http://socialistparty-usa.org/statements/no3962.html
Socialist Party USA Statement
While citizens in most other industrialized nations enjoyed the benefits of publicly administered healthcare from the aftermath of WW II forward, Americans have suffered under a healthcare system dominated by private corporations. For-profit healthcare has produced negative health outcomes at all levels of the system. More than 48 million people have no health insurance, 30 million more are underinsured and 6 out of 10 Americans report that they have either delayed or deferred a necessary medical procedure in the last year. Americans are more than ready for publicly-run healthcare that guarantees access at all levels of the system.
Unfortunately, the bill recently passed by the House of Representatives, The Affordable Healthcare for America Act (HR 3962), and the proposals being considered by the Senate will not provide the relief Americans so desperately need. Instead, these reforms were shaped and, in some cases, authored by the very same private interests who have spent decades collecting massive profits by restricting access to care. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama sensed the growing public anger about healthcare and scored many popularity points for promising “universal healthcare coverage.” Once in office, after taking millions from the healthcare lobby, his rhetoric shifted to the neoliberal promise of “choice and competition” in healthcare.
The primary problem with HR 3962 and the Senate proposals is that all of the changes they propose are made within a for-profit system. The House Bill strips the insurance companies of the right to deny coverage based on a pre-existing condition. Yet, it de-links the public option from Medicare reimbursement rates, thereby surrendering
pricing to the private sector. The Bill removes the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by private insurers. However, it simultaneously mandates that all Americans carry some form of health insurance, thereby herding millions into low-coverage high-fee private plans. Each step in a positive direction is coupled with a restructuring that will enrich private insurance companies and pharmaceutical makers.
The bills lost further reform credentials as Democrats cut last minute deals with Republicans. Immigrants were removed from eligibility for the public option, abortions were written out of the proposal and Medicare funding was cut. The Medicare cuts are particularly cruel, since they will reduce an already compromised plan to bare bones coverage. Some of the cuts will limit private insurance profiteering, but others will slash necessary items such as exercise programs for seniors. Overall, these omissions signal that the reforms are not about providing comprehensive medical coverage, but about political expediency within the establishment political class. The next round of negotiations in the Senate is sure to produce even further regressive measures as campaign-donation driven legislators cut more deals.
What people in this country need is healthcare. It is their right as human beings. The only way to secure this right is to place the healthcare system in public hands–-to remove the profit-motive from the system. Single-payer healthcare, as embodied in House Resolution 676, would be a positive step in this direction. It would provide
universal access to care to all residents of the United States by abolishing private health insurance companies. In thirteen clearly written pages, HR 676 does the things the 1,990 page HR 3962 does not. Access to care is made universal, a framework is created to make bulk negotiations with hospitals and doctors and healthcare activists would be freed to set their sights on making the pharmaceutical industry public as well.
The Socialist Party USA therefore encourages its members and supporters to continue their work in the single-payer movement and to pressure elected representatives to vote “No” on the Senate proposal and, eventually, on the merged bill. All non-violent forms of protest should be employed to prevent the passage of this legislation. The protests should clearly oppose the legislation. We do not want a stronger public option, we want what is rightfully ours–-unfettered access to healthcare services.
The passage of the weak and contradictory reform bills threaten to disgrace the notion that the public sector should play a prominent role in the administering of healthcare. Resisting the Obama, House and Senate proposals for reform not only promotes the idea that healthcare is a human right, it sends the message that people will not allow private sector campaign contributions to drive politics–-the satisfaction of our needs as humans should shape legislation.
Access to healthcare is our human right. We must build a movement to secure this right.
Say no to HR 3962!
Say no to Obama Care!
Yes to single-payer!
Yes to a socialized medical system!
11 responses so far ↓
1 jason // Dec 28, 2009 at 12:44 am
Amen brother.
2 Michael Seebeck // Dec 28, 2009 at 2:33 am
Ironic, yet typical. Freedom-loving Americans, starting with libertarians, oppose Obamacare because it goes too far, while the freedom-hating socialists oppose it because it doesn’t go far enough!
If that isn’t enough to show Obamacare is a stinker, then what is?
3 Catholic Trotskyist // Dec 28, 2009 at 5:49 am
My heart bleeds for you, Seebeck and Jason. I look forward to seeing the shock and anger on your faces when our holy Revolutionary General Barack Obama brings forth the Catholic Trotskyist revolution, of complete socialized medicine, Christian family values, and world government.
Please pray for the Pope and please pray for our great senator Ben Nelson, amen.
4 Mathew "RennDawg" Renner // Dec 28, 2009 at 7:26 am
I will go to prison before I live under goverment health care. It is anti-liberty and unconstitutional.
5 Deran // Dec 28, 2009 at 5:27 pm
“Anti-Freedom”? You obviously have a limited knowledge of US history. It was the SP and US Left that originaly opposed segregation, opposed the 1919 Red scare, it was the Leftists that stood up for free speech. So-calledd” libertarian capitalism is an ideology that’s only been around for 30 some years. The SP and the US Left have been fighting for people’s civil and personal rights for over a hundred years. Get a grip, and stop listening the Glen Beck, he’s an ill-formed demagogue.
6 paulie // Dec 28, 2009 at 6:14 pm
It doesn’t take knowledge of US history to realize that opposing individual economic freedom is anti-freedom.
Well, yes, civil liberties and social freedom is important – but so is economic freedom.
Who’s doing the calling? In political terms, “capitalism” is a term popularized by Karl Marx. It is meant deliberately to conflate and confuse completely separate and distinct concepts – free markets (a subspecies of free association) and individual liberty on the one hand, plutocracy and corporatism on the other. The purpose is to fool those who oppose plutocracy and corporatism into also opposing free markets, as well as to fool those who support free markets into supporting plutocracy and corporatism and the statism they are intertwined with.
Not so. Libertarianism goes back to at least Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism:
http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/lao-tzu.html
http://mises.org/story/1967
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/06/06/libertarian-wisdom-from-lao-tzu/
Other names you should look up include Frederic Bastiat and Lysander Spooner.
Bastiat, an early 19th century French libertarian, sat on the left in the French parliament (where the terms left and right originate), but he was no socialist.
The original left supported equal opportunity for poor and working class people, freedom of speech, religion, assembly, etc., and opposed big government. It supported the rights and interests of independent small business owners, workers, farmers, and opposed the state-abetted domination of the politically-connected big business class. It upheld reason and the ability of the individual to think independently and self-actualize.
The original right supported a powerful state, church, military, and business establishment, all tied together and supported by tradition.
It was only in the early 20th century that the original left split – between those who chose rightist (statist) means to achieve leftist goals, and those who reacted against the reality of oppression achieved by statist means to make common cause with big business interests (and thus came to be seen by most as actually being on the right). Before that, and still today in much of the world, these newer concepts of left and right would correctly be seen as absurd and self-contradictory.
See http://mises.org/story/2099 and references therein for more of the history on this.
7 Mathew "RennDawg" Renner // Dec 29, 2009 at 1:38 am
Why do you assume I listen to Glenn Beck. I do sometimes, I admit it. However, I have had my views and beliefs long before I ever heard of him.
8 paulie // Dec 29, 2009 at 1:41 am
I think that was actually directed at Seebeck.
As for me, I don’t listen to Glenn Beck at all.
9 Steve // Dec 29, 2009 at 12:33 pm
“necessary items such as exercise programs for seniors”? I’ll agree with you that seniors need to exercise, but why in the world would anyone think this is a federal necessity? I think seniors are perfectly capable of performing calisthenics on their own.
Or maybe I should join with the socialists and also point out the grave injustice of my recent 10-pound weight gain which is directly attributable to Congress’s failure to purchase a new treadmill for me.
10 Carl // Dec 31, 2009 at 2:28 pm
To What Are You Loyal?
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
December 31, 2009
With the crafting of the Hitler-like “IMAB” conditionality in the Senate health-care bill, President Barack Obama’s faction within the Democratic Party has gone over, not only, to the side of the enemies of our Federal Constitution’s most fundamental principle, but, by lending aid to such implicitly treasonous action, has given support to that which is fairly described as the principle of Satanic evil expressed in the usurpatious, and, frankly pro-satanic policies of Britain’s former Prime Minister Tony Blair who has led in reviving Adolf Hitler’s war-time health-care policies, with the active prompting of him by the leading figures of the present British royal house.
Under these conditions, when our republic is under a presently existential threat to its continued moral, and also its physical existence as a free republic, our patriots must make a principled break with the presently incumbent British monarchy. Patriotic Democrats, in or out of the Federal Congress, will prove themselves patriots by breaking themselves free of the control recently exerted by that corrupted administration and its leading accomplices within the Presidency and the Congress.
They, for the very soul’s sake, must join with other patriots in summarily ridding this nation of that evil which is represented by those who have acted to support the frankly Satanic evil which the President has come to represent through policies of practice such as the present, implicitly pro-Satanic, version of the draft health-care legislation introduced under the present Senate leader.
By his actions in this matter, especially those offenses represented by his so-called “health-care reforms,” this President and those elements of his Administration and Party which have crafted the hideous, Hitler-like policies represented by the content of the present Senate draft of that bill, have made themselves complicit, whether wittingly or not, with a policy which is tantamount to that of the Nuremberg crimes traced to Hitler’s health-care measures introduced as those “Nazi Tiergarten 4″ health-care policy under the war-time Nazi law which led to the great genocide for which leading physicians and others were condemned to death in the so-called “Nuremberg” proceedings.
We must join with those nations of the world which had led in defeating the evil scheme which the present British imperial monarchy had brought to the recent Copenhagen “summit.” We must align ourselves with those nations which share the principle which was defended against the evil, long associated with her consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, the which Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, had assigned to that Copenhagen “summit,” the Duke’s intention to reduce a world population of a currently estimated 6.7 billions living human souls, to two or less, that at a rapid rate.
We would hope that our sane and honorable “cousins” within the population of the United Kingdom would lend support to what should be, morally, our common cause against the monstrously great evil which the recent Senate action in support of President Obama’s and former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s evil scheme represents as a currently immediate, implicitly pro-Satanic, Hitler-like, threat to all humanity.
http://www.larouchepac.com
11 Libertaryan Pride // Dec 31, 2009 at 2:40 pm
That’s HOTT, Carl!
[ Hot Carl/Karl A Hot Carl is the act of defacating on someones face. A Warm Carl is defacating on their face whilst covered by plastic wrap. A Cold Carl is defacating on a glass table while someone lies below.
Suzie prefered Warm Carl's. "Less clean up afterward.", she said knowingly. John prefered giving Hot Carl's. "If there's no mess, what's the point?" Lucy liked the added security of the glass provided during a Cold Carl. "I just like watching it come out! Fascinating!"
by Brownson Pincheau Jan 7, 2005
2. Hot Carl/Karl 1. an enema with cheap red wine, usually Carlo Rossi Merlot.
2. squirting a red wine enema into another's face for one or both person's sexual gratification.
1- John: Man I am pooped I really need a drink.
Dan: Drink, nah I think what you need is a Hot Carl/Karl.
John: Hot dag, get the turkey baster bartender Hot Carls for the house!
House: Yeaaah ]
How HOTT? Well, not as HOTT as Bruce Cohen, who is the HOTTest HOTTie in all HOTTdom, but still pretty damn HOTT!
How HOTT is Bruce Cohen? He is so HOTT that I would have a threeway whith him and his dog Ginger! Yeah!
Maybe we could even do a Hot Carl! LOL.
Leave a Comment