Senate Panel Kills Government Healthcare Plan
Written by Ed on September 30, 2009 – 9:54 am -WASHINGTON – In a long-anticipated showdown, liberal Democrats twice failed on Tuesday to inject a government-run insurance option into sweeping health care legislation taking shape in the Senate, despite bipartisan agreement that private insurers must change their ways.
The two votes marked a victory for Montana Democrat Max Baucus, the Senate Finance Committee chairman, who is hoping to push his middle-of-the-road measure through the panel by week’s end. It also kept alive the possibility that at least one Republican may yet swing behind the overhaul, a key goal of both Baucus and the White House. Read more:
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By Catzilla02 on Sep 30, 2009 6:02 pm | Reply
YEAH, I was worried that the health insurance execs. would not be able to get the money to fuel their jets and heat thier homes. I do think that to many of our elected people are working for the corps that pay them instead of the people that pay taxes to pay their salaries. I guess that this is the decade of “got mine, sucks to be you”. I guess that if you cant get health ins (from price of others things) then I guess you dont need it. and if you have it you dont use it, cause you might lose it. think of the profits the companies need them after massive layoffs how are they going to keep making money? dont have ins. well you can run up huge bills. and those with money will not ave to worry. people was told by the republicans that the ew health care would have death panels, well the health insurance companies and already beaten them to it.
it looks like I put my rant hat on today
By Bogus on Sep 30, 2009 7:16 pm | Reply
For what it’s worth I’m one of the millions of educated young people who got hung out to dry once the economy went south, and I had no problem at all getting basic health insurance for about 50 bucks a month. Similar, maybe slightly better coverage under TennCare–the notoriously fraud-ridden “public option” of the state I used to live in–cost the average *taxpayer* something like $300 a month. It was rife with fraud and graft, and nearly ruined the state before it was severely scaled back in 2005.
Incidentally insurers actually don’t profit nearly as much as the demagogues would have you believe. A quick search of Yahoo’s financials section tells me that as of this writing, healthcare providers rank 89th in percent net profit margin, actually down from 86th when it was making the rounds a couple months ago. Breweries–top rank on the old list, now there’s some robber barons we can all get behind :)–have dropped to 4th with magazine publishing, hospital investment and software being the new top three. Other industries of note that make more money than insurers include residential investment (12th), domestic telecoms (22nd), processed food (36th), and waste management (51st). The notoriously in-the-tank-left mainstream media is near the bottom of the list, with newspaper and TV showing -31% and -47% profit respectively. I guess that’s why they want to bail them out next, of course nobody gives any mention to the similarly underperforming semiconductor companies that could potentially hire me. Clearly I should have majored in ass-kissing rather than engineering, as that seems to be the wave of the future…
You can see the whole list here, it’s actually kind of a fun read:
http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html
By Bogus on Sep 30, 2009 7:21 pm | Reply
Minor correction, I was off by one for all the rankings other than the top four. So rez REIT is actually 11th, and so on. Apologies for the confusion.