'Economist Robert Kuttner and journalist Matt Taibbi discuss Wall Street's power over the federal government'
wasn't what i was expecting, took the info off a tv guide site not Moyers' site http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html have to say i can hardly believe just how corrupt a country you Americans now have judging by how health insurance is being resolved as presented by Kuttner and Taibbi
I don't know what people were expecting. In a democracy, you have to compromise and you know the old saying about how making laws is like making sausages - you really don't want to know everything that goes into making them. Frankly, I don't see how some health care laws as practiced in Europe can ever be passed here. For example, in Germany where insurance companies cannot make a profit by law. For the consumer, you wished that were universally true, but it is anti-capitalism and the fact that it can't even begin to be passed here suggests that Obama is not a socialist as some claimed. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12182009/profile.html The biggest cowards and winners in all of these are the Republicans. They risked nothing by being obstructionists and can claim all the credits should anything goes wrong - and it will because health care costs will always go up and government bureaucracy will always have mistakes. Democrats are actually pretty stupid to pass health care legislation because they will most likely lose the next congressional election.. and why are they doing this? Perhaps they actually do care about the health of the average American.
Big Busines Big Unions own our government more than it is has ever in earlier times. This is the gigantic gift to the insurance companies than harms everyday Americans. ROBERT KUTTNER: Think about it, the difference between social insurance and an individual mandate is this. Social insurance everybody pays for it through their taxes, so you don't think of Social Security as a compulsory individual mandate. You think of it as a benefit, as a protection that your government provides. But an individual mandate is an order to you to go out and buy some product from some private profit-making company, that in the case of a lot of moderate income people, you can't afford to buy. And the shell game here is that the affordable policies are either very high deductibles and co-pays, so you can afford the monthly premiums but then when you get sick, you have to pay a small fortune out of pocket before the coverage kicks in. Or if the coverage is decent, the premiums are unaffordable. And so here's the government doing the bidding of the private industry coercing people to buy profit-making products that maybe they can't afford and they call it health reform.
You're so foolish it's painful to read. Republicans offered a multitude of market based reforms, none of which were violations of the Constitution.
This is unconstitutional. If Congress can compel you to buy something in the name of the greater good, then what limits are there to their power? It is a clear violation of the Constitution. The way around this was to impose a tax, which is considered constitutional under years of court interpretation. But that would require political sacrifice. So they opted for an avenue that will result in a showdown with SCOTUS.