apple juice

the juice-ette says that perhaps I over-reached a bit with my UnitedHealth — death panels comment.

Maybe so.

I do think it’s preposterous that a private company could theoretically hold in its hands an essential life-saving vaccine and then decide whether or not they were going to offer it to people that have their “health insurance”.

just another reason, in my mind, that health care is a right, not a privilege of the rich, and that decisions such as this should be in the hands of our “by the people, of the people and for the people” government, and NOT some private corporation.

“UnitedHealth Group announced Thursday afternoon that it’s going to cover the administration of H1N1 flu vaccines for all its members, regardless of whether their health plan covers immunizations.”

(Via MinnPost.)

Sounds like there was a death panel meeting at UnitedHealth to determine whether or not people they insure should be allowed to live.

“Dr. Will Nicholson, a family physician in Maplewood, wanted to see what kind of health-insurance experiences many of his patients go though to see him. So last month he elected to drop his employer-provided health-care plan and began an experiment to search for a private insurance plan on his own.”

(Via MinnPost.)

As he says in the video, the current options aren’t working, and we need better options.

“take the health care debate we’re presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and ‘listen to their constituents.’ An urge they should resist because their constituents don’t know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to ‘keep your government hands off my Medicare,’ which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.”

(Via New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country.)

I’m not sure if this column is funny or sad…

The link I found to this article claimed that it was the single most important thing you could read about the health care debate.

“Good thing our leaders weren’t so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill — because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.”

I don’t think it’s too bold to say that. Read this article.

(Via In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition.)

This is from the Washington Post:

“The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems. “

and this quote is especially spot-on:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society — whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

(Via Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform.)

At this point it seems that all of these tea-baggers are digging themselves into a hole… and asking for more shovels.

“Go ahead, shoot me. I like the status quo on health care in the United States. I’ve got health insurance and I don’t give a damn about the 47 million suckers who don’t. Obama and Congress must be stopped. No bill! I’m better off the way things are.

I’m with that woman who wrote the president complaining about ‘socialized medicine’ and added: ‘Now keep your hands off my Medicare.’ That’s the spirit!”

(Via Newsweek.)

Perfect!