Good Lord, how many more examples do people need before they finally admit that MAJOR insurance reform is needed. First there was a baby that was too “fat” now we have a two year old that is too skinny and denied coverage by insurance. People should be able to buy, maintain, and expect affordable health-care!
When Aislin’s father, Rob, worked for another company, Aislin was covered under the company’s group health insurance plan.
Now that Rob is working on his own, he’s had to get new insurance. The company, UnitedHealthcare’s Golden Rule, sent the family a letter, which says in part, “We are unable to provide coverage for Aislin because her height and weight do not meet our company standards.”
“It took me by surprise,” said Rob Bates. “I didn’t think that her size was that abnormal and that it was something that you’d consider to be unhealthy.”
Mandating people be covered widens the risk pool, creating more funds for insurance companies, not just “sick” people, but healthy people too will be required to purchase coverage.
However, this pending legislation can’t just be a slam dunk for insurance companies, now reveling in all their new potential customers, there must be REAL competition and the public option infuses just that paradigm. Congress can legislate all the regulations they want, but until there is forced competition, health care costs will not substantially decrease.
Exactly WHY you should support insurance reform. The entire system is broken, not just how insurance is “delivered” to people. Greed is a villian in my mind, it was partially responsible for the economic meltdown the world experienced, everyone wanted to make a quick buck, from the investors to the little guy, buying more than they could afford. There is enough “blame” to go around for our insurance dilema also.
Having said that, to allow people to die, when there is care that will help deal with their illness is simply barbaric. If you really want to get to the haves and have nots, I would argue that is not a civilized society. Are you a proponent of the laissez-fair model? Should someone who cannot afford health care because they have lost their job die of cancer when there is life saving treatment? Would you allow your wife, husband, parent, child to die? Is THAT the model of civilized society? Even though I don’t know your family, I truly do believe in the golden rule, not as a religious prinicpal, but as human principal. I would not want your child to suffer and more than I would want my own to suffer.
Elena – I too believe in the Golden Rule. I want government to let me and my family make our own health care decisions.
The entire system is broken? Why are most people happy with it?
Where do you get your news from? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored agencies. Before the meltdown, government had already acquired a huge interest in the mortgage lending industry. Because government will not keep its nose out of it, we still have cheap credit and people getting loans they have no business getting.
Government created the economic meltdown that resulted from bad loans. Because we elected the same fools that created the problem, they are doing it again. So this recession will be deepened and lengthened.
I do not oppose health care reform. I oppose the continuing government takeover of private industry. What is being proposed as a “solution” by the Democrats is not a solution; it is power grab.
What do we get out of government ownership or extreme government regulation of health care? Nothing. We just give up control of our health care decisions over to government officials. When only about 12 million people cannot get health care coverage, why does government need to take over everything?
The whole idea is stupid. Government is not efficient. So our money will be wasted. And the notion that folks in private industry are any more larcenous than government officials simply does not jive with history or current events. When government officials cannot even be trusted to obey their oath of office, why should we trust them with any more than we absolutely have to trust them with?
The Democrats are offering us Utopia, but when has socialism ever worked? Why do we have to be forced to accept it? Why can’t you justify this use of force? (Suggesting that I am a bad person just because I do not agree is not a respectable argument.)
Instead of suggesting your opponents are barbarians, why don’t you consider the possibility that there are alternative solutions? Instead of trying to force everyone to do it your way, why don’t you let everyone else find their own solution? This sort of thing goes by the names of freedom and liberty.
You assume that just because the Federal Government does not do something — anything — nothing good will happen. That is utter nonsense.
Not sure what you mean, when you say we elected the same people who got us in this mess. We have a new president, first time in 8 years. Maybe you think it was simply an accident, freak of nature, that Bush, left us in this mess. Recessions are cyclical, no question there, but near depressions are not. Insurance reform is not being offered as utopia and it sure aint socialism! We are all still paying for our health coverage, no one is HANDING out anything. Really, you are happy with your health care coverage? I guess me and ALL the people I know that complain about premiums going up and coverage going down must be the anomolies. I guess the reason for ALL our premiums increasing is because of a broken health care delivery system but YOU think its just fine?
From the CBO website:
The results of CBO’s projections suggest that in the absence of changes in federal law:
■ Total spending on health care would rise from 16 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007 to 25 percent in 2025, 37 percent in 2050, and 49 percent in 2082.
■ Federal spending on Medicare (net of beneficiaries’ premiums) and Medicaid would rise from 4 percent of GDP in 2007 to 7 percent in 2025, 12 percent in 2050, and 19 percent in 2082.
Those results show significantly higher federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid under current law than other official projections do, which typically assume that spending on those programs grows much more slowly in the future than it has in the past. For example, although the projections by CBO and by the trustees of the Medicare program (under their intermediate assumptions) track each other relatively closely for the next two or three decades, by the end of 75 years, Medicare spending under CBO’s projections is about 50 percent higher.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/87xx/doc8758/MainText.3.1.shtml
Then your contention is that were it not for Freddie and Fannie, we would not have experienced this economic meltdown?
WASHINGTON — As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.
Commentators say that’s what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They’ve specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial problems.
Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren’t true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.
Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height from 2004 to 2006.
Federal Reserve Board data show that:
•More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
•Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
•Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that’s being lambasted by conservative critics.
The “turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007,” the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets reported Friday.
Conservative critics claim that the Clinton administration pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make home ownership more available to riskier borrowers with little concern for their ability to pay the mortgages.
“I don’t remember a clarion call that said Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster,” said Neil Cavuto of Fox News.
Fannie, the Federal National Mortgage Association, and Freddie, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., don’t lend money, to minorities or anyone else, however. They purchase loans from the private lenders who actually underwrite the loans.
It’s a process called securitization, and by passing on the loans, banks have more capital on hand so they can lend even more.
This much is true. In an effort to promote affordable home ownership for minorities and rural whites, the Department of Housing and Urban Development set targets for Fannie and Freddie in 1992 to purchase low-income loans for sale into the secondary market that eventually reached this number: 52 percent of loans given to low-to moderate-income families.
To be sure, encouraging lower-income Americans to become homeowners gave unsophisticated borrowers and unscrupulous lenders and mortgage brokers more chances to turn dreams of homeownership in nightmares.
But these loans, and those to low- and moderate-income families represent a small portion of overall lending. And at the height of the housing boom in 2005 and 2006, Republicans and their party’s standard bearer, President Bush, didn’t criticize any sort of lending, frequently boasting that they were presiding over the highest-ever rates of U.S. homeownership.
Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble.
During those same explosive three years, private investment banks — not Fannie and Freddie — dominated the mortgage loans that were packaged and sold into the secondary mortgage market. In 2005 and 2006, the private sector securitized almost two thirds of all U.S. mortgages, supplanting Fannie and Freddie, according to a number of specialty publications that track this data.
In 1999, the year many critics charge that the Clinton administration pressured Fannie and Freddie, the private sector sold into the secondary market just 18 percent of all mortgages.
Fueled by low interest rates and cheap credit, home prices between 2001 and 2007 galloped beyond anything ever seen, and that fueled demand for mortgage-backed securities, the technical term for mortgages that are sold to a company, usually an investment bank, which then pools and sells them into the secondary mortgage market.
About 70 percent of all U.S. mortgages are in this secondary mortgage market, according to the Federal Reserve.
Conservative critics also blame the subprime lending mess on the Community Reinvestment Act, a 31-year-old law aimed at freeing credit for underserved neighborhoods.
Congress created the CRA in 1977 to reverse years of redlining and other restrictive banking practices that locked the poor, and especially minorities, out of homeownership and the tax breaks and wealth creation it affords. The CRA requires federally regulated and insured financial institutions to show that they’re lending and investing in their communities.
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote recently that while the goal of the CRA was admirable, “it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — who in turn pressured banks and other lenders — to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That’s called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity.”
Fannie and Freddie, however, didn’t pressure lenders to sell them more loans; they struggled to keep pace with their private sector competitors. In fact, their regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, imposed new restrictions in 2006 that led to Fannie and Freddie losing even more market share in the booming subprime market.
Elena – I suppose you do not think Medicare and Medicaid are manifestations of socialism. What do you think people are talking about when they talk about the public option? 🙄
If our elected officials wanted to decrease the cost of our health care, they would encourage increased competition and reform tort law. What they are doing is telling the insurance industry how do operate.
To have socialism, government does not have to “own” everything; the government just has to have control of everything, and that is the direction the legislation is going.
Bush was only the president, not a dictator. Who knows where Obama is going, but there is still a great deal the president cannot control.
The takeover of the mortgage lending industry took more years than Bush was in office. The takeover also required the passage of legislation passed by a Democratic Party controlled Congress. What Bush is guilty of is not doing enough to stop two things: (1) the increase in lending by government sponsored agencies and (2)the implied government backing of such loans. You really ought to investigate the matter.
OFL,
I just shared, from the CBO, why major reform is needed. Adding a public option MAKES the competition work. Maybe you could address the rising health care costs from the CBO if the Federal Govt does nothing. Have you read the arguments against simply relying on opening up state to state insurance purchase? What I have found is that it will not address the underlying problem, insuring those that don’t have the perfect health record. Maybe you are lucky, and have no chronic health issues, that is wonderful, but for many people who do suffer from chronic health conditions, not dealing with “cherry” picking who will insure becomes a crisis.
■ Total spending on health care would rise from 16 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2007 to 25 percent in 2025, 37 percent in 2050, and 49 percent in 2082
I found alot of interesting policy papers from this group.
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy_papers
http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/across_state_lines_explained
@Elena
Adding a public option makes competition work? I guess that why the government took over GM. I suppose we need a government home builder, a government farm, a government lawn mower maker, a government ice cream maker, and so forth. Nothing those area of the private economy are perfect either, but with Obama, perfection is only a public option away.
Yes, I have scraggly grass; I sure could use a cheap public option lawn mower.
Stop trying to justify the means with the end. It is dishonest and invitation for corruption.
Did you happen to read the any of the links I suggested? Have you listened to Wendell Potter on the need for a public option or non profit option, however you want to name it? I find him extremely credible. When a public option only will serve approximately 6 million people, what are you concerns?
How did you make the eyes roll, that is pretty cool even if it is meant as an insult 🙂
There has to be something that keeps the 45 million out of the emergency room. I haven’t heard any answers, just opinions, which is fine but OFL, you seem to think if you belittle Elena, that makes you more right. Tell me I am wrong and I misread that.
🙄
O.K., share the secret M.H., how do you do the “talking” face?!
I think that OFL must have the only insurance plan that has premiums decreasing every year instead of rising. Wish I could sign up for THAT plan!
OFL,
Are you pro-choice?
I will have to tell the code rather than write it out.
colonrollcolon
use the symbols where you see the word colon. Put the word roll between them.
🙄
Whoo Hoo, I did it!
@Elena
You will probably find this interesting.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Smilies