Couldn't get it through Congress? Didn't even try, would be more accurate.

Actually, they did try to get it to in the bill. You can thank the GOP, and those 'blue dog' Democrats for keeping it out. I'm sure we have all watched, just how 'grateful' Republicans are, that the bill was passed. I'm sure they are a 'noble', and 'generous' people, these Republicans, to make sure its included fairly 'soon' in another bill on health care. What's more important to Republicans? Money or the nation's health?

What was the point of all the "bipartisanship"? And all the wasted time on it. To prove a point? In the end it all worked out exactly the way everyone knew it would. ZERO republican votes. So why neuter the bill? The public option should have been there. The whole thing is pointless imo without it.

It's one of those times where, well ... since you're accused of something you might as well do it.
They should have "jammed it down their throats".
They did anyway.

And that's exactly why the people who voted for them did so, to get that shit done.

On the bright side, the guy wasn't tazered and dragged out.

There weren't 60 Senate Democrats that wanted a public option.

They could try calling the GOP filibuster bluff on it, but that would pretty much shut down all legislative activity until one side gave in.

@burdturgler:

"...On the bright side, the guy wasn't tazered and dragged out.

And just look at the size of his free speech zone!

@Psychologic:

I don't think that's true. Had the Dems wanted the Public Option, it would have gotten in. They never really wanted it from the start.

The Dems should have jammed it down the rests throats and slapped them on the face with it aftewards. But I suppose this can be seen as a good first step - it's certainly better for the people that now have health insurance.

32 million AMericans are going to have to come up with $10,000 to be gouged by insurance companies.

There is zero health care in the bill, only more costs and mandatory pork for insurance industries.

Zero price caps. Zero caps on deductables or co-pays.

Anyone who thinks the Health Insurance bill is good is an idiot, or a black President.

Obama didn't want the public option. He made deals with hospital and doctor groups, assuring them that it wouldn't be in there.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/State_of_the_Union/struck-deals-white-house-healthcare/story?id=9689680&page=1

It's quite simple, he's a corporatist and always has been.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bon-9KtNqw

i would call the public option more than "just an aspect of it"

@joedirt:

That's largely true, and I just thought of that the other night.

It's not "Health Care Reform" it's a "Medical Insurance Bill."

You, obviously, must possess health insurance regardless of the bill's passing.

It's a step in the right direction, and better than nothing.

>> ^joedirt:

32 million AMericans are going to have to come up with $10,000 to be gouged by insurance companies.
There is zero health care in the bill, only more costs and mandatory pork for insurance industries.
Zero price caps. Zero caps on deductables or co-pays.
Anyone who thinks the Health Insurance bill is good is an idiot, or a black President.

@longde:

But insurers are only middlemen. They don't fix broken bones. They don't perform mammograms or change bedpans.

This didn't change anything about health care. It changed the routes and byways that are now mandated by the writ of law to make sure 30 million previously uninsured people are insured as long as the same private insurers that we all hated for so long remain the middlemen.

Real health care would have a provision for free yearly or biannual checkups for all adults. That would be an act of health care by providing a means of preventative medicine, which saves lives.

Real health care would have a provision about prenatal care.

Real health care would have a provision that reigned in pharma's ability to charge Americans $100 for drugs it sells in Mexico and Canada for $10.

I have not been following the American health care debate as closely as I'm sure many citizens of that country are. My synopsis from afar is that the bill that was passed was not what Obama wanted. The kind of bill desired morphed into something that is only, as @longde pointed out, better than nothing. Coming from a country that has universal health care already, I am somewhat baffled by the strong resistance universal health care has in that country (except by corporates and lobbyists allowed to profit from disease.)

When I learned that the bill became a several thousand page behemoth does make me think that the final version should have been written by Alan Siegel and his team. At least then it might also be intelligible.

Actually Obama personally intervened to make sure a public option wouldn't happen. Besides the fact that he excluded any group that wanted a public option from meetings throughout, he also personally lobbied congressmen against Dennis Kucinich's bill that would allow states to pursue a universal health care system on their own.
Corporate interests = Buy. Obama = bought. The people = Consumers. Consumers = Buy what they're sold.

If I am not mistaken, this bill makes preventative care free.

At the end of the day in the U.S., I cannot see a doctor, unless I have a means to pay.

I recently moved, and found a new primary physician. On my first phone call to his office, before they would even talk about an appointment date and time, I spent 10 minutes on the line while the receptionist verified my insurance information and ability to pay. I know that this is a common occurrence.

This bill provides the means for more people to be able to pay. I also prevents, in the case of severe illness/injury, for people to go bankrupt. That's a huge step forward in my book, though not nearly enough. I wanted a public option, too, BTW.

>> ^rougy:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/longde" title="member since April 8th, 2009" class="profilelink">longde:
But insurers are only middlemen. They don't fix broken bones. They don't perform mammograms or change bedpans.
This didn't change anything about health care. It changed the routes and byways that are now mandated by the writ of law to make sure 30 million previously uninsured people are insured as long as the same private insurers that we all hated for so long remain the middlemen.
Real health care would have a provision for free yearly or biannual checkups for all adults. That would be an act of health care by providing a means of preventative medicine, which saves lives.
Real health care would have a provision about prenatal care.
Real health care would have a provision that reigned in pharma's ability to charge Americans $100 for drugs it sells in Mexico and Canada for $10.

The main influence of the bill is a guaranteed subside to insurance companies plus some new regulations on those companies getting the money. It's an improvement for middle to low income people. But looking at it generally it's the US government paying twice what other western pay for less service, and why...to give money to middlemen.

wind in sails....

Get healthy by growing strong children-stay healthy through mending-to fix the US' health problems with legislations' akin to using a bucket brigade to combat a refinery explosion-

..fucking hate watching US presidents speak-

i lost my health insurance in august. my kids got medicaid, which is 2131513213 times better than the private health insurance i've had since they were born. but i have no insurance. so i haven't figured out yet if i'll be able to get coverage on myself that i can actually afford.

from what i understand of the bill, it did a few good things, like eliminate pre-existing conditions and extend coverage for young adults. but as far as i can tell, the biggest thing it did was get the insurance companies 30 million new costumers and permission to raise premiums through the roof. fuck that. where is the part about cost control? and when are they going to figure out what it actually costs to provide health care?

The only thing this does is say.. We will fix the uninsured problem. YOU MUST BUY HEALTH INSURANCE. *poof* problem solved.

It's like passing a law that says you will be fined if you are caught sleeping on the street. *poof* homeless is SOLVED!

This is just assholish to say, go buy insurance, then everyone will be insured. Also they are putting the burden on states to come up with how to handle people who cannot afford the $10,000. What will happen is outrageously expensive insurance plans, and also insurance that has gotchas and really covers nothing. They will just have a plan that only pays out like $5000 then it is all out of pocket. There is nothing to prevent them from doing this until like 2018.. and even then they will just take the fines.

Please explain to me how does this prevent someone from going bankrupt? Imagine you already have health insurance, even good coverage.. Plenty of people do and they are being screwed daily by insurers. It will be no different. Did Obama do away with co-pays and deductibles and maximum policy coverage? NO HE DIDN'T

What most people around the globe fail to realize. Those of us who have healthcare already don't give a rat's ass about the 32 million who didn't. Now my rates will go up because some moron who couldn't educate himself enough to get a decent enough job where they could get healthcare? Fuck that. I am selfish for saying that? Hell yes. Do I care that I'm selfish? Hell no. Fuck stupid people.

^ You sure about that?

You're the only man in the world who works for a living?

The only man who pays taxes?

The rest of us are lay-abouts?

I gotta say, I have a real love/hate relationship with the way liberals refuse to unify.

Psychologic is right. Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson deserve the credit for what became the final demise of the public option. They're the ones who committed to joining a Republican filibuster of the Senate bill until it was stripped.

It's true that if there had been even one Republican who came out in favor of it, it would've been passed (probably only 61-39, but it'd pass), but that's a fantasy universe where good policy ideas on the left attract votes from the Republican side of the aisle.

I'm not sure that Obama being more engaged about the public option would've gotten it through. Maybe if we had some way of making Obama angry, and getting him to turn into The Rock Obama, he could have played hardball with Democrats, and threatened them with primary challengers, stripping them of chairmanships, etc. Ultimately though, I'm not convinced he really had any stick to wield against either Nelson or Lieberman. There's no other Democrat who could hold onto a Senate seat in Nebraska other than Nelson, and Lieberman seems to have simply been looking for an excuse to join the Republican party ever since the netroots successfully helped Ned Lamont beat him in the Democratic primary in 2006.

I'm honestly not sure there are 51 votes for it in the Senate. That campaign to get signatories to a letter for passing the public option under reconciliation petered out around 40 or so Democrats, and that was counting a lot of people who didn't actually sign the letter, just people who made approving noises about the idea. That makes me think that whether or not there are 51 Democrats who wanted the public option, there weren't 51 willing to try to use reconciliation to pass it.

It's my opinion, as a really, really avid follower of all this, that we just didn't have the votes for the public option.

I'm shocked and pissed about that, and I definitely think the nearly 20 Dems who were only for the public option when it was subject to the filibuster need to be ran through the wringer, but we go into these things with the Democrats we have, not the ones we wish we had. I'm all for a Congress entirely composed of Graysons, Weiners, Sherrod Browns, with a couple Sanders and Kuciniches, but we're a long way from that now.

I think this bill was the best deal we could have gotten in the 111th Congress.

It does not implement any level of government price setting (i.e. its 0% socialist). However, it does collect taxes from the rich, and uses the money to buy insurance for the poor.

It puts lots of new restrictions on insurance companies to make sure their profits come from serving their customers well, not from denying them care. Same for doctors and hospitals, it will make an attempt to change their incentives towards being based on patient outcomes, and not number & size of procedures done.

It does not, and will not solve every health care problem in the country, but it's going to vastly improve the state of our health care system, and provide care to a huge number of people who didn't have access to it, or who couldn't afford it until now.

It's not perfect, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

I think the main effect this bill will have is that we'll keep reforming our health care system as we go. The public option isn't dead, it just didn't get baked in from the start. We can keep pushing for it, and working to elect people who will fight for it, and working to defeat people who helped kill it...like Joe Lieberman.

^ You are lying out your ass.

There is nothing that says this had to be a "bi-partisan" bill.

Forget "ramming it down their throats", this is what they should have done:

I have to say that Grayson's proposed bill to allow people to pay into Medicare is interesting. It's not as if the US gov hasn't spent the time and effort into setting up a healthcare network like every other health insurance company has, IE Medicare. So allowing people access to what they have been and still are paying for is not crazy hard to understand. We already spend the money for the agreements they make with the hospitals and providers, so why can't they just allow people to trickle over to Medicare if people choose to? I suspect it has something to do with keeping insurance companies in business.

All I know is for the last two years minimum, the economy has obviously been down. And maybe 3 years ago it was starting to get to those levels. In that same period of time, my insurance premiums jumped up each year. This last year, it went up by nearly 50 percent. I pay out of pocket for it, and if I looked into it I would probably be in the realm of receiving government assistance at this point. But I'm trying to keep it coming out of my own pocket. The silly thing about it all is, I pay these outrageous premiums and I can't afford to get any tests done besides really simple blood tests the doctors want every so often. If I didn't have to cover the premium costs, but could get in on the pricing deals Medicare/other insurance companies had.......I could have the tests done with the money I would have been putting toward premiums. I've had to stop getting treatments in the last couple months for allergies because of the out of pocket costs on top of the new and improved monster premiums (even after I raised my deductible, etc).

Now I know for a fact there are people out there who've been on Medicare/SSI/Medicaid/Welfare/Whatever government program gives out money, who are 50 something years old and have been on it since they were 15. Worked an actual job very little in their lifetime, and have drawn a pretty sizeable check (more than someone would typically draw on unemployment at the lower end). So these people choose not to work at all, have the government cover most of their health care costs, live in a rental property most lower income working stiffs would find quite nice, and still afford to go out to the casinos every week and grab a steak dinner every week or so as they gamble away their government check.

And there are people out there who just want to be able to get treated so they can keep their job/house/whatever. And the government officials can't figure out a way to make it so working people can suffer a little less, but they can provide all of the above for people who don't work at all. It's a pretty fucked up situation, and all these welfare recipients get together and figure out ways to get more government money via divorce, custody, and other legal loop holes other people wouldn't even think of doing. And that's just the legal stuff, then you get into the welfare/medicaid guys who are getting drugs on the government dime and selling em for cash outta their welfare paid for houses.

So if you're not well off job wise, and completely unwilling to be a degenerate milking the system even though you could work......you get fucked.

This happened like it was rejected back in the early 90's. Because we don't have a functioning democracy. I can't imagine how much money the insurance companies spent sending people to Washington to lobby, you can bet they did it because it's a real good investment.

The guy behind Obama on the left of screen has the most distracting clap I've ever seen.

JD,

People who are 400% above the poverty line will be subsidized for buying the insurance. So it's not like they have to pay premiums completely out of pocket.

To echo you: Did Obama do away with maximum policy coverage? YES HE DID. Co-pays go away for preventative care.

How does this prevent bankruptcies? Would you rather pay for a $500k surgery out of pocket, or pay $2-5k a month for insurance and let the policy handle the surgery costs? By shifting peoples obligation from the total cost of care to an insurance payment, that will help many avoid bankruptcy.

>> ^joedirt:

The only thing this does is say.. We will fix the uninsured problem. YOU MUST BUY HEALTH INSURANCE. poof problem solved.
It's like passing a law that says you will be fined if you are caught sleeping on the street. poof homeless is SOLVED!
This is just assholish to say, go buy insurance, then everyone will be insured. Also they are putting the burden on states to come up with how to handle people who cannot afford the $10,000. What will happen is outrageously expensive insurance plans, and also insurance that has gotchas and really covers nothing. They will just have a plan that only pays out like $5000 then it is all out of pocket. There is nothing to prevent them from doing this until like 2018.. and even then they will just take the fines.
Please explain to me how does this prevent someone from going bankrupt? Imagine you already have health insurance, even good coverage.. Plenty of people do and they are being screwed daily by insurers. It will be no different. Did Obama do away with co-pays and deductibles and maximum policy coverage? NO HE DIDN'T

I'm willing to talk about your anecdotal cases, but please back them up with statistics. How many people are like this, and how much of our budget goes to subsidizing them? I don't think it's much in either case.

It's baseless to say working people were and are getting screwed. This bill for instance, helps the middle class greatly.

The american middle class is much more subsidized than the Tea or Republican parties would have us believe. >> ^Porksandwich:

I have to say that Grayson's proposed bill to allow people to pay into Medicare is interesting. It's not as if the US gov hasn't spent the time and effort into setting up a healthcare network like every other health insurance company has, IE Medicare. So allowing people access to what they have been and still are paying for is not crazy hard to understand. We already spend the money for the agreements they make with the hospitals and providers, so why can't they just allow people to trickle over to Medicare if people choose to? I suspect it has something to do with keeping insurance companies in business.
All I know is for the last two years minimum, the economy has obviously been down. And maybe 3 years ago it was starting to get to those levels. In that same period of time, my insurance premiums jumped up each year. This last year, it went up by nearly 50 percent. I pay out of pocket for it, and if I looked into it I would probably be in the realm of receiving government assistance at this point. But I'm trying to keep it coming out of my own pocket. The silly thing about it all is, I pay these outrageous premiums and I can't afford to get any tests done besides really simple blood tests the doctors want every so often. If I didn't have to cover the premium costs, but could get in on the pricing deals Medicare/other insurance companies had.......I could have the tests done with the money I would have been putting toward premiums. I've had to stop getting treatments in the last couple months for allergies because of the out of pocket costs on top of the new and improved monster premiums (even after I raised my deductible, etc).
Now I know for a fact there are people out there who've been on Medicare/SSI/Medicaid/Welfare/Whatever government program gives out money, who are 50 something years old and have been on it since they were 15. Worked an actual job very little in their lifetime, and have drawn a pretty sizeable check (more than someone would typically draw on unemployment at the lower end). So these people choose not to work at all, have the government cover most of their health care costs, live in a rental property most lower income working stiffs would find quite nice, and still afford to go out to the casinos every week and grab a steak dinner every week or so as they gamble away their government check.
And there are people out there who just want to be able to get treated so they can keep their job/house/whatever. And the government officials can't figure out a way to make it so working people can suffer a little less, but they can provide all of the above for people who don't work at all. It's a pretty fucked up situation, and all these welfare recipients get together and figure out ways to get more government money via divorce, custody, and other legal loop holes other people wouldn't even think of doing. And that's just the legal stuff, then you get into the welfare/medicaid guys who are getting drugs on the government dime and selling em for cash outta their welfare paid for houses.
So if you're not well off job wise, and completely unwilling to be a degenerate milking the system even though you could work......you get fucked.

>> ^rougy:

^ You are lying out your ass.
There is nothing that says this had to be a "bi-partisan" bill.


First things first, I gave my honest opinion. You may think I'm wrong, or just simply disagree with me, but I said what I really believe.

As for the bill being "bipartisan", I'm not sure what you mean. Only Dennis Kucinich was talking about single payer in the Presidential primary. Edwards, Clinton, and Obama all had plans that left private insurance at the heart of their reforms. None of them proposed a public option as strong as Grayson's bill that would allow everyone to be able to buy into Medicare. None of them really even proposed a plan that regulates the private insurers as much as this bill will.

Democrats are honestly a center-right party. I'm on board for trying to pull them left so that they become at least a center-left party, but we're not there today.

I think that we got a pretty good bill, considering the kind of timid centrists we had at the heart of our party, and we'll have plenty of opportunity to improve the bill over the course of the next decade. We might even get a public option before most of this stuff comes into effect in 2014.

I for one expect that the public option will be a big topic in the 2010 and 2012 elections, especially in the Democratic Senate primaries, and hopefully in the 2012 presidential campaign as well.

Do you own your company? How do you know you won't be layed-off tomorrow? >> ^Sigh:

What most people around the globe fail to realize. Those of us who have healthcarThe already don't give a rat's ass about the 32 million who didn't. Now my rates will go up because some moron who couldn't educate himself enough to get a decent enough job where they could get healthcare? Fuck that. I am selfish for saying that? Hell yes. Do I care that I'm selfish? Hell no. Fuck stupid people.

I work for the only self-sustaining office in the fed gov't. If I got laid off it would take them 9 months to do it. So tomorrow? Nope.


>> ^longde:

Do you own your company? How do you know you won't be layed-off tomorrow? Many professional class assholes thought just like you before this last season of layoffs. >> ^Sigh:
What most people around the globe fail to realize. Those of us who have healthcarThe already don't give a rat's ass about the 32 million who didn't. Now my rates will go up because some moron who couldn't educate himself enough to get a decent enough job where they could get healthcare? Fuck that. I am selfish for saying that? Hell yes. Do I care that I'm selfish? Hell no. Fuck stupid people.

I am just commenting on a few cases I know for sure are happening and have been happening for many years. My personal experience and what I see people whom I know are on government assistance doing.

As for proving it with statistics, many of these people on the government subsidies fill out forms improperly or change information on the forms they submit from their landlords to the government. I have also seen this when my grandmother had rental properties, they would ask for them back so they could mail them, instead of having her mail them. One time my mother typed up her response, and the renter who lived next to my grandmother...was asking for a typewriter. Never asked for one before or since, just when that one piece of paperwork had been typed.

So how can one accurately find statistics on how much people deceive or change their living situations to benefit more greatly from the system? Do they have a check box on forms that says "I divorced my wife and refuse to pay child support so she can draw a government subsidized check for rent on my children, and get them into medicaid?"

It's enough that I've seen multiple cases like this over the last 10-15 years.

This bill could help the middle class greatly, because it's impossible to say how it'll get twisted around and massaged to make it work "better" for corporate interests or what loop holes have been overlooked in it's creation and re-examination.

And really middle class is a pretty broad term, a lot of people like to classify themselves as middle class. In this "middle class" range people go from being 10k above the poverty line to pulling down 250k or more. So sure if you're barely above poverty, YOUR middle class will be subsidized. But if you're pushing the upper limits of middle class and spend your time worrying about trying to avoid taxes, YOUR middle class probably won't be sudsidized much if at all.

Middle class is such an ambiguous term, I couldn't even find a definition that meant anything from a discussion standpoint.


>> ^longde:

I'm willing to talk about your anecdotal cases, but please back them up with statistics. How many people are like this, and how much of our budget goes to subsidizing them? I don't think it's much in either case.
It's baseless to say working people were and are getting screwed. This bill for instance, helps the middle class greatly.
The american middle class is much more subsidized than the Tea or Republican parties would have us believe. >> ^Porksandwich:
I have to say that Grayson's proposed bill to allow people to pay into Medicare is interesting. It's not as if the US gov hasn't spent the time and effort into setting up a healthcare network like every other health insurance company has, IE Medicare. So allowing people access to what they have been and still are paying for is not crazy hard to understand. We already spend the money for the agreements they make with the hospitals and providers, so why can't they just allow people to trickle over to Medicare if people choose to? I suspect it has something to do with keeping insurance companies in business.
All I know is for the last two years minimum, the economy has obviously been down. And maybe 3 years ago it was starting to get to those levels. In that same period of time, my insurance premiums jumped up each year. This last year, it went up by nearly 50 percent. I pay out of pocket for it, and if I looked into it I would probably be in the realm of receiving government assistance at this point. But I'm trying to keep it coming out of my own pocket. The silly thing about it all is, I pay these outrageous premiums and I can't afford to get any tests done besides really simple blood tests the doctors want every so often. If I didn't have to cover the premium costs, but could get in on the pricing deals Medicare/other insurance companies had.......I could have the tests done with the money I would have been putting toward premiums. I've had to stop getting treatments in the last couple months for allergies because of the out of pocket costs on top of the new and improved monster premiums (even after I raised my deductible, etc).
Now I know for a fact there are people out there who've been on Medicare/SSI/Medicaid/Welfare/Whatever government program gives out money, who are 50 something years old and have been on it since they were 15. Worked an actual job very little in their lifetime, and have drawn a pretty sizeable check (more than someone would typically draw on unemployment at the lower end). So these people choose not to work at all, have the government cover most of their health care costs, live in a rental property most lower income working stiffs would find quite nice, and still afford to go out to the casinos every week and grab a steak dinner every week or so as they gamble away their government check.
And there are people out there who just want to be able to get treated so they can keep their job/house/whatever. And the government officials can't figure out a way to make it so working people can suffer a little less, but they can provide all of the above for people who don't work at all. It's a pretty fucked up situation, and all these welfare recipients get together and figure out ways to get more government money via divorce, custody, and other legal loop holes other people wouldn't even think of doing. And that's just the legal stuff, then you get into the welfare/medicaid guys who are getting drugs on the government dime and selling em for cash outta their welfare paid for houses.
So if you're not well off job wise, and completely unwilling to be a degenerate milking the system even though you could work......you get fucked.

For contrast, this is what happened today when someone heckled Palin at a McCain rally:

Seems like Obama is slowly transforming from law professor to Dan Quayle.

and the point is...?

I like the conversation. My 2 cents: The bill was, in its conception, a great policy. But after it went through the special interest ringer that has a stranglehold on our governance, it turned into a giant turd. I have examples but will spare you the ten paragraph rant. The bill stands as a beacon of just how fucked our political system has become. I pray that over time new legislations will be added to ensure that premiums won't increase due to the new insurance regulations. Also that a public option will be added so that people will be activly participating in driving down insurance rates, and turning their money into aditional aid that will reduce the federal deficit.

I do not see this like most of my fellow liberals, as helping out a less fortunate sector on the socioeconomic rung. Their gross income will be reduced more than it has ever been, regardless of whether or not they need any medical coverage at all. I definitly don't agree with the conservatives who think that this is a handout at their expense. No class stands to gain if your looking soley at paystubs, as the republican argument always appears to.

And the collapse is already starting...insurers are claiming they don't have to cover children with pre-existing conditions (one of the prime "victories" of this legislation, remember).

NY Times article

Anyone want to make a wager on how many more such loopholes are going to show up in the next 3-4 weeks? Maybe we should start a pool...

@Stormsinger, terrible as it is, it seems like the insurance companies, really, really want to help boost support for more reform.

It's like a cry for help, something like "please, stop us from screwing over children to defend our profit margins!"

I'm curious to see how it plays out. I would hope Democrats just introduce a new standalone bill to specifically close that loophole, and dare Republicans to stand in the way.

@NetRunner
The thought that keeps running through my head here is that either the insurance companies know something we don't, or they're stupid beyond belief. And, as delightful as the idea is, I find it difficult to believe that they're all that stupid. It seems far more likely that they're just that sure of the leashes they have on their politicians.

That said, I do wonder just how far they can push things before Grayson's bill starts looking passable. To judge by the reform passed for Wall Street, that's a hell of a long ways.

@Stormsinger, I just think people at the top are so surrounded by yes men and other various sycophants that they can easily lose touch with reality.

They also come to think money can buy anything, and that profits excuse everything. The ends justify the means and all that.

Letting children with preexisting conditions buy health insurance is going to be a net loss for them, so they resist. In their minds, it doesn't matter what happens to the kids they deny, that's not their problem, and making it their problem is tyranny and socialism, etc.