> <http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/blue-dog-dream>
> A Blue Dog Dream
> Neera Tanden
>
> Let’s go issue by issue. The Blue Dogs opposed the public plan that
> featured so prominently in the House bill. Well, the Senate scrapped that
> a long time ago.
So in addition to a grotesquely inefficient, wasteful, taxpayer-subsidized military-industrial complex, a prison-cop-industrial complex, a sprawl-oil-highway complex, and a Treasury-investment-bank complex, we'll now have a grotesquely inefficient, wasteful, taxpayer-subsidized insurance-pharma complex.
> Blue Dogs wanted more cost-containment policies. Well, the
> Senate bill is not just stronger, but substantially so. It
> features a robust Independent Payment Advisory Board with authority to
> lower Medicare payment rates.
Translation: Medicare will be gutted and the elderly will now be expected to die. Russian-style demographic collapse, here we come.
> The Senate bill also has stronger provisions to push payment
> reform through a new “innovation center” that will reward quality of care
Translation: insurance companies have yet another way to screw doctors and justify nurse understaffing.
> the Senate
> bill has a Medicare tax that raises only $87 billion from high-income
> folks.
The rich will get richer.
> The Senate bill costs nearly $200 billion less over ten years.
The poor will die.
> But liberals seem to have made the
> following calculation: In order to get a bill that covers 30 million
> Americans, with insurance reforms that protect consumers, they will
> swallow hard and accept several provisions that anger them. It’s called
> compromise—and, in some quarters, it’s also known as governing.
It's called Empire, and it's an offense against any notion of decency, rationality or humanity.
Soviet-style collapse, here we come.
-- DRR