Joe Biden kept the crowd with him on Tuesday, partly with red meat rhetoric. You’ll see his outrage in the clips below about health care and about the Republican policy of offering deferred taxes to corporations that move operations to other countries. Humor played a part in his presentation, as well, as you’ll also see.
Another ingredient in his appeal is that he sympathizes with middle class people because of his own middle class background. He talked about going to his dad’s place of work, an auto agency, to see about borrowing the car for the prom and finding his dad out on the car lot. (Hey, my dad sold cars. You think I didn’t identify?) Anyway, his dad was visibly upset because he’d been turned down for a loan for Joe’s college education.
And finally, of course, the crowd loved Biden because they were fired up and ready to add their energy to his message.
On health care, he hits McCain hard for proposing to tax health care benefits as if they were income:
Obama needs to be more aggressive in getting Biden some coverage. This is great stuff.
Kudos to Joe Biden for his rousing address but I would be remiss not to point out that the health care he refers to in Canada that allows the minivan to be sold for 14% less than in the US is single payer health care. Under the Obama plan w. insurance still at the table, the minivan will continue to cost 14% more than it does in Canada.
i wonder, how so?
McCain’s proposal leaves everyone at the mercy of the private insurance industry with tiered health plans so you would buy a plan as good as you could afford. With enough coverage limitations, deductables & copays you would fine something but discover how little the insurance actually covered when you got sick or hospitalized. McCain has managed to find a way to make a horrible insurance system worse for a lot, possibly most, working people. A position that acceptable only because so few understand our healthcare system & its costs. Obama’s proposal is slightly better but leaves a more “regulated” private insurance system intact. I doubt such a powerful industry would ever be regulated by our government sufficiently to prevent gouging everyone else (patients, doctors, hospitals) or cherry picking only the most healthful, just as they do now. Obama’s plan does little to reduce or control bureaucracy or costs, including administrative overhead. Many studies show that only a single payer system can do that. Medical experts say that a universal Medicare for All system could cut overhead ~10% but only if our current crazy public/private is ended.
and don’t really see anything there that hasn’t already been applied in some form over the past ten years w. the exception of “increasing insurance industry competition”. He also calls for catastrophic reinsurance coverage for the purpose of reducing standard premiums. He doesn’t provide much detail or support for either position and assumes that b/c decreased competition several years ago caused cost increases, then increased competition could do the opposite. We tried a “catastrophic care” routine a few years ago and it proved unworkable.
But if Obama/Biden want to provide some detail and let me know how tiering, means testing, and access, etc will figure into the “public plan” I will be happy to listen.
The real issue, as I see it, is that Obama knows that Single Payer is the real option, but is unable to advocate for it b/c of you and me. A majority now believes that single payer is the answer, but the the number is still not sufficient to shout down the insurance industry. A sustained outcry to prohibit insurance industry money to political campaigns would free politicians to look honestly at our broken health care system and move to fix it.
supplementals in European countries are covered via Non-Profits. These supplementals provide for designer services such as cosmetics, private rooms, excuses from waiting lines, etc. HR 676 provides for such options as well. But the basic plans are not optional and the premise is “everybody in, nobody out” b/c that is the basis for the pool. You may not opt out, but you may purchase a supplemental.
Yes I do oppose incremental health reform plans which are convoluted and sometimes impossible to understand. Their goal is to protect for profit corporations who earn their daily bread (and a ton of it at that) by taking a quarter of the health care dollar in payment for not providing health services. It is no longer possible to maintain the health of our citizens and the status quo of insurance companies at the same time.
Obama’s plan reminds me of the Chinese proverb which I noted on the Common Dreams site – “Much noise on stairs. No one appears.”