Trojan Horses: How Obamacare Actually Paves the Way Toward Single Payer

Last week the liberal documentary-maker Michael Moore prompted indigestion across the progressive wonk community by pronouncing Obamacare “awful.” In a New York Times op-ed, he bemoaned the way the president’s law preserved the health insurance industry rather than replacing it with a Medicare-for-all style single-payer system. The good news, Moore conceded, is that the previously uninsured (and often previously uninsurable) can get finally get coverage. The bad news is that their coverage will often be lousy and pose an enormous financial burden. He ended by calling for activists to lean on state politicians in an effort to beef the law up.

I happen to agree with Moore’s basic sentiment. For-profit health insurance is on some level morally offensive—at least when it’s practiced the way we Americans practice capitalism. With a few tantalizing but mostly unrepresentative exceptions, the longstanding aim of health insurers has been to weed out sick people, and to weasel out of paying for treatment if they somehow get insurance, so that the companies could boost their share price, lavish income on their executives, and plow money into annoyingly saccharine TV ads. To its everlasting credit, Obamacare genuinely tries to whip the insurers into shape—making it illegal to deny coverage to sick people, or to withdraw coverage when healthy people get sick, among other much-needed reforms. But you still have to be skeptical of middlemen who historically spent a mere 60 cents of every dollar individual policy-holders sent them on, you know, health care.1

And yet I’m still much more sympathetic to Obamacare than Moore. He thinks it’s awful. I consider it a deceptively sneaky way to get the health care system both of us really want.

How? Allow me a brief digression: In 1991, Congress created the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, which funded screenings for women who earn up to 250 percent of the poverty level. What Congress didn’t do is provide money to pay for treatment if the tests came back positive. The policy seemed sadistically cruel: Suddenly thousands of women would discover they had a life-threatening illness while realizing they could do nothing about it. Both Moore and I would have surely denounced the law. But it soon proved to be a shrewd, if unintentional, opening move. “Almost from the moment it was implemented, there was pressure to take the next step,” says Harold Pollack, a professor of social policy at the University of Chicago. “They constructed a sympathetic and organized constituency … with an actionable grievance.” Congress approved the money for treatment in 2000.

In some sense, Obamacare is the breast-and-cervical-cancer story writ large. In order to move the law through the Senate, the White House had to make all sorts of noxious compromises, like keeping the overall spending under $1 trillion, which limited the subsidies available to people buying insurance. Hence the kind of horror-stories Moore cites in his op-ed: A 60-year old couple with an annual income of $65,000 who could end up spending $25,000 on health care in a single year. And that’s with Obamacare. (This is something of an outlier, but not that much of one.) But the flip side is that the law also created potentially millions of hard-working Americans who will have some health insurance; just maddeningly insufficient health insurance. What are the chances politicians stand up and take notice when these Americans complain?

In the heat of the political back-and-forth with Republicans bent on the program’s destruction, this whole Obamacare adventure can feel a little hopeless. But when you look at the big picture, the underlying political logic is clearly toward more generous, more comprehensive coverage over time. Once the previously uninsured start getting insurance, the natural upshot of cataloguing the law’s shortcomings isn’t to give them less insurance, as my colleague Alec MacGillis pointed out last fall. It’s to give them more. Republicans are in some sense playing into the trap Obamacare laid for them. And a few of them seem a bit concerned about it.2

Medicaid expansion is a case in point. Under Obamacare, uninsured people who earn up to 138 percent of the poverty level (just under $16,000 for a single person in 2013), can qualify for Medicaid, at least in states that opt into the law.3 This has a few key political consequences, as Pollack notes. First, it transforms the political constituency for the program. Historically, Medicaid has served extremely poor, frequently minority, patients who either don’t vote or support Democrats when they do. That meant the GOP had no hang-ups about squeezing it. But there will likely be millions of white working-class voters on Medicaid in the coming years. (Even in some conservative states, like Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia.) Once that happens, something tells me Republicans will become more charitably-disposed to the program.

Then there’s the likelihood that, one day soon, especially if Medicaid becomes more generous, the working-class person who makes 175% of the poverty level will look at his working-class neighbor making 130% of the poverty level and think, wow, his health insurance seems a lot better than my private Obamacare plan. How long can it be before most people earning 175% or 200% of the poverty level are allowed to buy in, too?4

Impeach Obama in 2014. Period.

The US House of Representatives is analogous to a Police Force - - - their main job of Check and Balance is to “arrest” the perp by Impeaching the perp.

The US Senate is analogous to a Jury of Peers who have the power to throw the Impeached perp off of the taxpayer gravy train, take away his residence, ban him from building a Library paid for by us, and ban him from using his personal Corporate Jet, Air Force One.

Most RINO Americans want to wait, Wait, WAIT! until they control the House, the Senate and the White House.

To those weak-kneeded summer soldier “patriots” I say “Enjoy the Obamanation that you have tolerated since January, 2009.”

In similar manner, we Summer Soldier Conservatives continue to tolerate a wimpy, hand-wringing, sobbing, crybaby Speaker of the House Boehner as our sorry chief policeman.

“Oh, if only my best friends across the aisle would just play nicey nice - - - “ is the perfect quote that fire-in-the-belly Socialist-Democrats love to hear from their doormat, cowardly, Obamacrat RINOs.

Yes indeed, as long as we WAIT for things to be PERFECT we will never attack those whose goal is to destroy the US Constitution.

Suck it up you sorry House RINOs, and replace John “Benghazi Coverup” Boehner with SC Rep Trey Gowdey, or SC Rep Joe Wilson.

Without a fire-in-the-belly Republican Speaker of the House, Obamacrat RINOs will continue to cave in to “their best friends across the aisle,” to the unbridled glee of every Democrat voter in America!

House RINOs: Pretend that you are paid by taxpayers to fight to enforce the US Constitution.

Fight or go home, House RINOs.

FIGHT or we will send you home!

Impeach Obama in 2014. Period.

_________________________

The RINO Establishment has been, is now, and forever will be a spineless relic that is incapable of protecting the US Constitution.

Commie Obama came in 1-2009, and by 12-24-2009 he had Nationalized one sixth of the US Economy.

Now, four YEARS later, loyal RINO Establishment stalwarts estimate that it will take a generation (20-25 years) to undo what Commie Obama did in eleven MONTHS.

What does it take for the Loyalist RINOs to draw a line in the sand?

As for concern about “loss of political capital” and other Leftstream Media manipulating tactics, when in the next 20 to 25 years would be a good time for y’all to consider to begin to commence thinking about draining the swamp full of Leftstream Media “alligators?”

There are more of us than there are of them, so grow a pair and FIGHT the Left Stream Media!

Remember this: Commie Obama is counting on never being held accountable for his violations of the US Constitution.

BTW, Boehner and McConnell have done their best to not hold Commie Obama accountable for 4 years.

Thus, support for the RINO Establishment is to continue to endorse the Boehner-McConnell protection from accountability plan for Commie Obama.

""Dr. Quentin Young, Longtime Obama Confidante and Physician to MLK [Martin Luther King]

FROM "THE OBAMA FILE"...
RE: QUENTIN YOUNG

The primary figure who delivered Obama to the single-payer camp was Quentin Young, an 86-year-old retired physician who was a longtime friend and neighbor of Obama in Chicago. Young joined the Young Communist League as a teenager in the late 1930s. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, he was closely associated with the Communist Party. In October 1968 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was probing the extent of his knowledge about the riots that had erupted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago two months earlier. The Committee accused Young of belonging to the Bethune Club, an organization for communist doctors; the group was named after Norman Bethune, a communist physician who devoted his services to the totalitarian regime of Mao Zedong

Dr. Young was active in the radical movements of the Sixties and Seventies and led a small delegation to Communist North Vietnam in 1972. In the late 1970s, Young became associated with a Marxist organization known as the New American Movement, which was initially convened by Michael Lerner, an America-hating radical who counseled young people to explore the use of LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs as portals to a greater comprehension of socialist principles.

In 1980 Young founded the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, a single-payer lobby group whose Board of Directors he chairs to this day. In 1982 Young helped establish the Democratic Socialists of America, which, as the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International, asserts that "many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed." In 1987 Young co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), a single-payer advocacy organization where he currently serves as national coordinator. In PNHP’s view, government-run healthcare "should be financed by truly progressive taxation."

In 1995 Young attended the now-famous meeting at the Hyde Park home of former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, where Barack Obama was first introduced to influential locals as the hand-picked successor to Alice Palmer, a pro-Soviet radical who planned to vacate her Illinois State Senate seat in pursuit of a higher elected office. Young quickly became a friend and political ally of Obama, teaching the latter about the merits of single-payer healthcare. In a 2009 interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Young reminisced about the germination of his ideological kinship with the young Obama:

"Barack Obama, in those early days [as a state senator] -- influenced, I hope, by me and others -- categorically said single payer was the best way, and he would inaugurate it if he could get the support, meaning [Democratic] majorities in both houses, which he’s got, and the presidency, which he’s got. And he said that on more than one occasion…."

Another noteworthy influence on Obama’s views vis à vis healthcare has been Dr. Peter Orris, who co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program with Quentin Young. The son of a Communist Party member, Orris in the 1960s was a leader of Harvard University’s campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the New Leftist organization that aspired to overthrow America’s democratic institutions and remake the nation’s government in a Marxist image. He later joined the Communist Party (CP) for more than two decades, before ultimately shifting his allegiance to the CP splinter group, Committees of Correspondence, where he remains a prominent figure to this day.

http://www.theobamafile.com/_associates/QuentinYoung.htm
_________________________________________________________

From David Horowitz's
FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org
PROFILE: Quentin Young

An admirer of Fidel Castro, Young is proud that two of his children traveled to Cuba as members of the Venceremos Brigades to cut sugar cane and pick oranges. (The Venceremos Brigades were organized by Castro's Cuban intelligence agency, which trained "brigadistas" in guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives.)

* Longtime supporter of communist causes
* Was active in the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s
* Helped establish the Democratic Socialists of America
* Co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, an advocacy organization that lobbies on behalf of a single-payer, government-run healthcare system
* Friend and supporter of Barack Obama
* Longtime friend of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

Lots more at the link:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2439

.... This is my theory.

..... The way ObamaCare is set up .... the insurance companies have become the Proverbial "Middle Man" in the healthcare process.

.... The Pre-ObamaCare process consisted of the patient seeking treatment with his healthcare provider. The healthcare provider would then check with the Insurance company to confirm what treatments were covered and whatever the decision was the decision was left to be basically made by the patient.

.... NOW ..... The patient now seeks treatment with the healthcare provider. The healthcare provider checks with the insurance company to confirm what is covered ...... THEN the insurance company must now check with the ObamaCare representative to make a decision as to what procedures the government will allow. Then once that official government decision is made .... the insurance company will impart that decision to the patient..... the government basically makes the decision for you. However this process of decision making effectively doubles the time between your initial desire to seek treatment and the time that the decision is made as to what is covered.

..... In the future I predict that this fabricated "Incovenience" of having to deal with the insurance company middle men .... it will be passionately mandated to cease .... and in a passionate loving effort to help the patients gain more timely care .... the Peoples Government will then take over all insurance responsibilities .... for the good of the people.

..... The Single Payer system will then be instituted in America.

Watch for back-door implementation of single payer by “repeal”

Just like Don't-ask-Don’t-tell...

They would NEVER have gotten openly gay in the military to be OK’d if they went straight for it and said “hey, let's allow openly gays into the military”... *NEVER*

So, they implemented a ‘new’ policy called Dont ask dont tell. (DADT) Many would say this was always the policy- if you keep your mouth shut and do your job, you can serve. No one is supposed to talk about sex on the job anyway (this goes for straights too)

So... they implement DADT. It suddenly is ok to be gay in the military as long as they don't talk about it.

Then, that is not good enough, so they 'repeal' DADT, and go to a whole NEW position, the one they wanted all along: openly gay in the military.

That is like starting at position A, and going to a position B, then ‘repealing’ it but instead of going back to A you go to a new position C.

Usually a repeal means you go back to what was. Not to a whole new position.

Harry Reid did this with the ‘nuclear option’ with a new twist. They put a vote to go from position A to B that required a 2/3d vote, so it failed... Then they claimed that the motion to go from A to B was “out of regular order” and appealed it. (repeal). The ‘appeal’ only takes 50% vote, and so they said since it was appealed you could go to new position B. *NOT* back to A for another vote (in ‘regular order’).

Look for a ‘repeal’ of Obamacare NOT back to private sector health care, but to government health care.

They will try to ‘repeal’ it saying government health care is the result of repealing it.

Somehow... just watch!

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