Baby steps are action and would have been better than dumping a bucket of cash into the same old hands. Obama chants trust us as he promotes his tax evading Treasury Secretary. Obama chants it's going to take a long time, planning for his next election campaign as he backs off the promises of his first.
President Obama what are you doing? Promoting ideas that "might" work over a "long" time while you grow and protect the immunity from our disastrous economic environment for civil servants is outrageously irresponsible, hypocritical and self-centered. It's too early for the bait and switch of change really meaning change for me, I was in Congress and now I'm President.
Why haven't you done anything to address the health services crisis? And of course, you'll wave around the SCHIP reauthorization and yell, look, the children are insured. But we're onto the SCHIP game. AHIP supports SCHIP. The country's largest insurance lobby supports SCHIP. Why? Because they get the most bang for their buck...federal and state money for the finite costs of wellness care for kids. Coverage of finite costs is not insurance and until we change the paradigm back to rating insurance coverage in terms of its ability to protect individuals from the cost of illness, we're all merely paying thousands of dollars a year to cover the lesser cost of getting a checkup.
Why won't you put your money where your mouth is? Remember the promise that all Americans would have access to the same insurance you and your family enjoy as Federal Employees?
So looking forward because you clearly state you don't look backwards (which, by the way, leaves the risks of not learning from experience a glaring reality in the face of American citizens) it's time for you to reread your campaign speeches.
Affordable, Accessible and Quality Health Care is not going to be possible under your inactive leadership and looking busy by promoting technology and wellness programs is a distraction that those of us who DO examine past experience know does not work.
Bailouts of companies that made bad investments, including insurance companies who spend more than $.50 of every dollar on non-insurance expenses including bad investments, ignores the fact that the American people are bailing out every organization, including the government that has wasted, frittered and overspent its money.
So let's regroup President Obama: The choice isn't a sweeping plan of raining money down onto the problem industries and satisfying the lobbyists who have effectively promoted their own well-being at the expense of American citizens. The choice is do nothing and look busy (which is what is currently going on) or take those most difficult baby steps you can take now that urgently address immediate problems. Crisis management is NEVER advised to be done by changing the entire system to adapt to a crisis...that is not temporary and therefore is not crisis management.
1) Keep it Simple Today: Slowly, thoughtfully and making the HARD decisions: Today you can wake up and start demanding the change you demanded when you were asking for our votes: If benefits packages cannot mirror those available to the ever-growing number of civil servants then suspend civil service health benefits packages and DEMAND that our representatives and civil employees jump into the reality in which the rest of us live. Let's see how much time and patience it takes to start acting then.
2) Keep it Simple Today and provide for oversight and Enforcement of our immigration laws and instead of instituting infrastructure programs to construction companies that get rich by employing illegals, increase the oversight and fines imposed on those companies that employ any illegals. Your four million "potential" jobs are about to become next year's "WE HAD HOPED THAT MORE JOBS WOULD HAVE BEEN CREATED...."
3) You may not be a look backwards kind of guy but you do read, right? Read about Joseph Pulitzer's objections to the insurance industry in 1900!
4) If insurance companies no longer insure...cover the risk of paying for needed medical services...then let people opt out. Private insurers are exploiting the American people to the tune of a lot more than one thousand dollars a year. As for the cost of needed health care? It's unimaginable (sarcastic) but doctors may actually have to lower their costs! Expand Medicare/Medicaid to cover every American for catastrophic health care costs and leave the rest of it to out of pocket (physicals, checkups). Physicals for schools and employers should immediately be taken over by health departments and believe me it will cost less than this current stupidity. Right now we are supporting governmental employee benefits packages and insurance companies...not a good deal.
5) Bad mortgages? Let the foreclosures increase to such a level that banks become realtors or have to spend a huge portion of their money managing, maintaining, and selling properties...we'll see the housing market stimulated.
Then, before you go to bed at night, re read your speeches again, and again. Anything less is a betrayal of the American people.
