medicaid

After reading the outrage,indignant outrage by both the right and the Hillary supporters Pat Buchanan steps into the mix. Our past Chair, George Wilson sent this article to me asking why Buchanan gets a pass from the MSM?

Reading the article you can see that Buchanan actually listened to Obama, I was almost encouraged. But how can a leader of the Christian community, interpret the message in this offensive manner?

What is wrong with Barack's prognosis and Barack's cure?

As I mentioned earlier when talking about the races this year, I am totally open to conversations/corrections, or what have you with the campaigns themselves. Shortly after posting my comparison of the kid's health care plans from the two Gubernatorial candidates I had a sit down meeting with an acquaintance who worked on the Perdue health care plan. While I consider this person a friend and he was very helpful in learning and discussing the state of health care in North Carolina - I'm still undecided, impartial, and not 100% satisfied with either candidate's ideas.

That said, there are several things I would like to talk about related to children's health care, which are positives for the Perdue campaign. And, there is one thing I would like to talk about which is a negative (for me, not for everyone) for the Perdue campaign.

Let me go ahead and admit that I am understandably biased on this post: I'm a former Democratic House member who is married to an outstanding current Democratic House member, works in State government on the legislature's front lines, and serves in several roles in county, district and State party committees.

But, if you would rather READ the thousand words.

Oh that tricky Bush administration. They say clean air when they mean more pollution. They say No Child Left Behind when they mean No Upperclass Child Left Behind. They call it a Patriot Act, when it is in fact the KGB Surveillance for Dummies Act.

Now, they've gone and done it again. They've said they wanted to reform Medicaid so that those sneaky /brown/ people would quit "stealing" YOUR health care. They're the enemy you know, those /brown/ people, with their jobs and their families and their kids and their churches. But, what they really meant to say was that those sneaky /poor/ people were stealing THEIR tax breaks by using Medicaid.

That just won't do in the modern Republican Aristocracy. So, off with their benefits!!!

crossposted at Kos.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_latimes-what_health.htm

(This information was passed onto me by a reader and in checking it out I found that of those listed among the uninsured are those on Medicaid. Well these are the very poor, unemployed or unemployable and they are indeed covered if they are on Medicaid. So when you subtract the number of people on Medicaid the number of uninsured is considerable less than the figure often given. As for the rest of the information I also did some checking of the Census Bureau and could verify some but not all of the information before my patience ran out. Sorry.

And I know many of you do not want to read this information that is contrary to what you currently believe. I was where you are at one time too. So I know how passionately you feel about the inequities of life. Dear Lord how I know! But as I got more and more information my opinions changed. I DID NOT ACCEPT THIS NEW INFORMATION LIGHTLY. I CHECKED OUT EVERY LITTLE FACT. But eventually knowledge changed my views. I am sincerely not trying to force feed you into changing your views. Please believe this. I am just trying to help you to get more information about a subject you feel is important. AND YOU KNOW YOU ARE NOT OBLIGATED TO READ MY BLOG OR CREDIT ANY OF THE INFORMATION I GIVE. IT IS YOUR CHOICE TO MAKE. Brenda

I have written several times on Healthcare, or more specifically Medicare and Medicaid, so my views are pretty well known by any who read my blog. I am opposed to Universal Healthcare. I am also vehemently opposed to the universal healthcare we now have for anyone 65 years old or older which we know as Medicare.

A need for government involvement in insuring medical care for the poor was seen to be necessary in the early 1960’s and so in 1965 Congress *“enacted as Title XVIII and Title XIX of the Social Security Act, extending health coverage to almost all Americans age 65 or over (e.g., those receiving retirement benefits from Social Security or the Railroad Retirement Board), and providing health care services to low-income children deprived of parental support, their caretaker relatives, the elderly, the blind, and individuals with disabilities."

If you are against Universal Healthcare/Single Payer Healthcare, your biggest enemy is Medicare. Medicare is an excellent single-payer system that covers a huge number of people with lots of serious medical conditions for a reasonable price and with low low overhead (2% versus 30%). So, if you are a Republican in the White House and in the Legislative Branch, what do you do?

You starve the program into submission. You don't come right out and say you are going to kill off Medicare, because no one will support that. But, you start trimming benefits here, making more paperwork there, donut-holes for you, and then you slowly undercut the whole program by making it unattractive to doctors. That is the secret plan if you will of the Republican Congress. Undercut medicare so that less doctors accept it, talk about what a lousy plan it is, and suggest privatization.
crossposted at CountryCrats

Adam Searing is the Director of the North Carolina Health Access Coalition. My one experience with Adam was watching his downtrodden and negative take on healthcare at a Chapel Hill forum. That and he doesn't support the push for UHC at this time, which I disagree with. He's been fighting for healthcare reform longer than any of us, but I think maybe he needs a change of scenery.

That aside, he has put together a good postmortem on why the high risk pool died a lonely death (PDF). It is easy to see why Mr. Searing (his resume says graduate degrees in law and public health, but I don't think they are Ph.D.s, if so, I apologize) is downtrodden on healthcare reform in North Carolina. The high risk pool would have covered somewhere between 9,000 - 20,000 North Carolinians. There are 1.5 million uninsured. This bill would have covered 0.1% of them, and it didn't pass. I'll cut and paste a few things after the break, but the PDF is a good read.

As a true-believer in the Democratic Party, I hate it when I am let down by the party. One of the things that I believe will make us a greater country is universal healthcare. When Americans are healthier they are better workers, better parents, and better citizens. Just as with education, healthcare is a right that all North Carolinians have inherent to their being – it is not a privilege bestowed upon those with the most money. Yet, in our society we too often kill off our poorer citizens by denying them healthcare. Make no mistake, the inability to have preventive care leads to lethal illnesses that could be stopped earlier in the disease progression. Look no farther than curable childhood diseases, which under a universal healthcare plan could be screened for in every newborn. Instead, many of our children suffer through their whole lives with physical and mental retardation all for the lack of a blood test at birth.

So, what have we as Democrats in North Carolina done for better healthcare? Well, not much. Certainly not as much as the Republican governor of Massachusetts. More below the fold.