Joe Lieberman.  Still a douche.
Thank god Ned Lamont wasn’t elected in his place.  Just imagine the horror.

Lieberman may go down in history as the reason that health care reform did not happen.  May his soul be eternally haunted by the people that suffer for his jack-assery.

Joe Lieberman is still pissed he lost the 2000 election and when the wave of new liberals showed up he got left behind.  Then again he also rallied against video games in the 90s and has generally been a ne’er do well for many years. 

The article hits it on the head though, when you probe the anti-public option people they really can’t figure out a strong argument other than they want less government.  Of course less government is just a loose coalition of thought processes that stem from their own internal perception of the lack of power they have or their personal predicament.  We have family friends who would be classic stereotypes of the teabaggers and even they concur that a public option if anything will stimulate the prices of healthcare to drop spectacularly.  Course, owning the hospitals & the means of care would be the ultimate answer to solving the problem of healthcare. 

Offer doctors a free education in exchange for 10 years of service there after.  Owning the hospitals so it doesn’t make a difference if a bed is making money or not.  Excluding insurance company accountants from medical decisions are the three cornerstones to turning medicine from a business into a function of society.

Frankly, anyone who did not know this was going to happen all along has had their head up their but for the last 3 years.

Offer doctors a free education in exchange for 10 years of service there after.  Owning the hospitals so it doesn’t make a difference if a bed is making money or not.  Excluding insurance company accountants from medical decisions are the three cornerstones to turning medicine from a business into a function of society.

Agree on all points, but it’s a pipe dream to even talk about such a system as that happening in America right now, when we can’t even get people to think of a Canadian-style universal healthcare system as being anything other than a Maoist takeover of America.  And Canada doesn’t control their means of delivery, unlike the UK.

I wonder if Lieberman’s main motivation is being the Insurance companies bought and paid for schill, or his hatred and deep desire for revenge against the left who humilated him by leaving him for a much younger man right in front of the whole world.  Or, if it’s a pretty even mix of the two.

But at this point I guess it doesn’t matter.  What does matter is wtf is wrong with the dems?

this fucking bastard, this whore, is chairman of a very powerful committee by the Democrat’s pardon.

WHY???????

Throw this fuck to the dogs, strip him, inform him he not only gets stripped, anything he wants, every dollar, every program, gets flushed, and then tell him go see what the repukes, the minority party, got for you.

Kick him out on his wrinkled ass and make him crawl home.

I’m just gonna say it right now.

Barring the use of reconciliation to get even somewhat meaningful healthcare reform passed, HCR is dead.  It is now clear that any bill that passes with the support of 60 U.S. Senators will be virtually no reform at all.  And I’m not speaking as a universal healthcare purist who would have thought anything shy of Medicare-for-all would not be reform (though I do think that would be a far better option than anything we’ve seen presented thus far), but as someone who believes that a good, robust public option would be a meaningful step in the right direction.

My hope dims everyday on whether or not we’ll have a robust public option, or ANY public option for that matter.  I mean, the goalposts have now been moved to the point in which ANY public option, even a crappy milquetoast one, is considered “OMG SOSHULIZM!!!”, and any real attempts to reduce healthcare costs in a meaningful way is a government takeover.

There is no “good faith” in play here.  The goal of the Republicans, including Republican Joe Lieberman and virtual Republicans Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu, is to destroy anything which could be beneficial to liberals - namely, good healthcare reform legislation.

Reid needs to realize that he’s only hurting his own re-election chances and hurting his own party’s 2010 chances by continuing to try to reach the magical 60 votes while keeping good HCR legislation intact.  It ain’t gonna happen.  I don’t care how controversial he thinks the nuclear option would be, it’s going to be far more costly to him and his caucus if he continues to allow this fucking asshole from Connecticut and his three little buddies from Nebraska, Arkansas, and Louisiana to run this thing into the ground.

DTG, Matt Yglesias wrote today that some of health care might not pass the procedural test, but that changing the medicare age to 55 would.  Maybe the dems are going to get whatever they can, and then do the rest via reconcillation, but i really doubt that.  I think they suck.  I am so frustrated it’s not even funny.  I sat through 8 years of a fucking maniac idealogy that never enjoyed majority support, shove down everyone’s throats any ole thing they wanted to.  And they did it with 50 votes plus Dick Cheney.  So you tell me what the fuck is going on?  Are we kidding ourselves that there are even 50 dems plus Biden who WANT real health care?  That’s what I wonder.

Is Lieberman (no one hates him more than me) just a convienent evil boogeyman for them?

And if you can lower the medicare age to 55 via reconcilliation, why not 45?

Might not pass the procedural test to use reconcillation I mean.

Angi, Lieberman is a hero to the Democratic Party. They will shower him with praise for blocking any meaningful reform. The Dem party as an institution is just as entirely owned by our owners as the Republican Party is. They’re good cop/bad cop, all in the interests of keeping our owners as far above the herd as they can. If Lieberman weren’t there, the Senate Dems would have to come up with some other plausible reason to block HCR.

And yes, there is about a third of Dem elected officials who are real liberals, but they’re powerless in the party structure. Watch Obama kick them in the face over and over again.

Agree on all points, but it’s a pipe dream to even talk about such a system as that happening in America right now, when we can’t even get people to think of a Canadian-style universal healthcare system as being anything other than a Maoist takeover of America.  And Canada doesn’t control their means of delivery, unlike the UK.

Not necessarily.  Pell Grants are incredibly popular, as is opposition to the “free ride”.  Offering education in exchange for public service is a deal we make in the military all the time.

The real hurdle is government owned hospitals.  Frankly, I think you could work around this if you made the program local rather than federal.  The idea of a federally owned hospital would be off putting.  The idea of a city owned hospital, not as much.  Providing cities with block grants to set up hospital services might win people over more easily.

These policies aren’t particularly novel, they just haven’t been queued up and pointed at the health care problem.

So then it’s true that we live in under corporatism or in a plutocracy.  What’s keeping us from full-on facism?  The mirage of democracy?  The refusal of the citizens to revolt?  If they did revolt, would we see the real facist state drop its mask and rear its head?

AnglScarlett @ #8:

It does make one wonder, doesn’t it?

I mean, right now, we’re being led to believe that we’ve got somewhere between 57-59 votes firmly on our side, but darnit, we just can’t get to that magical threshold of 60.

My belief is that if we really do have well over the 50 vote threshold right now as we’re being led to believe, why not pass everything they can using budget reconciliation?

If it is true that we really don’t even have 50 votes onboard, then it means that Joe Lieberman isn’t the only huge asshole in the Democratic Caucus.  Not that I believe that he is - Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu have all been assholes in their own way, as has Max Baucus - just that Harry Reid knows something the rest of us don’t, and isn’t telling us.

The only thing that leads me to hesitation in that belief is that Lieberman hasn’t validated it.  I mean, he’s taking a huge amount of shit right now for being an obstructionist, and deservedly so, but I think if he knew that there were at least ten other Democrats who were sharing his position, he’d be sure to let us all know that he’s not the only one blocking HCR right now.

Lieberman is a vendictive cobag who is getting back at the left for 2004 and 2006.

Does CT have recall? I have never in my life seen a Senator represent the interests of their state worse. CT is a liberal state.

You know what? We don’t really have 60 seats in the Senate. Liebertool is a Republican.

Does CT have recall? I have never in my life seen a Senator represent the interests of their state worse. CT is a liberal state.

No state has recall for elected officials in federal offices.

We’re stuck with Joementum until 2012, unless he croaks or does something so egregious that the Senate kicks him out.  And the Senate pretty much never kicks anyone out… so we’re almost certainly stuck with him until 2012.

American business has moved from a model of creating products and value to one of skimming off value and charging for “service”.  It’s that simple.  Like many other industries, they simply want the government to enshrine their business model into law.

We never had 60 in the senate.  Not even close. lieberman isn’t the only one who will balk and defect when the time is right for a tantrum.  Rest assured, the big money is fueling a few emergency senators.

There’s also no question reid is not up for the task either through incompetence or planning on his own part.  That much is clear.

If he were doing this kind of thing and weren’t a senator, there’d be a pretty clear case for a conservatorship and perhaps involuntary commitment. He apparently can’t remember statements he made in public only a few days or weeks ago, his behavior has become erratic…

And btw I really believe he is the only one holding this up. Lieberman is that much of an asshole.

Angi, Lieberman is a hero to the Democratic Party. They will shower him with praise for blocking any meaningful reform. The Dem party as an institution is just as entirely owned by our owners as the Republican Party is. They’re good cop/bad cop, all in the interests of keeping our owners as far above the herd as they can. If Lieberman weren’t there, the Senate Dems would have to come up with some other plausible reason to block HCR.

And yes, there is about a third of Dem elected officials who are real liberals, but they’re powerless in the party structure. Watch Obama kick them in the face over and over again.

I hate to concede that you may be right, but I have to say… you may be right.

But this begs the question… are we really therefore a center-right country, a notion that people like Bill Kristol maintained even as the Republicans were getting trounced in two consecutive elections?

It really does suck that he can’t be recalled.  But DTG is right, he can’t be.  And it’s clear from his behavior that he has no intention of running again.  He’s going to fuck as many liberals as he can, and serve at the pleasure of whichever corporate entity is paying him for the rest of his term.  Then he will receive many millions in direct payoffs, through serving on boards and whatever other bs covers they come up with.

Unless he dies first.

Can’t say I’d consider that last outcome to be a shame.

@ DTG # 19.  I don’t believe so.  Polls have been showing very consistent, solid, majority support for a public option.  Polls have always shown majority, at times super-majority support for center-left positions. 

I think that on the public option in particular, it just can no longer be denied that quite simply, what the people want does not matter.  And the right ignore those polls, and keep stating that “the people don’t want a public option.”

It’s like we are all being gaslighted.  Because the people do want it.  But they’re not going to get it, so paid liars like John Boehner have to keep stating that the people don’t want what they have already said, over and over,a nd in the face of an onslaught of propaganda, that they do want.

It’s stunning.  It’d take a revolution.  We almost had one, and then came FDR.  He said he’d come to save capitalism not destroy it.  That was true.  It seems they give us just enough to keep us from uprising.  And of course, they throw in their foreign boogeymans to keep us scared.

Revolution? Be careful what you wish for. If we had one I have zero confidence that it would be a left-wing revolution.

These seem to be contradictory positions:

We never had 60 in the senate.  Not even close. lieberman isn’t the only one who will balk and defect when the time is right for a tantrum.  Rest assured, the big money is fueling a few emergency senators.

and

There’s also no question reid is not up for the task either through incompetence or planning on his own part.  That much is clear.

On the one hand, you contend that we’ve never had even close to 60 votes on our side, as corporate interests have already bought off several senators, not just Joe Lieberman; on the other hand, you hold Harry Reid personally responsible for not having 60 votes on our side, when the first argument sort of implies that his hands are completely tied.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Harry Reid, as I think he’s a lousy Senate Majority Leader.  But how much of this is really his fault, if it’s corporate interests that are keeping us well away from the 60 vote threshold?

I mean, do you really think if a more forceful senator held Reid’s position that they would be better at blocking the insurance lobby money from reaching the pockets of a few key Democratic senators to buy their votes?  Without solid campaign finance legislation to keep corporate interests completely out of our elections, how could ANY Senate Majority Leader legally prevent this from happening?  They couldn’t.

I guess what I’m saying is… if it really is the case that we aren’t anywhere near 60 votes, if it really isn’t only Joe Lieberman fucking this whole thing up, then it doesn’t really matter one iota who the Senate Majority Leader is - nobody would be able to prevent the powerful health insurance lobby from blocking real reform.  It could be Schumer or Durbin or even Feingold, and they’d still be having as much difficulty whipping up the votes as Harry Reid is having.

Steve, that is too true…right now anyway.

I had in mind the conditions which existed during the Great Depression, and the rise of socialism in this country at that time. 

But speaking of modern times, you’re right.

This is when I long for a President like Lyndon Johnson (before Vietnam went off the rails).

He would have straightened out senator like Liberman so well he would have been a guaranteed vote for whatever the President wanted — or he’d be on his ass so hard he wouldn’t know what hit him.

The sick thing is this demonstrates exactly why Fascism can appeal to the proles: One guy kicks ass in the name of law and order, and things happen — or else.  It feels like we’re teetering on the edge.  We seem to have plenty of Lewis Prothero and Adam Suttler wannabes, but there is no V to be found…

It’s stunning.  It’d take a revolution.  We almost had one, and then came FDR.  He said he’d come to save capitalism not destroy it.  That was true.  It seems they give us just enough to keep us from uprising.  And of course, they throw in their foreign boogeymans to keep us scared.

Well, to be fair to FDR, I’d say that Adolf Hitler was a little bit more than just a “foreign boogeyman”.

Granted, you may have been referring to more recent foreign boogeymen like Saddam Hussein, in which case I completely agree.

DTG - lol, no I wasn’t talking about then, I meant now.

DTG: No, we’re not a center-right country. We’re a center-left country but for a) masses of people who are graduates of such poor educational systems that they believe the propaganda put out by the right, b) people who are hypnotized by bright and shiny distractions such as pro sports or reality TV and/or scared shitless by boogeymen, and c) masses of people who have recognized that we’re essentially slaves to a corporate/military oligarchy and have chosen to react to this by withdrawing entirely from participating in politics.

In order for the government to truly represent the people, we need a) education reform, b) media reform and c) some way to draw people back into participation. It’s a generation-long project to retake the Democratic party back from our owners and make it an engine for progress—our system requires two and only two parties, so third-party politics, however appealing, is counterproductive. Until then, we’re all slaves except the oligarchy and their enablers.

There’s a non-violent kind of revolution known as a Constitutional Convention, a legal process outlined in the Constitution.

The very THREAT of a new convention is what finally got the Senate to vote for direct election of Senators, bte.

felagund @ #28:

Makes you wonder… has the American presidency become a rightwing construct?

I mean, on the one had, you make the astute contention that 2/3 of the Democrats in D.C. are bought and paid for corporate shills, and sadly, I largely agree.

But is that who they originally are, or who they have become due to the nature of the DC political system?

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day about the real Barack Obama.  It’s my contention that the real Barack Obama actually is a progressive soul in his heart.  I think that deep down, he really does believe in progressive policy positions.  I think the center to center-right Barack Obama who is the 44th President of the United States may be that way largely BECAUSE he is the 44th President of the United States.  That the corporate interests have so infiltrated our federal political system that it is literally impossible to reach that office without selling one’s soul out to some extent.  That the real progressive Barack Obama who spoke so passionately in the late 1990s and early 2000s about progressive ideology never would have made it into the Oval Office.

I mean hell, look at Senator Bernie Sanders versus Congressman Bernie Sanders.  I think the senatorial version of Mr. Sanders is still a relatively liberal guy, but he’s decidedly toned down his progressivism a tad since moving up to the old boys club.

And folks like Dennis Kucinich will never be president so long as he holds the postions that he does.  I’m not sure the man could even make it into the U.S. Senate if he ever aspired to do that.

Is the system so catastrophically broken that it has the literal power to change formerly left-leaning and center-left politicians into centrist and center-right politicians, just by virtue of winning a higher office?

Is it literally impossible for a progressive to even become president, or if one does become president, does the nature of the office in the 21st Century make it impossible for them to maintain their progressive positions?

Ben I completely agree with your post.

DTG, those are all very good questions and the ones I have been asking myself more and more.  I too believe Obama is more progressive than he is showing.  After reading his first book it’s hard not to.

But I’m not even sure the guy is free to do something like say, pull out of Afghanistan.  Just not even free to do it if he wanted to.  Or, it’s a matter of no one could stand up to the shit storm the military powers, and the corporate military donors would send their way.  It’d be that fierce.  It’d take down anyone’s presidency. 

So who really knows.

But I’m not even sure the guy is free to do something like say, pull out of Afghanistan.  Just not even free to do it if he wanted to.  Or, it’s a matter of no one could stand up to the shit storm the military powers, and the corporate military donors would send their way.  It’d be that fierce.  It’d take down anyone’s presidency.

That’s one of the only reasons why I’m not ready to completely pile on him for his decision regarding Afghanistan.  The other reason being that while I disagree with his decision, I don’t feel betrayed by it - he literally campaigned on a pledge to escalate military efforts in Afghanistan, so I can’t act as if he somehow lied to us in 2008, because he didn’t, at least not regarding his position on Afghanistan.  He’s doing exactly what he said he would do in this regard… unfortunately.

I thoroughly disagree with his choice, and wish he wouldn’t have done it, but perhaps he knows something we don’t know - that the choice to pull out would have been a guarantee of defeat for him in 2012, for reasons we aren’t fully aware of.

We’re a centrist country, with tendencies to left or right depending on the issue. Right on defense and national security, left on abortion rights, for example.

Is the system so catastrophically broken that it has the literal power to change formerly left-leaning and center-left politicians into centrist and center-right politicians, just by virtue of winning a higher office?

You’re begging the question by calling it ‘broken’. We (left-)anarchists believe that is the proper social function of the state, as designed (or evolved, depending on whether you think the current structures arose out of planned forethought or organically). In fact, I’d say it’s likely the effect is great enough that one needs to shift right to even *run* for office, much less win it.

The same analysis is behind Chomsky’s ‘Manufacture of Consent’ model for the news media. There are filters in place such that only (or mostly) True Believers get promoted to the higher stratas. The rest of us are kept away from such lofty positions.

Perhaps Bill Kristol’s prognostication on November 4, 2008 that we are still a center-right country wasn’t so much an expression of the view that the American people are center-right, but that the political power structure would remain center-right even though the Democrats just steamrolled the Republicans for the second straight election.

If it’s the latter, Mr. Kristol may have been quite prescient in that observation.  Almost like he was arrogantly taunting naive progressive Americans by discretely saying with a wink and a smile, “You may think that you’ve just had a huge victory tonight, but take my word for it… you haven’t won shit.  My side will still be calling the shots, losers.”

@#35.  That depends on where you place the center.  And that’s the problem.  It is the village that has told us where the center is.  And they are lying. 

In the village, the public option is, and always has been, a far left, or as Digby puts it, dirty fucking hippy position.  And the Senators from United Health Care who are against it, are called “the moderates.”  This is a lie.  Every part of it is a lie.

In fact, PEW’s extensive national surveys taken over decades have shown that there is SUPER majority support for these positions:  70 percent believe that the government has a responsibility “to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves.  69 percent say government should guarantee “every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep”. (66 percent)—including a majority of those who say they would prefer a smaller government (57 percent)—favor government funded health insurance for all citizens.  65 percent say corporate profits are too high.  68% say labor unions are necessary to protect the working person.  83 percent supports stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment.

According to the conventional wisdom, those are all dirty fucking hippy positions. 

But according to the American people, those appear to be centrist positions.

So if we are indeed a centrist country, we need to redefine centrist to its real meaning.  However, under the current meaning, we are indeed, a center-left country.  Period.

On a related note, Jane Hamsher is starting a rukus over Lierberman’s wife, a paid health care schill, also being paid by the Susan Komen foundation as a representative.  I’m not always Hamsher’s biggest fan, but I read her whole post, and I have to say I had no idea that the Komen foundation was so tied to Republicans, and to Republican policies.  I’m pretty upset.  I ran in their race in Central park this past summer.  One of my closest friends has a tragic breast cancer history in her family and is a big supporter.  I’ve not only run with her this past summer, but have donated money to them through her many times.

How do you tell someone with that family history that you can’t support that organization any longer?  Do they do more good than bad?  After reading Hamsher, if she’s right, it’s very hard for me to see how.  I just feel like the one percenters (the wealthiest, the people really running the country) have poisoned every part of my life right now.

We proles, who are ignorant and incapable of seeing The Big Picture, must be protected from our socialist leanings by Our Representatives and Our Media.  Otherwise we’ll turn into Russia, or France.

That’s why it’s so important to defeat/destroy Health Care “Reform” — along with keeping up the wars in Afghanistan and The-Other-War-Whose-Name-Must-Not-Be-Spoken, and enabling the continued looting of America by Our Economic Overlords Who Must Not Be Taxed.  All the Serious People know this…

In the village, the public option is, and always has been, a far left, or as Digby puts it, dirty fucking hippy position.  And the Senators from United Health Care who are against it, are called “the moderates.” This is a lie.  Every part of it is a lie.

Yup.

The biggest problem there is that very, very few of the MSM villagers don’t live where 99% of Americans live.  The talking heads on TV and the highly compensated syndicated columnists have no idea what it actually feels like to have financial insecurity over healthcare concerns.  They’ve got theirs, who cares about those who don’t?

Sure, you’ve got Eugene Robinson, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and a tiny handful of other highly-compensated pundits who argue in favor of the public option as a centrist position, but they are a tiny, tiny minority.  And even by their own admission, they don’t live where most of us live - Olbermann himself has acknowledged that his personal wealth offers him a buffer to ensure that his ailing father can get the best medical attention money can buy.  He’s honest enough to point out that he’s decidedly in an exceptionally privileged class, and that a huge number of Americans (even those WITH health insurance) in his spot but without his wealth would have to agonize over the possibility of losing their home to take care of their dying parents.

Oops, grammar fail.  I meant to say that very, very few MSM villagers live where we proles live.

AnglScarlett—if you do some digging around the feminist blogosphere, you’ll find lots of folks talking about the not-so-goodness that is the major breast cancer organizations in the US.  I’m thinking I Blame the Patriarchy, and maybe Shapely Prose in particular, but most have touched on it at one time or another.

Oh, and

if the public option really does create the threat that private employers will switch to save money, insurance companies will start to do what private delivery services like Fed Ex and UPS do to compete with the post office, which is offer add-ons and other premium service to attract business clients.  Everyone wins under that system, except of course insurance companies.

Even the insurance companies win. They get slight less obscene profits, but they get reality checks that keep their business models in line, and they avoid replacing investment bankers as the most hated businesspeople in the country. And the people who work for them get their souls back.

AnglScarlett, I know your pain.

My sister has breast cancer.  Komen is evil

They wrap themselves in pink ribbons and fake out people who genuinely want to help out in anyway b/c they are losing loved ones.

The future is most likely in prevention, similar to preventing cervical cancer.  We’re going to stop more cancers that way than by curing it after it shows up.

Komen has ties to Big Pharma and pays Hadassah to shill for them, and to lobby Congress to provide exemptions for biological research/drugs so that the ‘new cures’ never go into generic forms.  These drugs are expensive as hell, and if they can never go generic, then they will NEVER be affordable to the middle class, much less the poor.

They set themselves up as a center that is doing, because who could be against fighting breast cancer? but they actually are using the money to help Big Pharma.

How do you explain?  Forward them Hamsher’s post or any of several other post you can find with the Google.

I really wish they were some altruistic group fighting for breast cancer sufferers, but apparently Big Pharma money is too much for everyone.

Thanks Caren, that’s what I’m going to do.  Because that really is evil.

How do you tell someone with that family history that you can’t support that organization any longer?

By finding another organization that helps out.  We have a fun local one here called Bowling for Boobies that sponsors fundraisers to help financially support breast cancer patients while they’re undergoing treatment.  That way, it’s not, “I won’t donate to help breast cancer patients,” it’s “I want to send my money where I think it will do more good.”  There are so many great small organizations that desperately need funding that I have no qualms about giving them my money instead of the big ones like Komen.

Caren @ #46:

The pharmaceutical industry is little more difficult to categorize than the health insurance industry.

One can absolutely make the objective argument that the business model of Big Pharma is pure evil, but unlike the health insurance lobby, Big Pharma does actually deliver an inherently valuable product to the healthcare equation.

For instance, it’s not tough to construct the argument that we could absolutely have a healthcare delivery system that completely eliminates the “product” provideded by health insurance from the equation, with no one suffering even slightly as a consequence.

You can’t really make the same argument in regards to the product provided by the pharmaceutical industry.  No matter how we reform the system, we need the drugs that companies like GSK and Pfizer produce.  Even if we figure out how to eliminate those companies from the equation, we still need the very products those companies manufacture.  We don’t inherently need the “product” offered by the health insurance industry.

While it can be said that not on person who works for the health insurance industry is doing work that betters the public, the same is not necessarily true for the many scientists and researchers making pharmaceutical breakthroughs which help to resolve unanswered medical questions.

I mean, even if you hate Big Pharma with every fiber of your being, if you get a serious illness and your doctor tells you to take this pill made by Pfizer, even though by taking it you may be increasing Pfizer’s profits, odds are you are still going to take it, if you trust that it will help treat your malady.

It is possible for us to build an excellent healthcare delivery system in which we completely eliminate the health insurance industry.  It is not possible to do so while eliminating the industry that produces the drugs necessary for excellent healthcare delivery.

That said… PhRMA does suck, and the industry should be massively overhauled in how it is allowed to do business.  But we can’t eliminate pharmaceutical producers altogether, unlike health insurance providers.

Zinfab@ #11

“The real hurdle is government owned hospitals.  Frankly, I think you could work around this if you made the program local rather than federal.  The idea of a federally owned hospital would be off putting.  The idea of a city owned hospital, not as much.  Providing cities with block grants to set up hospital services might win people over more easily.”

My concern with moving hospitals to city ownership/control is the amazingly dysfunctional and often corrupt state of a lot of city governments.

The real distinction here, IMHO, is not the governmental/non-governmental control one.  The real distinction is nonprofit versus for profit.  Once upon a time, back when American health care really was the envy of the world, for-profit health care companies were strictly forbidden. Even now, some of the most successful (from the point of view of delivering care to patients) systems out there are private, nonprofit - the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, etc. The reasons are simple: the mission and focus of these organizations is on health care, not profit, and the whole approval layer of the bureaucracy is streamlined.  Where approval is required, it tends to be peer review by other physicians rather than profit review by accountants.  Sure, you may not be able to pick your doctor (a concept I’ve never quite understood - when I found out I needed an oncologist, I was in no frame of mind to go out and evaluate the qualifications of potential doctors. I was very happy to be assigned to one I knew met my provider’s qualifications, because I had come to trust their way of doing business. Oh, maybe that’s why…)

There’s a good parallel in my field of work, higher education.  Limiting things to California where I work, there are examples of excellent governmentally funded (for the moment, at least) universities such as Berkeley, UCLA and even a couple Cal State campuses (Cal Poly, San Diego), along with well-respected mass education options in the rest of the Cal State system and to a lesser extent (because they are so stretched right now) community colleges. In the private, non-profit world, Stanford, Cal Tech and the Claremont gang come to mind, but there are also middle-brow places that do a great job like Loyola-Marymount or Whittier. Private for-profit schools? Well, there’s a couple of “ok” vocationally oriented schools like DeVry (in a wide field of fly-by-nights). Degree granting for-profits? University of Phoenix has campuses here.  The common element is very aggressive marketing to potential students. Once enrolled, it is certainly possible for someone to get a good education, but on a day-to-day basis student learning usually seems to take a back seat to shareholder returns.

In areas of activity where creating a product that people will want to buy is the goal, the profit motive works well.  I don’t begrudge Apple one penny of the gazillions of dollars they are making off of iPods, iPhones and iTunes.  In areas of activity where the benefit to society comes from a focus on the well-being of individuals, the important distinction isn’t between public and private, it is whether or not the driver for decisionmaking is maintaining and increasing profits.  I think framing the argument this way also helps to disarm the ‘government takeover of health care, OMG, they’re going to let the DMV run your doctor’s office!’ canard.

...PhRMA does suck, and the industry should be massively overhauled in how it is allowed to do business

DTG in STL, I agree with your points and I think that the MAIN thing that we should be focusing on re: drug pricing is removing the legislation imposed during the Shrub administration that doesn’t allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug rates.
That right there is going to go a long way in getting drug prices to within a reasonable limit (one hopes) because of the tremendous buying power of the govt. Which, again, is another reason why PhRMA doesn’t like the socialized medicine thing as it does cut into drug company profits.

And, that the govt. puts in massive amounts of funding into R& D on drugs developed in this country and yet it’s own citizens - the ones FUNDING that development - get hosed.
It’s deeply wrong.

JadedOptimist @ #50:

Excellent points.

When the discussion in HCR briefly turned towards the idea of creating non-profit co-ops instead of a government-run public option, I wasn’t immediately turned off to it.  In principle, it’s not a terrible idea… the problem is that co-ops were never going to be able to fairly compete with the current for-profit health insurance industry maintaining most of its power, and that experiment would have failed horribly, giving Republicans the opportunity to claim that healthcare reform was a huge disastrous boondoggle.

In truth, I think a system of co-operatives could work, if they didn’t have to compete with the current health insurance industry and their incredibly deep pockets.  If we eliminated all for-profit healthcare at every level - insurance, providers, and pharmaceutical companies - a co-op system would be an entirely feasible option.

As you pointed out, there was a time in which healthcare delivery wasn’t a profit-oriented market-based industry in America, and healthcare delivery was pretty good, relatively speaking.  People didn’t generally worry about medical banruptcies and home foreclosures being a consequence of getting sick, because getting sick wasn’t usually the financially crippling situation that it has become today.  And healthcare delivery wasn’t government-run, for the most part.

All that said, as the current debate doesn’t even include the possibility of eliminating for-profit health insurance providers, the only option that will truly be able to compete in this environment is a robust government-run public option.

OK, well, I just saw a video clip on Hardball which leaves me absolutely fucking flabbergasted by the audacity of Joe Lieberman.

Precisely 97 days ago, on September 8, 2009, Joe Lieberman did a videotaped interview with a local newspaper in Connecticut in which he stated that he would propose a healthcare reform initiative that would offer a buy-in option for Medicare for those aged 55 years and older.  This was the precise alternative that he favored over the public option in September 2009.

Fast forward just three months later - not 9 years or even 9 months later - just three month later, and Joe Lieberman now says that he opposes any efforts to allow a Medicare buy-in for those age 55 and older.

God I fucking hope he gets hit by a goddamned bus.

cosign with BlacBloc @36.

But then, I’m an anarchist as well (in the commie sense that either we become so or die kind and not the pushing for self-government kind).

OK, slightly off-topic (but health-related): Has anybody seen the “holiday” PSA for Pap smears?  A variety of actors—all male—ask if “you want to do something special for your woman” for (insert holiday matching actor’s belief systen) schedule her pap smear.
What the fucking fuck?!
Because we silly women are just too helpless and air-headed to take care of our own little twats?!
And nothing says “Merry Christmas” like telling your little woman to have her bits inspected?!

<head/desk>

It’s a shame there isn’t a hell for Joe Lieberman to burn in when he dies.

@Ben D.: Can we tell him to go there now anyway?

I keep asking myself how much different things would be right now if McCain had won the elections. I’m not saying differences don’t exist, they do. But WHAT THE FUCK?

Like BlackBloc, I’m feeling very Chomskian at this moment. Elections in our country really don’t make that much of a difference. I mean, in terms of political power, things won’t get any better for Democrats than they are now. Still, Obama seems completely impotent to implement almost any point in his political program.

Just look at the polls from pollster.com . For 30 years, Americans have shown disstisfactions with our health care system. For some years now, there was also a confortable majority in favor of signing the Kyoto Agreement.

But all it took was a few months of Fox News, WSJ Op-Eds and corporate adds, and suddenly public opinion is against health care reform, believes AGW is a hoax, etc, etc. Meanwhile, people’s frustration and rage is being neatly diverted by Limbaugh, Beck, Palin & Co.

Oh, and the absurd escalation in Afghanistan and the erosion of our civil liberties proceeds at a steady pace.

The Bush years were bad, but I’ve never felt that my vote was quite so fucking worthless than right now.

My concern with moving hospitals to city ownership/control is the amazingly dysfunctional and often corrupt state of a lot of city governments.

Exhibit A:  King/Drew Medical Center here in Los Angeles, aka “Killer King”.

The Bush years were bad, but I’ve never felt that my vote was quite so fucking worthless than right now.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.  No wonder the Republicans keep kicking our asses and taking our lunch money.

The Religious Right carried out and executed a 30-year plan to take over the Republican Party from within.  We can’t even stay focused long enough to talk about finding people to challenge Bayh and Lincoln from the left in 2011—you know, barely 12 months from now?

We also need to consider that pharma is not monolithic.  The two big classes are bio-based and Chem-based, and it diverges on down from there.  Many are interrelated, but they are often different entities at different stages of corporate development.

hbsweet, e of ic,
It’s a recent twist to the father’s day schedule your man for a prostrate check and mother’s day talk to your mom about her mamagram thing.  I thought those were wrong and stupid, too, though less so as they are something that tends to need to start later in life.  Most women start getting pap smears in their late teens and early 20s; its not something one starts at late middle age.