Category: News and Views
A year after President Barack Obama's political honeymoon ended, his job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 - 48 percent, his worst net score ever, and American voters say by a narrow 39 - 36 percent margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.
This compares to a 48 - 43 percent approval for Obama in a May 26 national poll by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University and a 57 - 33 percent approval last July, just before the political firestorm created by opposition to his health care plan galvanized political opponents and turned independent voters against him.
In this latest survey of more than 2,000 voters, independent voters disapprove of Obama 52 - 38 percent and say 37 - 27 percent they would vote for a Republican contender in 2012.
American voters also say 48 - 40 percent Obama does not deserve reelection in 2012.
I was a doubter of Obama but he has wone mover as a president. He dares to step up, defy the money minded power hungry finance and oil gangs and bring about changes for people.
The healthcare bill was something no one had any ideas about and a myriad of completely unrealistic stories sprung up about it. I think not a fifth of Americans had any idea what the healthcare bill was about really, and it was used against him, mostly be insurance companies and drug manufacturers who want to keep charging us tens of thousands of dollars more than necessary.
His oil spill handling was not the greatest, but then again he was in a difficult position where the expertees to fix the leak lay with BP, not with anyone employed by the U.S. government, so really the only way was to keep pressuring them to continue fixing the problem.
And now he has set new regulations forcing the banks into line and protecting consumer rights.
I believe his ratings will go up as the ellection approaches, and if a president will be ellected, who can see Russia rom her house, I am definitely leaving the U.S. for safer places with smarter voters.
I am not, by any means, automatically republican, but the majority of the candidates I have seen from them might as well have logos saying who they are sponsorred by, they never want to work for the people.
And at some point Americans need to realize that they need to invest more in education, less in weapons and that lower taxes and more government spending does not work in the long run.
I think the U.S. is a great country and I think Obama is doing a lot of the right things to keep it so.
Not an Obama supporter, never will be. He is the most pro abortion President in U S history, was the lone Senator who supports even third trimester abortion, which is infanticide.
I am also not for spending more money on education. I have seen statistics about money spending in relation to education, and that particular study showed states that spent less on education actually got more of their money's worth than those that spent more. Also, didn't he help deny a group of black students assistance to attend private schools in the D C area, where they were actually learning, consigning them to mediocre public schools at best? You know his kids don't attend public schools.
Also, where are the anti Iraq protesters by the Unitarian Church in Cambridge now? We're still there. Bit of a double standard, isn't it? A Republican President sends us there and everyone's up in arms, but a Democratic one hasn't gotten us out, and everyone's quiet?
Also I am a supporter of the Arizona immigration law. I think all of the states should enforce it, but instead the candy asses who live near me are out protesting it, and President Obama is against it himself. It's already the Federal law. If an illegal immigrant committs a federal crime and gets convicted, the next step is deportation once they've completed their sentences. My mom retired from the U S Federal Probation & Parole Service, she went through this process with any # of defendants. All the Arizona law does is allow status checks on any immigrants caught breaking local laws. I live in a state where both legal and illegal immigrants are extremely destructive. Even incidence of tuberculosis up here is higher in immigrant communities, most of them coming from third world countries, and you can't babysit these people to make sure they take their meds. I get samples on positive tb patients regularly, and this is HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS. Immigrants wanting permanent residence & citizenship are tested for TB, but doesn't someone have to be here for awhile before being granted lawful permanent residence status, except under the Green Card Visa Lottery, which is a crime itself? Wouldn't deportation of illegals curb the number of new tb cases?
Living in a 'Democratic' cesspool of a states that even people in other liberal states laugh it, I only hope our next president is an immigration reform minded conservative or independent.
I think anyone running for office should have to wear a plackard during the campaign, listing all their contributors. Not going to enter the supposed soft money hard money debate, but if you want to see who someone is working for, see who's paying them.
And the president who last performed a large amount of amnesty for immigrants was his truly, the great white god of the 1980s, Sir Ronald Reagan. I worked in that program, and what made it a good program was the people seeking amnesty had to demonstrate they had worked 90 days per year for three years, and no government benefits.
Now as to Arizona two things:
First, if you weren't white, how exactly would you show you were an American citizen? Illegals have social security cards so they can pay income taxes, they have driver's licenses so they can drive vehicles for their employers (frequently farmers), all sorts of documentation you and I have.
Now, flip the coin. You're the cop. Now how are you supposed to tell this one's an illegal? And I mean on paper, not the court of public opinion that shows your young age / disposition.
Some of the most virulent opponents to this are cops: it's a law that is virtually impossible for them to enforce. Face it: You do not possess one single document an illegal can't with one exception: the birth certificate.
So the cop who stops a Mexican American for speeding has to look for documentation, but a member of the old Irish Republican Army gets a pass? How's the cop supposed to know? Skipping over the kiddy anti-cop stuff for a minute:
Their job is done by the numbers, maybe not to the proportion of an accountant, but even a simple speeding ticket has explicit information - how fast, what lane was incorrectly turned into and out of, because they may be used as a prosecution witness in a trial, or the state's testimony even in traffic court. So now Arizona's asking them to do something on more wobbly supports than a six-year-old's loose tooth.
I am certainly not claiming Obama is the perfect president, or the best one we could have, but he has done a lot of things right and will continue to do so.
You can't pull out your army in one go and he is actively working on pulling people from Iraq, his handling of Afganistan is nothing to write home about (even if you have email), but that is a different matter I suppose.
Second the immigration thing. I disagree on the greencard lottery, it is hard enough to get a green card in the U.S. and foreigners work here for years, paying a lot of money into the social security system, without being entitled to anything like unemployments or social security or any other benefits, and it is nice, as one of these people, to have a bit of a hope to get an easy green card.
TB and such diseases cannot be blamed solely on immigrants. Americans are beginning to ignore their shots, or refuse to give their children the necessary shots, so they start contracting TB and spread the problem themselves.
And why are the immigrants here? The explanation must lie with the jobs and opportunities available here, probably picking fruit and doing other jobs that Americans have no desire to do, or demand too much wages to make it susteinable.
Everybody wants lower prices and higher wages, so sometimes outsourcing and employing people who accept lower wages is the preferred solution for some.
I think a paradigm shift in public opinion and education about money and the future is needed.
The biggest threat to the U.S. is nothing to do with weapons. It is an uncontrolled deficit that is enabling investors from China, Japan and the middle east to buy up companies and influence and control the government. Globalization goes both ways and I am afraid the U.S. is losing its way as a world power, though I hope that is not the case.
I love living here and think this is a wonderful country, and the U.S. has done a lot for the world and is certainly very unappreciated at times.
Wildebrew for all my pith at times I agree with you. Most people who harp and harp and harp like what we see on here aren't working in the private sector, I mean for companies not services.
And yes, if TB and Poleo are reasons to send back the immigrants what do we do with this crowd of nuts who won't get their kids immunized? Most of them are probably too young, or grew up too privileged, to have seen a Poleo victim. I'm not old enough to have seen kids with it, but my parents had relatives who were older who struggled with it. I also knew a woman in college who had it, and had all the symptoms they now call fibromyalgia and I'll tell you what, her kids were vaccinated. I had a TB test in college don't remember what for but they wanted to do one, came up no TB but apparently it's around, and what I was told then is that the TB itself has mutated to fight whatever it is they try and kill it with, sorry to be such a biology ignoramous but that's as much as I know.
Generally though, when people are out of work, or financially and personally struggling, they blame another group that has at least the appearance of doing better than they are. It's called envy, last time I checked, and envy doesn't have to be for something that actually exists.
Look at how the Taliban deceived so many in the Middle East. They didn't get their armies from the wealthy: they got those from the poor, because the "White people were taking all the (fill in the blank) from them". The religion part as usual came later to strengthen an already-building resolve. Some fundamentalist groups be they Christian or leftist, in this country start pulling the same wankery. None of it is based on logic, and you can see in all of them, it's about opinion and belief.
As most of you know, I follow only Greek politics and only consider myself an American on paper. So I can't comment on this as someone with knowledge. That said, I'll never understand those who don't agree with high spending in education nor do I get why America still hasn't socialised their schools. They want to be the land of the free and all but they put barriers up when it comes to education, one of the most important things a person can have today. Am I saying that no private schools should exist? No, but I see education as a right, one that should be earned by hard work but still a right. I'm also very pro abortion, and though I usually hesitate at third tri-mester ones, I could understand it if the mother has a serious medical problem or honestly didn't know that she was pregnant. As strange as it sounds, there really is something medical called a surprise pregnancy. From what I know about it, I also support the Arizona immigration law. I think anyone entering the U.S. should be tested for disease, and if they're found not to have been and refuse to be, then they should be deported. The same holds true if they refuse to speak English, unless they're children, elderly or unable to work and are here with their families. I'm sick to death of everything being in English or Spanish and of the Spanish speaking population getting special treatment in schools and in the workplace. If you want to live in a foreign country, learn the language! It's fine if they don't know that much when they arrive here, but that's why ESL schools and tutors exist. While I'm not against citizens receiving benefits, I am against it for immigrants who haven't at least obtained a resident status and proven that they've worked here for a few years and intend on doing so again as soon as possible. That said, the visa restrictions for some countries are ridiculous. For instance, if you're a Greek here as a cook or a musician, those are the only jobs that you can legally take, even if you've got all of your papers and are qualified for other jobs where positions are needed. This is not right. As for a birth certificate, that's not entirely fair. There are people who are perfectly legal but who can't find their birth certificates or who had them destroyed by natural disasters like fires or floods and who can't get them back unless they contact their country of origin. Don't even get me started on outsourcing and cheap imports from China etc. That annoys the hell out of me. It's ruining the world's manufacturing and jobs and the quality of these imports isn't even good most of the time. Japan actually makes extremely good technology, but even they're falling into the outsourcing and importation of bad products trap. America may have done some good things, but they've also done alot of bad ones and I think these are coming back to haunt them. The Taliban and others, many times, got help from America. I'm not saying, by any means, that they deserve terrorist atacks on innocent members of the population, but they got the ball rolling so to speak.
I'm honestly not sure there is a vaccine against tb. The only control I know is the old test, which, if negative, in a few days should only look like a mosquito bite, if positive, an irritated mosquito bite that's been scratched a lot. People from eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, central America sometimes come up positive.
Heck I'm positive for chicken pox. I can't get it again and give it to anyone. The thing with tb, though, is initial infection may be contained by the person's natural immune system, so they don't even know they have it. The lesions in the lungs can be 'reactivated', so, voila, they have highly contagious t b. We know someone this happened to, they are from Morocco. By then she had quit her job, & the drug regimen caused liver disease, so we have one more family dependent on Medicaid for their medical care, but they always seem to have money to return to Morocco for a long time. Seeing behavior like that has made me cynical and more restrictionist as far as immigration the 8 years I have been here, but the Reagan program of making sure illegals had worked for at least three months sounds reasonable.
But yeah, we also have a lot of the anti vaccine crowd, and it's so ridiculous IMNSHO. How do they explain kids and adults who got their vaccines & didn't get autism or any # of problems? I knew an adult years ago who became paralyzed from polio JUST ONE YEAR BEFORE THE SALK VACCINE ENTERED THE PICTURE. Five or ten years, understandable, but one?! This lady dealt with it and taught school w/o a hint of resentment.
I personally don't believe in socialization, although probably schools should have a more uniform curriculum. I spent time in a country where nationalization of business & property was the norm, and most people under 30 (likely unemployed) will tell you nationalization was a BIG mistake. One of my BIL's was set to migrate to the U S, but his visa was cancelled right after the 9/11/2001 attacks. He will personally tell you if 30,000 young people there were offered U S visas, probably 28,000 will accept the offer. Socialism is part of what has made Algeria poor.
And I hope we don't get into the nightmare of the "public health option". Socialized medicine there has ensured that my BIL woke up during gall blader removal & didn't come off the anesthesia for 5 days afterwards. It ensures that public maternity hospitals are dirty, and no matter how incompetent, or if the poor mother gives birth alone and the poor baby drops dead on the floor, the nurses and midwives will always be employed. I kept up with news in French there, and folks were seeking French, even American medical visas as the treatment for everything from a deaf child to a paralyzed adult is such low quality. I think if it gets to socialized medicine I will take Mimi & immigrate someplace I would expect that. I don't want to give up my private doctor or the one hospital here I trust. It sounds like a cliche, but it's true: anyone in favor of this option should tour a V A hospital here. As a former V A employee, I can attest to this. One of the first things a nurse told us on our new employee orientation is "Word of mouth about poor quality gets around, and as a result a lot of vets are now avoiding us." Scary.
I'm not saying that private hospitals, doctors, schools etc. shouldn't be allowed. I'm saying that those who can't afford them should have an option of receiving medical care and education. It may not be the best, but at least it's something.
Here's where I am confused. Where is public health not available?
We have a 24/7 public health clinic by the airport, and it sees everyone, insured or otherwise. My home town in Florida provided indigent health care through private clinics, like the Red Crescent (saw anyone Muslim or otherwise), Judeo Christian Clinic (it saw anyone as well, usually those who made too much money for MedicAid but not having a lot of money or insurance to see a private physician) and ElderMed (another misnomer, they saw uninsured patients of all ages). There's a church up here that provides indigent health care Tuesday, and former Representative Tony Conti's wife worked at the biggest dump of all, Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was surprised at the stuff so called poor patients can afford. Where are the poor not being cared for? They even get vouchers to take a taxi in the U S. Some of these passengers get in my reservist friend's cab, and they're citizens of Brazil or elsewhere, and they pay him with a voucher for a ride home (voucher doesn't benefit reservist, but the owner of the cab), their wife/girlfriend/quicky has just gotten free medical care at Boston University Med Center, and they have the balls to complain about the U S. ?!?!
I even support the dismantling of Medicaid. Some doctors come from wealth, but others don't and these people have taken out student loans and rented one room while in medical school. Why should they be forced to accept state insurance that pays them on average 7 to 20 cents on the U S dollar for their services and requires five pages of paperwork per Medicaid patient?
Why not instead let physicians charge on a sliding scale based on proof of income, or proof of lack of income? One lady doctor in another state posted her prices for services and her time on a blackboard in her office. Rather than her having to mess with third parties, her patients knew in advance what they'd owe her, and she built up a clientele of mostly uninsured patients.
I am sick. His rating dropped because you conservatives yell the loudist. What absolute filth.
yes, your right your sick... grin
I echo margorp's last post completely.
Never heard of what you're speaking of Spongebob, maybe it's regional. Out here, when our daughter was little, we got our notice from the bill collectors after taking her in to the emergency room. I'm not demonizing the hospital they have to get paid somehow, but this was before I had any private health insurance, whose definitions change more freely on a state-by-state basis than did Clinton's statements in the Monica Lewinski case.
Anyway I hear all this from conservatives, but I've been dirt poor and had nothing, I do mean nothing. And what if I hadn't been able to scrape together payments / borrow from a family member? The hospital would have had another defaulting bill, so prices would inch up to compensate for everyone else. Oh and an ambulance after I had a seizure was around $600 don't know where the tales of decadence regarding state-sponsored cab fares come from. Not complaining about the ambulance they have a lot of expensive equipment to maintain, and we basically have no infrastructure.
This is out west in the supposed tree-hugger part of the country. Either we need to come up with a public option (one very small part of the new contract), or we need to let people die, because the current systems cannot be expected to compensate as they are.
Ironically even with my financial situation now, if I got cancer I would consider non-treatment as the best case, which would be tantamount to self-termination in some cases, so as not to leave my family with a financial burden. Ironically it's the very same conservatives who have a problem with that. Suck it up and deal: One or the other. I'm not just talking out of my ass: I already made that decision once when I first had seizures, they found what they thought was a brain tumor. I'm damned pragmatic enough to do it, too: they checked me out and said come back in a year, if it's worse they'd consider expensive treatments. At that point, I said not gonna happen cause I can't pay. I did go back to get checked out, fortunately it hadn't grown. But the conservatives oughta be man enough to embrace an attitude like mine rather than claim to be so pro life as it were. I'm at least honest enough to admit a leaking system has limits. So if my insurance carrier ceased to compensate me because of a medical issue that came up, and provided I could not compensate me for it, I would cease and desist seeking all treatment, strap on the belt and go for the ride. even before the tumor incident what got me thinking about this was When I worked at McDonald's in college, I knew an elderly woman in her 70s who was working there to pay for her dead husband's medical costs, he'd been dead for ten years. She was one broken individual, and I said then there's no way in hell any family member o' mine is gonna do that on account of me. So talk on about your foreigners with plush pillows, but it's a parallel universe to the one I've always lived in.
So, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The whole damned if you do, damned if you don't thing.
That's it I'm really out of it. Submitted my post to get the 'error you must be logged in' message. Can't stay too long.
LeoGuardian, sorry to hear of your health problems and hope you don't have a brain tumor that gets worse. Have you had a CAT scan looking for an aneurysm? A now deceased relation of mine had seizures, and in Atlanta had to be taken by EMS as one day he was really incoherent. Turns out he had an aneurysm that was reparable, but he was never able to return to work. Has this been looked at as a possibility?
Re the public option, I've seen entirely too much poor quality care and even experienced some of it. Luckily all I can say is my ruptured achilles was misdiagnosed. Had I driven to an Orthopaedic clinic in Everett, and I say 'driven' as the switchboard there is a pain in the a*, the problem could have been fixed sooner. This is mild. I met a British woman who considered the desire for 'universal care' here 'utter poppycock'. Had she kept her government appointment months away, she would have been dead of the thyroid cancer a private physician treated right away, and she is now in her 60's rather than a dead child. People I have known with this option under the British and French have said you are better off saving your money or even in debt to private physicians than under public health.
Why instead can't employers give back their employees what they take out in premiums so employees can buy portable health plans they can take with them from job to job? Or practitioners do like a counselor in Florida when I was strictly a temp and ask for proof of income (or lack), and have their own formulas that would set a reduced rate, but still give the patient the care they need? Specialty dentists would do this w my dad in particular as federal dental plans aren't the best, so the periodontal surgeon would sit him down in advance & work out a payment plan. I'm afraid my experiences working in a V A hospital and my own personal experiences with public health have soured me on it.
Also, I don't like that he wants to tax international companies. Oh boy, in addition to the payroll tax, they will be penalized for having operations in Mexico or somewhere else outside the U S. Where's the incentive not to lay off more workers in order to cut costs? How are they going to afford to pay their workers if they're shelling out this additional tax?
Also, why not instead of offering an additional unemployment extension, why not eliminate the payroll tax to motivate companies to hire workers? This may be regional too, but a lot of people where I live seem content to coast by on unemployment comp. Where is the incentive to hire someone the longer they've been out of work? Unemployment is only a fraction of one's base pay, and doesn't include any shift differential or tips or sales commissions. Talk about maintaining a permanent underclass rather than a more prosperous, productive group of citizens...
There is one thing, though, on which he and I can agree: the need for hands on fathers in their children's lives, based on his own experience growing up without his dad. A prison chaplain (don't remember where) offered the inmates the experience of sending mothers' day cards. Almost everyone participated. When the same experience was offered on fathers' day, almost no one did. That really says a lot.
LeoGuardian, I truly admire you and feel that your post has explained, in a very dramatic way, the need for public healthcare. What is someone supposed to do if they honestly can't afford healthcare and don't have insurance? You're an adult and made up your mind. But for those who are still against it, what if it were a child? What if a five-year-old had the cancer and it could be cured but the family is too poor to afford the treatment? The doctors won't take them on a sliding scale and they don't have good credit or their credit isn't enough to pay for this cure. At least, having a public healthcare option would give a ray of hope to this child. Yes, it could indeed turn out that he/she could die while waiting for treatment and that is a truly horrible thought. But it could also turn out that his/her case is pushed up due to it's severity and the treatment could be given, an option not available previously. And what about those with truly minor things like a toothache, allergies or a cold who can't afford anything? Why should they not be able to seek medical assistance or why should they have to pay a huge amount just to go for something that's relatively simple instead of paying a set amount and having that option available? Too often I've heard Americans say "it's not my problem... why should I have to pay for someone else"? My only response is where is your humanity? We're not asking you to foot the entire bill, only to share in part of it, the same as everyone else would be doing. It's already done for other services like education through high school, and there are obviously private schools out there too, so why not healthcare?
As for workers, why not offer incentives to companies that don't outsource and that hire only citizens and legal immigrants? Surely, this would make them think about switching their operations and it would bring more revenue to the country. I can't understand why no one would want to send cards to their fathers, but my guess is because, as you've said, they probably weren't in their lives. As I've said, this happens far too often in America with both fathers and mothers. Just as their are plenty of single moms out there, there are single dads, and I really commend them for sticking by their children and for not giving up.
Well I digress far enough to say perhaps you are the Zone's Dr. Laura, though how she or anyone could stand the complaining callers for more than 2 minutes I'll never know.
First, they did verify the tumor or rather they downgraded to give it a different name, isn't a problem hasn't been for twenty years now thanks for the concern. But the situation just forced me to think, not a bad thing actually.
As to the public option, there's no way we're getting a European public option. That's not what is in the works, it's private contractors (insurance companies) bidding into a public option, I read the bill. It is contract law, and the contracts are just like what I bid into as a government consultant when I did that for a living. I didn't consider that socialism, the state didn't own my business, I bid into an existing contract with them or a private company or anyone else. Their terms had some unique qualities, shall we say, but that didn't make it socialist.
I can appreciate what you say regarding the doctor's offices and sliding fees, but really their suppliers would need to come into play for this, and the financial end of medical has virtually no standards, where we software people were in the 1980s. Standards in software (things like SOAP, xml, html, XQuery and the list goes on) have actually caused otherwise small companies to reap enormous profits because you don't have to reinvent what it means to be x.
Every year when we do the insurance thing, I can't help but think if this were software it wouldn't make it off the bench: Every state having it's own laws, it's own standards, each company defining the same words to have different meanings.
Nobody wants a Canada or a France, but our public highway system, our national defense, and many other aspects to our infrastructure don't do this either: they use private contractors who, as part of their bid / contract, agree to certain public standards and take the gig. You and I would probably agree on some of the taxation problems - I would have rather had Mitt Romney's bill which looked similar to what we've got passed now. But this is no single-payer system it's contract law. You won't be on HMO / government waiting lists. I read the bill, I'm nerdy enough to have actually done that, shrinks be forewarned.
Ultimately things will morph in the courts but we don't have an infrastructure to impose a single-payer system like that: everything in this country is done at a local level first. That's what made Hillary Clinton's Single-payer system in 1993 so laughable: It died before it left the ground but is technically not feasible in our nation. We are a federation more than we are a union, with all the benefits and drawbacks a federation provides.
I agree on dads sticking around as well.
Only as one who has stuck around, flaws and all, I do get tired of all the rhetoric against dads or even some wanting us who do stick around to inspire or teach those who don't. I'm a doer not a teacher, which means I'm good as a software engineer but terrible when assigned to train the intern. Maybe I am a dad who sticks around, but I don't see it as my responsibility to try and convince those who won't. I didn't wake up one day and say "I guess I'll stick around." I'm just not that psychologically deep I guess. I did cave to pressure once by others and tried to help a fellow out in this regard, stick with the girl keep the baby, stumbled my way through it and well, whatever the softfoot words are for it, it was a 100% failure. 0 is 0, and that's about the size of my success there. He up and split like he'd been planning to and the woman was left to adopt out the baby.
Also I am just gonna say this I'm sure somebody can "help them change" or whatever, but deadbeat dads are probably first just deadbeat people to begin with. I agree more of us need to stick around, but I ain't going to meetings about it no matter what the 1990s fads were: instead of the meetings I was ... helping out at home. Just my thoughts, somewhat rambly as usual
Americans aren't ready for a real public option and I'm not sure if they ever will be. It's not even a matter of not having money to impliment it, which I would fully understand. There's just too much selfishness around. But they really should consider making federal standards and laws instead of state ones. Doing otherwise simply doesn't make sense, and this goes for healthcare as well as other things. But as you said, America is like that...
I can understand what you mean about being a teacher and not a doer. I think it's a wonderful thing that you stuck around, and while it's always good to encourage people to do so, it's certainly not your obgligation to do this nor to teach anyone. I don't think that it's always a good idea for a couple to stay together, but so long as there's no abuse or drug use etc. the parent with whom the child doesn't live should still try to be in his/her life. That doesn't mean it's necessary to be on friendly terms with the former partner, just be good to the child and don't let him/her see any fighting/hard feelings.
I don't know that Americans are an especially selfish people. It was found some years ago that Americans as a rule tend to give quite a bit to charity. Ironically, it's those in liberal states who give the least. I understand that...we're already being taxed enough as it is.
Personally I don't want to see anyone denied medical treatment, and this goes against the Hyppocratic Oath. I simply don't want to see them reduced to a low quality of treatment. A distant friend of mine wouldn't even use the neighborhood public health clinic if her abandonning husband didn't reduce the family to Mass Health, aka Medicaid.
And I'm still wondering who is being denied medical care? Even those who went into deep debt...were they denied services of that doctor? My primary will see anyone regardless of ability to pay. Indigent children in that clinic are given vaccinations free.
Medicaid itself is something of an insult. It not only reduces doctors to a pittance states are forced to further restrict available services as an increasing number of states are in financial disaster. I was surprised to see some lab tests that Mass Health isn't covering, like glycohemoglobin (a diabetes monitor, as diabetes has gotten to be a common problem). It is a program open to fraud.
Anyone remember Labscam in the '90's? The head of a lab (now defunct) I once worked for served time in the Club Fed. Turns out all the major labs were taking ambiguously worded orders and writing their own interpretations, which had nothing to do with the actual doctor's order. The doctor was getting results for tests he/she didn't want, and not only state operated Medicaid but federal Medicare were defrauded, hence the federal prison sentence.
Directors of a drug testing lab in Woburn, MA were arrested recently and charged with offering financial incentives to get certain "sober houses" to perform their drug screens with them. This is not only illegal in the lab business, but also involved Medicaid fraud as Medicaid here covers one drug rehab per year.
I wouldn't want to see anyone denied care, but don't think a public option is the way to go about it.
Not only this, but isn't classical democracy the will of the majority? A group of people difficult to insure, including small business owners, was polled on whether or not they'd consider a public option were it available. A whopping 2% of those polled answered yes.
At minimum the words and terms used by insurers need to be standardized to mean the same thing everywhere, even if there is no public option. I'm admittedly grossly ignorant on the medical front, but a woman who did processing of some kind in one of those cushy nuthouse type places was floored by the amount of standardization we have. I and some others came in and did softare development / patching and some upgrades to systems. We were from everywhere all over the country, and guess what? 0 is 0 and 1 is 1. 256 MB of DDR RAM is just that, no fuzzy words for it, we all did a bunch of .Net, xml, SOAP and other stuff to manage tons of data we had no idea what it meant. But because our terms are all standardized, no weird hoohoo about "we mean this in Oregon but that in California", they had software running in six months. She kept saying with surprise how we all always meant the same thing by what was said. They could ask every one of us how much RAM it would take to properly load a server for a particular task and they got the same answer. Sure there are differences in professional opinion, and we had ours, but terms had meaning and several evolved standards have converted large enterprise systems like theirs from the crapshoot you had in the 1980s and early 1990s to what they have now.
Admittedly I've never worked in social services or medical, save the occasional software consulting gig when I was self-employed. However, this ridiculous and assinine nonstandardization by insurance carriers drives me bats! The same carrier can't answer questions at a employee meeting because the word means something different in different states. What the hell is *that* all about? If an intern tried to pull a fuzzy-thinking stunt like that on my watch, I'd bodily remove him from the premises.
It's not you medical people denying treatment, you people take the oath and, like our armed forces, deserve our very best.
However, it's the fools in the insurance business that very obviously have themselves an "outcome-based" "education" where x is y and 2 is 3 if they feel like it, they are the problem. And Medicaid or Medicare are not the model, for sure, but the current contract law doesn't do this. Hillary Clinton's 1993 fiasco would have.
I know I can't possibly be an expert on the issue even though I read the bill in its entirety because I have lived my life as a private sector member, paying for insurance through my employer or Cobra or not at all. However, the portability options presented in the new legislation where I could continue to cover my daughter if I lost my job, provided I could pay the same amount I am paying now, would be a very very significant improvement.