Liberals Against Choice and Competition »
Posted By btatman22 3 months, 1 week ago in Political OpinionAmericans clearly missed something in President Obama’s speech to Congress last week. “My guiding principle,” President Obama told Congress, “is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition.”
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btatman22
Editor of Fresh Conservative which highlights conservative movements and exposes liberal shenanigans. I am Lutheran, yet not fanatical in my religion. I'll worship my ...
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Wolfie20073 months, 1 week ago
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BB643 months, 1 week ago
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Wow Wolfie, it's amazing. When you fail to parrot the speech of the left, they claim your comments are below some sort of standards. With the racists on this board, I didn't realize there was any standards besides the 7 or so words Carlin used to talk about....
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hyperbola3 months, 1 week ago
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How ironic to see "conservatives" chanting slogans about "freedom" when ever since Reagan they have been putting Americans in an ever tighter strait jacket where they can be abused at will by corrupt corporations. Amazing how many people become easy to lead around by the nose with a dollop of propaganda from corrupt oligarchs.
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How corporate P.R. works to kill healthcare reform
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/09/17/how-corp...
One of the reasons I left my job at CIGNA, where I headed corporate communications and was part of the Legal & Public Affairs division, was because I did not want to be involved in yet another P.R. and lobbying campaign to kill or gut reform. I finally came to question the ethics of what I had done and been a part of for nearly two decades to influence decision making and bill writing on Capitol Hill.
When I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in late June, I told the senators how the industry has conducted duplicitous and well-financed P.R. and lobbying campaigns every time Congress has tried to reform our healthcare system, and how its current behind-the-scenes efforts may well shape reform in a way that benefits Wall Street far more than average Americans. I noted that, just as they did 15 years ago when the insurance industry led the effort to kill the Clinton reform plan, it is using shills and front groups to spread lies and disinformation to scare Americans away from the very reform that would benefit them most. The industry, despite its public assurances to be good-faith partners with the president and Congress, has been at work for years laying the groundwork for devious and often sinister campaigns to manipulate public opinion.
...The industry goes to great lengths to keep its involvement in these campaigns hidden from public view. I know from having served on numerous trade group committees and industry-funded front groups, however, that industry leaders are always full partners in developing strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with insurers' ability to increase profits. My involvement in these groups goes back to the early '90s when insurers joined with other special interests to finance the activities of the Healthcare Leadership Council, which led a coordinated effort to scare Americans and members of Congress away from the Clinton plan.
A few years after that victory, the insurers formed a front group called the Health Benefits Coalition to kill efforts to pass a Patients Bill of Rights. While it was billed as a broad-based business coalition that was led by the National Federation of Independent Business and included the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Health Benefits Coalition in reality got the lion’s share of its funding and guidance from the big insurance companies and their trade associations.-
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hyperbola3 months, 1 week ago
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Like most front groups, the Health Benefits Coalition was set up and run out of one of Washington’s biggest P.R. firms. The P.R. firm provided all the staff work for the Coalition while an executive with the NFIB, which has long been a close ally of the insurance industry, served as a frontman.
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....With this history, you can rest assured that the insurance industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious P.R. practices it has used for many years, to kill reform this year, or even better, to shape it so that it benefits insurance companies and their Wall Street investors far more than average Americans.
The creation and funding of front groups and the use of shills on Capitol Hill and in the media are not the only tactics P.R. people use to support and enhance lobbying efforts. Other activities include, of course, the implementation of grass-roots and grass-tops campaigns. But a much more subtle tactic is to provide supposedly accurate and objective information to “educate” members of Congress and their staffs.
Business Week recently described how health insurers, United Health Group in particular, have been hard at work behind the scenes providing a treasure trove of data to key senators. If lawmakers believe the information and date the insurers are feeding them is comprehensive and objective, they are mistaken. Corporate representatives, especially the P.R. people who work with the media and who write talking points, are masters at the selective use of data and disclosing only the information their employers want to be disclosed.
What does this all mean for our country and our democracy?
During my 20 years in corporate communications and public affairs, I participated in the steady growth and influence of largely invisible persuasion -- and at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and investigative journalism seems to be vanishing. The number of P.R. people long ago surpassed the number of working journalists in this country. And that ratio of P.R. people to reporters will continue to grow. The clear winners as this shift occurs are big, rich corporations and other special interests. The losers are average Americans, most of whom are completely unaware how their thoughts and actions are being manipulated to achieve corporate goals on Capitol Hill. -
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plowshare3 months, 1 week ago
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It is insurance, period, that is creating higher costs by making it possible for hospitals and doctors to charge more exorbitant fees while the patient only foots about 20-40% of the bill and so is not so easily bankrupted by medical costs. This will not be alleviated by taxes footing even more of the bills under the government option.
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However, insurance companies do help to hold costs down more than you might expect from such a setup, because they will disallow costs that they deem out of line, and if the provider is in the system (as is often the case with Blue Cross/ Blue Shield) then the provider will write off the difference. Do you -- or does anyone reading this -- know what providers will do this under the proposed health reform plan (HR 3200, etc.)?
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mesodude3 months, 1 week ago
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Of course liberals are for competition. Unfortunately, as with most things, cons want to set all the ground rules and define all the terms. Why do we even need private insurance companies? The for-profit insurance industry isn't working for a great many Americans. Cons clearly don't realize this or don't care because you haven't made this a legislative priority when you've been in power. It's only when you face reform that the GOP and the insurance industry springs into action and claim that you'll change. You're like spoiled toddlers in a grocery store--"Mommy,Mommy... Give me a cookie NOW and I'll be good...I pwomise." Why should anyone believe you are serious or that you have alternative plans when you go around insisting that we should be grateful that we aren't other countries (countries which happen to have better health care than we do, in fact)?
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rimbaud3 months, 1 week ago
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"The for-profit insurance industry isn't working for a great many Americans." The for-profit insurance industry works great until you are in a position to really need them. Most of us have yet to be in that position, so we are very happy with their performance.
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Ratskii3 months, 1 week ago
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btatman22, You're for choice now? Wow, some of you former allies are going to be all over you.
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Note that some of the items on the list the author gives are false. There are several competetors to the postal service (fed ex, ups, etc.), and all the 401Ks and IRA are certainly in competition with social security. Also, charter schools and home schooling are options in competition with the public schools. -
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Wolfie20073 months, 1 week ago
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beavith13 months, 1 week ago
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wolfie.... they're breaking your chops over the word 'choice' in the abortion context...
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rats... fed ex and ups don't compete with the Post Office. they can't by federal law. 401s and IRAs don't compete with Social Security. they may pay money, but they don't get treated the same way tax-wise or income wise. you MUST pay into social security. no one forces you to carry a 401 or an IRA. sure, charter schools and homeschooling 'compete with public schools, but are frowned on or run through the wringer.
case in point. a voucher program in Washington DC was supported by Obama pre election, but now that he's in, he and the congressdemons want to kill it, even though it produces kids that read/math at or above their grade level. guess who wants it killed? the teacher's unions.
scary.
so, your examples aren't really examples. got more? -
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hyperbola3 months, 1 week ago
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Well, right now the Supreme Court is considering whether corporations are "human beings" and entitled to "free speech" and to spend as much money as they like on political propaganda designed to cement in their corruption. It is already late in the day, but Americans need to get very loud and aggressive about the abuses of our oligarchical class. Here is one venue where protest will happen.
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Go to Pittsburgh, Young Man, and Defy Your Empire
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/08/31/go-to-pi...
Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept into the history books along with the open-market theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism, communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new language to address our reality. The voices of change, those who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words, will cry out Sept. 25 and 26 in Pittsburgh when protesters from around the country gather to defy the heads of state, bankers and finance ministers from the world’s 22 largest economies who are convening for a meeting of the G-20 . If we heed these dissident voices we have a future. If we do not we will commit collective suicide.
...The international power elites will go to Pittsburgh to preach the mantra that globalization is inevitable and eternal. They will discuss a corpse as if it was living. They will urge us to remain in suspended animation and place our trust in the inept bankers and politicians who orchestrated the crisis. This is the usual tactic of bankrupt elites clinging to power. They denigrate and push to the margins the realists—none of whom will be inside their security perimeters—who give words to our disintegration and demand a new, unfamiliar course. The powerful discredit dissent and protest. But human history, as Erich Fromm wrote, always begins anew with disobedience. This disobedience is the first step toward freedom. It makes possible the recovery of reason.
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Klarissa3 months, 1 week ago
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Striker1013 months, 1 week ago
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You got that right, Klarissa, but it's not just Propeller, it's everywhere, it's everywhere!
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I've been wasting most of my time with these comment games for a couple of years now. We need a somewhere which won't be called a "social" site and where real individuals can gather to discuss the ways of taking back Liberty.
On my own website the door is closed to those who want governments for the purpose of Forcing their collectivist schemes upon us. -
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rimbaud3 months, 1 week ago
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Propeller is just an extension of an age-old tradition where idle old men gather in a coffee or tea house and discuss politics. You have to laugh at the self-importance of those who state "what is acceptable to me is..." That is not to say that you may not find the ideas you repeat, here, somehow getting into the mainstream: did you really influence public opinion? did someone of importance really happen to read your post and incorporate it into their speech or position?
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Some people will not change their minds no matter how often they hear (or read) an idea, or position, opposed to their own. But it is a principle of PR, and advertising, that repetition may serve as a worm into your thinking computer and bring you around to their point of view.
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Tangent0013 months, 1 week ago
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FTA:
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"1. The government provides our children’s public education. Do they offer us choice and competition? No."
We have private schools and various charter schools. Also, kids can choose which public schools to attend, within district restrictions.
"2. Our government provides daily postal service. Any choice or competition? Nope."
FedEx? UPS?
"3. The Feds provide health insurance (and thus control the quality and quantity of health care) for our nation’s poor and elderly. Choice? Nada. Competition? Nyet."
What's your alternative? No health care whatsoever? How is that a choice?
"4. Our government provides the health care of our nation’s proud service men and women. Do they get choice or competition? Nie. (That’s “No,” in Polish.)"
Again, what's your alternative? Taking that money and having a private company take 30% profit from our injured troops?
"5) The government controls the future retirement savings of all American citizens, our Social Security. Are we offered choice and competition? Not even close bud."
IRAs? 104k? SS offers a minimum safety net, bet everyone is free to plan for their retirement.-
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energizersnobabe3 months, 1 week ago
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Tangent, dude, you need to learn how to read!
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1. There is no competition for our public taxpayer dollars used in PUBLIC education. Give me my dollars back, Tangent, and I'll send my sons to private schools, gladly! You also wrote,"kids can choose which public schools to attend, within district restrictions." Wrong. Kids can't, and their parents can't. You're stuck with the zone in which you live, unless you can show some superhuman reason why your kids cannot go to your zoned schools. Variances are hecka hard to get, haven't you heard?
2. There is no competition in DAILY POSTAL SERVICE. It is against the law for anyone else to put anything in YOUR mailbox, Tangent. UPS and Fed Ex are considered package delivery services. Let them deliver my mail too, please!
3. Medicaid and Medicare are broke. The Feds are inept at running these programs. Let the poor and elderly buy insurance on the TRULY OPEN (national, no state restrictions) market, and reimburse them the cost every April 15th.
4. Privatizing veteran care wouldn't take a dime from our injured patriots. But it would take BILLIONS from the Feds... and that's the rub, isn't it? Our government would rather control the pot and have the soup be rotten than to let another cook take over.
5. The money I pay into SS is mine. Give it to me, please. I can invest it better than the Feds can. They give money to frauds (ACORN) and companies that are essential bankrupt. I can do much better. If I put it into my IRA, in the most conservative paper, backed by the fed govt., I am guaranteed to have it when I retire. Right now, estimates are there will be NO SS when I retire.
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