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See, RedCommissar. They are beginning to come out of the woodwork again, as they did over a year ago. People making the same argument Howard Dean made (he was chair of the DNC at the time the bill was being considered): "It's not perfect, but it's an improvement that represents a starting point for where we need to go."
No, it isn't. And no, it doesn't.
I can sense you are using this product:
You are right. I never had cancer, but I have family and friends who do or had cancer. I know their struggle to try to pay medical bills and pay bills. For example my uncle two weeks ago got diagnosed for leukemia. Now they are worried of trying to keep two foster kids and their own house because they don't trust my uncle's employer to keep my uncle employed. Also note they are getting paperwork ready for Medicaid just in case he loses his job because he knows he has an high chance of being covered under "Obamacare" than the previous system.
Outside my friends and family. I've seen how the poor struggle to get insurance or pay. I used to be a account manager for a major rent-to-own business. I repo things if they don't pay their rent. Once day I had to repo an entire house because she had gotten breast cancer and her insurance company denied her because she had reach her cap. That was a sad day for me because I didn't want to repo her washer and dryer, all her beds, and her oven. When I left her house. She had no stove to eat or a bed for her and her kids to sleep on. I think that was the day that taught me about capitalism the most.
Really want to start the how poor you all fight? I only make 18,000 a year working for the 2nd biggest discount retailer for the nation. I barely work enough hours to get basic health insurance. Which is only an HSA account. HSA are health savings accounts. You put money in a special tax free account and you pay for EVERYTHING out of pocket up to 2,000 a year before the insurance kicks in. This is what major companies are moving towards. Also add that my wife works too, but she makes about 10,000 year as a contractor. That means I have to pay my wife's income, SS, and Medicare taxes out of my paycheck because my wife's employers is to damn lazy to file her W-4. Also add that I live with my in-laws because my pay doesn't even afford a studio apartment where I live. My wife doesn't have health insurance because I can't afford the extra $90 partner fee, but I did get her some dental.
Sounds like you are blaming Obama because your employers decided to accelerate the plan of not to offer benefits anymore. Employers were going to get rid of our benefits anyway. Also note Universal Healthcare (Socialized Medicine) would have NEVER pass that congress nor today's congress. Remember, progressive Democrats did try to pass a single payer bill during Obamacare but the Democratic leadership killed it.
If I was in congress I would vote no out of principle and because we are forced to buy private insurance. Yet, I was not a congressman or an senator and we have to deal with the issue now. The system is better than it used to be. That is the truth. You don't like it that I give credit where it is due. Well I am sorry you can not accept that. Just because we are anti-capitalists we can't give credit when a capitalist does something a big better for the working class in a once in a century. Was Marx wrong to give capitalism credit for some of it's achievements?
Here are some sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/young-millenni...-election.html
http://www.gallup.com/poll/158966/ma...guarantee.aspx
The rise of the young Libertarian movement is a troubling sign in the United States. Heck I will say that the Young Libertarian movement is united and more stronger than the Socialists or the communists.
Clearly we must challenge the bourgeois conceptions of the "fiscal liberal or any left wing ideal". So how can we reach these working Americans? One of our concerns should be to promote the growth of socialist class consciousness, which can only be obtained in the active struggle against capitalism. But your plan doesn't seem to go beyond defending the "gains" of the health care bill. Furthermore, to oppose "Obamacare" does not mean that the only other option is to support insurance denial; it's to ruthlessly expose the weaknesses of Obama's measure and counter their program with one of our own. If socialists keep providing such "critical" support of these austerity measures like you're doing, we will lose all credibility with the working class.
During a long period of political reaction, it may seem like any semblance of a "progressive" policy is attractive in order to alleviate the misery of workers. But defending "gains" of certain bills as an end in itself will not put us closer to building a revolutionary party. Instead, all you're doing is pragmatically adapting to the bourgeoisie's playbook to justify your own inaction and lack of perspective beyond "working with what we have".
The main problem is that we are all fighting each other on who is the best Marxist to lead a revolutionary party. Us fighting is not going to create "critical" support against austerity and the capitalists. A lot of Americans look at us and turn away in disgust because we like to fight a lot against our selves.
Propaganda straight from whitehouse.gov
The first and fifth "benefits" are basically the same. The second "benefit" COBRA already covered.
Not excluding children under the age of 19 is only possible because millions upon millions of healthy people will be paying into insurance, people who won't be using it. This way the insurance companies still make a killing $ but this isnt a reason to praise the law. Fascism had some benefits for citizens in Italy and Germany, shall we advocate fascism now?
Preventative care is already pushed by insurance companies because, you know, the healthier you are the more profits they make.
There was already laws preventing insurance companies from dropping policy holders when they get sick and they'll find ways around the new laws just as they did with the old.
Medicare is being expanded? What a sick fucking joke. They're cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare/Medicaid.
So, in the wake of the revolutionary left being splintered, your solution is to do nothing at all?
If Americans "look at us" only to "turn away", it's because the Marxist left has no meaningful presence in the working class. Parties that either call themselves Marxist or otherwise largely function as "critical" boosters of the union leadership and the bourgeois left. To the extent that socialists have any influence in unions at all, they are only allowed there unless they step out of line and actually attempt to organize opposition or promote the growth of a dedicated cadre. Other parties, while adopting "orthodox" stances, do absolutely nothing beyond journalism, such as the Northist SEP. Workers who have written to them in the past call for help and advice in their struggles and all they get are lectures regarding the union bureaucracy and how they must "break" with them.
In this diseased setup, I do not find the possibility of mass disillusionment among American workers surprising. And in my opinion, theoretical stances like yours are part of the problem. Rather than oppose the misconceptions of socialism among workers, you passively accept them as given and simply content yourself with the notion that we will not be able to reach workers until we stop "fighting amongst ourselves". You are, as Trotsky once said, "worshiping the accomplished fact". This a pragmatic position that dooms us to abstentionism, and I don't think it speaks well of your self-awarded title of "Intellectual Marxist". That is, unless you're convinced that the way to overthrowing capitalism is defending one austerity policy out of many more to come on the internet.
+ YouTube Video
I have a bucket list and on it I've listed spitting in these two guys faces. The ammount of disdain I feel for people who claim to represent the interests of the working class who are really agents of capital is tremendous.
MarxArchist and Red Commissar
I see your point. But I also see a (needed) systematic attack upon the established (corrupt) Capitalist health care monstrosity.
As B5C has pointed out, there are a curtailment of abuses (step one) a 'roundup' of non-payers entering into
the system (step two) and a future takeover of 'private' money-grubbers (step three, not implemented yet)
The result will be a true peoples' health care system, not a for-profit evil empire of blood-letters
money is to politics as fertilizer is to garden weeds.
No the end result will not be a "peoples healthcare". This law cemented the privatization of healthcare...forever. Please stop listening to Micheal Moore. Please? On my knees here.....with my hands folded in front of me.
I respectfully disagree. I can see it where more and more people will simply demand a government takeover.
This is because of the outrageously rising profits and inefficiencies of the private health industry. Please read:
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us
http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/2...re-killing-us/
money is to politics as fertilizer is to garden weeds.
Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink. This is a lot of smoke-blowing that doesn't contain anything substantive to rebut what I am saying. It literally reads like it was written by some functionary on the Obama 2012 campaign staff.
As much as you want to call it a strawman, my point stands -- Obamacare has directly affected my employer-based health-care plan (shared by thousands of other employees) in an adverse way, reducing coverage and making it more expensive. Your counter to this is that you have an uncle who was diagnosed with leukemia (which, by the way, I am sorry to hear), and this uncle has a better chance at receiving coverage because Obamacare allows states to opt in for Medicaid expansion. Really? Which state does your father live in? Did the state choose to opt into the opportunity for expanded coverage or not? Many have already opted NOT to expand Medicaid. Would your uncle has been eligible even without the expanded coverage?
Even if we assume the best possible scenario, and your uncle can receive care he would otherwise have been unable to receive without Obamacare, you're missing the point entirely. That for every uncle like yours there are ten people like me, who will end up paying more to receive less or, in the case of all the newly mandated young people who will now be customers of Aetna, perhaps not even receive anything at all.
As previous posters in this thread have stated, Obamacare provides some fig leaves for liberals to point to as "proof" of how much better the system will now supposedly be. But these are fig leaves nevertheless. You know what a fig leaf is, right? It's the lovely piece of greenery that covers up a statue's naughty bits. That way, all the puritanical prudes can walk by, not be disturbed by something as horrifying as human anatomy, and yet still be able to talk of the artistic use of "nature," indifferent to the obscene way that nature is being hidden.
Those fig leaves are the provisions relating to Medicaid expansion, ability to stay on a parent's health plan until age 26, etc. They make the law look downright progressive, at least when you ignore the existence of all those dirty little provisions underlying the leaves. Which also happened to be the result of backroom deals that O cut with the very companies that you know and love. The most notorious provision, of course, is the much-talked-about mandate: the requirement that everybody who is not already covered by a government plan (the elderly, the military and other government employees, and the indigent) purchase a private plan from companies that will face no meaningful price controls, lest the "consumer" either be fined or, in rare cases where a person can find NO health plan that costs less than 8% of a person's income, receive some subsidies from the government (or simply continue going without insurance altogether, which is the more likely scenario considering that an estimated 30 million people will continue to be uninsured even with Obamacare fully implemented).
The basic premise of the mandate is to increase the pool of insured people to encompass those less likely to have serious ailments (people paying money to insurance companies and receiving nothing but a certificate in return) in exchange for forcing the insurance companies to cover the really, really, really sick people, which is of course an expensive proposition. This might sound progressive, until you remember that the vast majority of those healthy people who are going to be a part of the expanded pool are workers with very little money to spare on insurance they are being forced to purchase precisely because they are expected NOT to use it. As somebody who seems sympathetic to welfare-liberal politics, you might understand the scheme better if I put it this way: it's like a progressive income tax, except healthier and younger demographics of the population are standing in for the rich. Sound progressive now?
Without even getting to the other horrid provisions of the law, such as the half-trillion-dollar gutting of Medicare, the mandate alone is reason for opposition. It represents a giant give-away to corporations, either through government subsidies to pay for unnecessarily costly and unusable "insurance," or as is going to be true in the vast majority of cases, through forced payment directly from people like you and me. The mechanism through which this give-away is transmitted is the locking-in, on a permanent basis, of a private-insurance model of health-care provision, along with all the attendant evils that people on the left should be fighting against, including incentives to deny care in order to increase profit, and wasted resources on advertising and other commercial overhead. Liberals, and pseudo-leftists on revleft, seem to forget that health insurance is not the same as health care.
