mom have moved in, etc. etc.

 

In any case, this guy, the co-worker, he's a staunch Republican. He's one of those people who thinks for some unknown reason that he's going to be rich one of these days, so he's a Republican through and through. Hate, hate HATES the Democrats, boy.

 

So a few weeks ago, he's talking about how his grandson lost a tooth. Funny thing is, the kid was thinking he ought to get more money from the tooth fairy because this too was a gold tooth that fell out.

 

This kid is like 5 years old, and as I'm sure you realize, is on Medicare/ Medicaid. I paid for that kid to have a non-permanent tooth replaced with a gold tooth with my tax dollars.

 

This co-worker of mine has no idea the hypocrisy he espouses regarding socialized medicine because he doesn't perceive Medicaid as being fairly close to socialized medicine. There's millions of people in this country on some sort of assistance program like Medicare/ Medicaid, live off of Social Security, or use other socialized public services like the Fire Departments or Police, but they don't perceive it as that. This, I feel, is one of the main problems with the U.S. getting some sort of national healthcare program in my lifetime- the Republicans aren't fans because they make tremendous amounts of money keeping the medical industry an industry. The Dems can't put together a coherent package that would actually do what we need it to do at a country level (probably because they're on the books too). The majority of the people are too dumb to understand the full implications of having socialized healthcare, and a large contingent really do believe the government will somehow fuck it up and we'd end up worse off than we are now. And when you see Fox News and MSNBC standing around fanning the flames of fear, you can kind of understand why. Still doesn't excuse people's irrational and ignorant beliefs on the subject, but it does go a certain distance in explaining them.

Edited March 9, 2010 by Cid_MCDP

[Park Life 71]

From http://tarpley.net/2010/03/10/letter...100-per-month/:

 

"Letter to Congressman Van Hollen: Reject Obamacare, Enact Medicare for All at $100 per Month

"Webster G. Tarpley

TARPLEY.net

March 10, 2010

 

"Dear Congressman Van Hollen:

 

"I urge you to reject the Obama health care bill. This is not reform; it is a bailout of bankrupt insurance companies at the expense of average working people, obtained through coercion and extortion. Forcing Americans to buy insurance from private, for-profit, deregulated companies is clearly unconstitutional. The idea of a mandate to purchase insurance is a reactionary Republican invention, and we want no part of it. Furthermore, this bill’s $500 billion in Medicare cuts are a direct attack on the economic rights of Americans implemented under the New Deal and the Great Society, and will cause incalculable suffering and human tragedy. These colossal Medicare cuts will inevitably result in rationing, delay, and the denial of care, causing patients to die needlessly. The spirit of this bill is that of OMB Director Peter Orszag, the sinister Malthusian bureaucrat who is behind recent attempts to deny Americans Pap smears, mammograms, and PSA tests – as cost-cutting measures.

 

"Instead, we should set a national goal of extending US life expectancy by five years over the coming two decades. Funding for Medicare must be increased by making Wall Street pay their fair share with a 1% Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax on derivatives and other speculative transactions, by clawing back the TARP bailout from the zombie banks, and by ending the Iraq and Afghan wars. Give every person the voluntary option to join Medicare For All at any age for $100 per person per month, with generous allowances and fee waivers for families, the unemployed, students, the working poor, and the destitute. Further savings can come through a fully funded national and international crash program of biomedical research to find cures for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other dread diseases.

 

"In addition, health care requires more than insurance. We need to build 1,000 modern, state of the art hospitals with 500 beds each just to reach the minimum of targets set by the Hill-Burton Act of 1946. We need to train 250,000 doctors over the next ten years. These goals require serious investments, not subsidies to predatory insurance companies who are going broke because of their reckless derivatives bets.

 

"Your role in the Democratic leadership suggests that you are severely out of touch, paying far more attention to the needs of Obama and Pelosi than to the needs of your district. Stop armtwisting for this wretched sellout and listen to your constituents. Vote no on this bill.

 

"Webster G. Tarpley"

[ChezGiven 0]

Webster is an idiot. First of all if insurance companies are bankrupt it means that the payment mechanisms are too expensive, nothing in that case to do with profit. Secondly, there is vast evidence that the mechanims caus massive overuse of ineffective interventions, the evidence on pap smears being the most obvious. Denying more use of these reduces cost without affecting outcomes. Stopped reading after that.

[Happy Face 29]

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats: all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster: sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted. Democratic pundits used that claim to push for "filibuster reform," arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents. In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

 

Continue Reading

But all those claims were put to the test -- all those bluffs were called -- once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill. That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) -- including the addition of the public option -- would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had. Great news for the public option, right? Wrong. As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished. Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it. Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed -- a "majority rule" system -- they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes.

 

All of that was bad enough, but now the scam is getting even more extreme, more transparent. Faced with the dilemma of how they could possibly justify their year-long claimed support for the public option only now to fail to enact it, more and more Democratic Senators were pressured into signing a letter supporting the enactment of the public option through reconciliation; that number is now above 40, and is rapidly approaching 50. In other words, there is a serious possibility that the Senate might enact a public option if there is a vote on it, because it's very difficult for these Senators to vote "No" after pretending all year long -- on the record -- that they supported it. In fact, The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim yesterday wrote: "the votes appear to exist to include a public option. It's only a matter of will."

 

The one last hope for Senate Democratic leaders was to avoid a vote altogether on the public option, thereby relieving Senators of having to take a position and being exposed. But that trick would require the cooperation of all Senators -- any one Senator can introduce a public option amendment during the reconciliation and force a vote -- and it now seems that Bernie Sanders, to his great credit, is refusing to go along with the Democrats' sham and will do exactly that: ignore the wishes of the Senate leadership and force a roll call vote on the public option.

 

So now what is to be done? They only need 50 votes, so they can't use the filibuster excuse. They don't seem able to prevent a vote, as they tried to do, because Sanders will force one. And it seems there aren't enough Senate Democrats willing to vote against the public option after publicly saying all year long they supported it, which means it might get 50 votes if a roll call vote is held. So what is the Senate Democratic leadership now doing? They're whipping against the public option, which they pretended all year along to so vigorously support:

 

 

Senate Democratic leaders are concerned about the amount of mischief their own Members could create if or when a health care reconciliation bill comes up for debate. And sources said some supporters of creating a public insurance option are privately worried that they will be asked to vote against the idea during debate on the bill, which could occur before March 26.

 

Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) acknowledged Wednesday that liberals may be asked to oppose any amendment, including one creating a public option, to ensure a smooth ride for the bill. "We have to tell people, 'You just have to swallow hard' and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen," Durbin, who supports a public option, told reporters.

 

 

If -- as they claimed all year long -- a majority of Congressional Democrats and the White House all support a public option, why would they possibly whip against it, and ensure its rejection, at exactly the moment when it finally became possible to pass it? If majorities of the House and Senate support it, as does the White House, how could the inclusion of a public option possibly jeopardize passage of the bill?

 

I've argued since August that the evidence was clear that the White House had privately negotiated away the public option and didn't want it, even as the President claimed publicly (and repeatedly) that he did. And while I support the concept of "filibuster reform" in theory, it's long seemed clear that it would actually accomplish little, because the 60-vote rule does not actually impede anything. Rather, it is the excuse Democrats fraudulently invoke, using what I called the Rotating Villain tactic (it's now Durbin's turn), to refuse to pass what they claim they support but are politically afraid to pass, or which they actually oppose (sorry, we'd so love to do this, but gosh darn it, we just can't get 60 votes). If only 50 votes were required, they'd just find ways to ensure they lacked 50. Both of those are merely theories insusceptible to conclusive proof, but if I had the power to create the most compelling evidence for those theories that I could dream up, it would be hard to surpass what Democrats are doing now with regard to the public option. They're actually whipping against the public option. Could this sham be any more transparent?

 

*******

 

One related point: when I was on Morning Joe several weeks ago, I argued this point -- why aren't Democrats including the public option in the reconciliation package given that they have the 50 votes in favor of the public option? -- and, in response, Chuck Todd recited White House spin and DC conventional wisdom (needless to say) by insisting that they do not have the votes to pass the public option. If that's true -- if they lack the votes to pass the public option through reconciliation -- why is Dick Durbin now whipping against it, telling Senators -- in his own words -- "You just have to swallow hard' and say that putting an amendment on this is either going to stop it or slow it down, and we just can’t let it happen"?

 

No discussion of the public option is complete without noting how much the private health insurance industry despises it; the last thing they want, of course, is the beginning of real competition and choice.

 

As I've noted before, the column I've written which has produced the highest level of hate mail over the past year (in terms of volume and intensity) was when I compiled the evidence back in August that the White House was working to ensure there'd be no public option in the final bill at exactly the same time Obama was publicly insisting he favored it. The very idea that the President might be saying one thing in public and doing the opposite in private was outrageous and conspiratorial; a politician (or, at least, Barack Obama) would never do such a thing. Yet all along, that's exactly what the White House was doing, and it continues to do exactly that even though there is, at least, a significant chance that there are sufficient votes to enact the public option. That's the reason their explanations and excuses make no sense: because the real reason there's no public option -- they don't want one -- is the one they can't or won't admit.

 

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_gr...rats/index.html

[Happy Face 29]

On Monday, Ed Shultz interviewed New York Times Washington reporter David Kirkpatrick on his MSNBC TV show, and Kirkpatrick confirmed the existence of the deal. Shultz quoted Chip Kahn, chief lobbyist for the for-profit hospital industry on Kahn's confidence that the White House would honor the no public option deal, and Kirkpatrick responded:

 

"That's a lobbyist for the hospital industry and he's talking about the hospital industry's specific deal with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee and, yeah, I think the hospital industry's got a deal here. There really were only two deals, meaning quid pro quo handshake deals on both sides, one with the hospitals and the other with the drug industry. And I think what you're interested in is that in the background of these deals was the presumption, shared on behalf of the lobbyists on the one side and the White House on the other, that the public option was not going to be in the final product."

Kirkpatrick also acknowledged that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina had confirmed the existence of the deal to him.

 

This should be big news. Even while President Obama was saying that he thought a public option was a good idea and encouraging supporters to believe his healthcare plan would include one, he had promised for-profit hospital lobbyists that there would be no public option in the final bill.

 

more

Edited March 18, 2010 by Happy Face

[ChezGiven 0]

Approved.

[ChezGiven 0]

"This legislation will not fix everything that ails our healthcare system, but it moves us decisively in the right direction," added the President.

 

His objective all along, as i always said. If Obama had tried to push through a more socialist reform measure, it would have failed. Now it is law, incremental changes can be added to improve the fairness of the system over time. Obama is win and the critics should hang their heads in shame, what they wanted would never have flown, Obama knew that so went for the best compromise possible. The minor changes needed to bring the correct financial incentives into the system and better access to care for the poor will occur as small amendments to this bill over the next 7 years.

[Happy Face 29]

"This legislation will not fix everything that ails our healthcare system, but it moves us decisively in the right direction," added the President.

 

His objective all along, as i always said. If Obama had tried to push through a more socialist reform measure, it would have failed. Now it is law, incremental changes can be added to improve the fairness of the system over time. Obama is win and the critics should hang their heads in shame, what they wanted would never have flown, Obama knew that so went for the best compromise possible. The minor changes needed to bring the correct financial incentives into the system and better access to care for the poor will occur as small amendments to this bill over the next 7 years.

 

The perfect bill for the poorest Americans....and the wealthiest...especially those with shares in pharma or insurance. A middle class skull fucking.

 

[AgentAxeman 86]

A middle class skull fucking.

 

 

nail, head!

[Park Life 71]

Same in England, the target now is to break the middle class. Been hiding their money dontcha know....

[Park Life 71]

@ Chez.

 

Btw Tarpley is a muppet but his grandiosity always catches my eye.

[AgentAxeman 86]

Same in England, the target now is to break the middle class. Been hiding their money dontcha know....

 

 

no middle class?? you mean masters and peasants will be the norm?? who'd have thought it from our socialist masters!

 

Edit:

Edited March 22, 2010 by AgentAxeman

[ChezGiven 0]

Its a rarity when its only Parky making any sense in replying to me.

 

Just remember that in the US, you pay minimal tax. If you lived in the EU you would pay a lot more in the same income bracket. The difference? Greater than a healthcare premium.

 

Funny that.

[Happy Face 29]

If Obama had tried to push through a more socialist reform measure, it would have failed.

 

http://www.toontastic.net/board/index.php?...st&p=721893

[Park Life 71]

Same in England, the target now is to break the middle class. Been hiding their money dontcha know....

 

 

no middle class?? you mean masters and peasants will be the norm?? who'd have thought it from our socialist masters!

 

Edit:

 

It's kinda what they are upto, the well educated and money savvy middle class need to be dealt wiv, as they carry too many notions about democracy and whatnot....

[ChezGiven 0]

If Obama had tried to push through a more socialist reform measure, it would have failed.

 

http://www.toontastic.net/board/index.php?...st&p=721893

 

I prefer to read what you think, not some mouthpiece from the US with little understanding of economics or healthcare.