Are we all strangers in our own country?

I'm so angry that the insurance industry, after all this sturm und drang, has gotten exactly what it wanted. No public option. Not even an opt-in, or opt-out piece of legislation. This, one year after these banking assholes got all the money in the world so they could give each other their requisite massive bonuses.

Obama is obviously bought and paid for like any 50-plus-year-old white president....

What the fuck, do we have no voice in our own country anymore?

 

I'm with ya, Simon.

At least now the idiot fringe will have to drop their "government-run health care" nonsense.

 

No, Simon, we do not have a voice in our own country anymore. Haven't for quite a while now.
All Government -- Republicans, Democrats, white, black, male, female -- is bought, paid for, owned and controlled by special interests.
We simply get to pay the price.

 

Progressives need to relax; as Stephanie Miller explained at length on her show this morning, there IS public option in the plan but, shhhhhh don't tell Fox News, it's just now called "expanded Medicare" and "guaranteed insurance for people within 150 percent of the poverty level."

This plan as it stands now is very, very good for the country.

 

If you are unemployed and under 55, it seems to me that you are fucked.

 

I agree with TigerVols, and I just heard there's a provision in the Senate Democrats compromise plan that will cap insurance company 'profits and administrative costs' or some such.

If they knew what they were doing, Republicans would view this as 'worse' than the public option... so ... shhhhhhhhh

 

I think the Democrats ran a trick play on this one. While the GOP was transfixed on what was basically terminology in the dreaded "public option", they snuck in the back door with these other provisions.

It seems like this new stuff can get us closer to single payer. Stay tuned.

 

So the feds are going to tell an industry how much their companies are allowed to make?

Funny, I thought I still lived in America.

 

Um, that happens every day in energy and with Pentagon contracts. If you live off the gov't tit, you've gotta expect some limitations.

 

Simon, we live in a country where a working majority (see Quinnipiac poll today) believes that helping others inevitably means they themselves will be worse off. So positive change is always going to be very, very incremental. Individualism is both America's greatest strength and biggest weakness.

 

Well, my anger is abating... slightly

 

They also took advantage of the fact that one of the GOP's talking point against the public option was that it would result in eviscerating Medicare (by a stated goal of reducing Medicare costs to help pay for it), which had a particularly active Republican demo running scared: old people.

So now you expand Medicare eligibility, use a term that everyone in America is familiar with and feels generally good about, and who can be against that? (I'm asking rhetorically. I know people can be against it.)

This is becoming like the marriage vs. civil union nomenclature.

(By the way, young people, don't feel left out -- the more of you that go to war, the more of you that will get your own public option -- the VA!)