I’m truly embarrassed for you.

As a northerner, I’ve never been able to understand why we wasted even one man, during the Civil War, to keep you losers as part of this country. You guys suck! Crawl back into your trailers and shut your faces about health care, and you will get the health care you don’t deserve.

What are the TWO most popular government programs in U.S. history. Social Security and Medicare. Both Democrat Legacies. So much so that Ronald Reagan had to assert, repeatedly, that he was not going to and had absolutely no intention of touching either. A government optional heath care plan will become the third, and three strikes and the Republican Party is out.

When the Clinton’s were trying to pass Clinton Care, all of the Republican advisors told Congressional Republicans to not go negative on it directly, but to get others to, because if it passed it would turn into the third most popular government program in history and would result in 20 years or longer of complete Democratic control of the executive sand legislative branch. This is not opinion this is well documented history.

Republican advisors are starting to say the same thing now. That if they kill health care reform in the fall of 2009, there will be fewer Republicans in Congress come the fall of 2010.

Obama and the Democrats have great methods of publicly handling this as the vote gets closer. All they need do is show some videos of Republicans asserting the existence of WMD’s in Iraq, and then show photos of the same people making assertions about heath care reform with a caption “This is who you are going to believe”

Republicans may have the public scared now, but it is whoever controls the fear factor during the week of the vote who will prevail.

Already articles are showing how Medicare Advantage carriers are tricking the elderly into signing up and then denying them treatments for colon cancer, telling them to take over the counter ibuprofen for cancer pain to avoid paying for prescription pain medications and tricking them into signing living wills at the same time as they as they sign up, or bullying them into signing them afterwards, leaving the health care provider to make the “end of life decisions” while the family is waiting to take the provider to court.

A simple google on the words “Medicare Advantage” “trick” and “elderly” will bring up many articles many current, but many in 2007 before the current fight over health care reform started.

Other articles show how the largest private employer based insurers falsify data on the costs of out of network provider costs in order to artificially increase premiums from between 10 and 28 percent. The AMA sued this one provider and won almost half a billion dollars in settlement.

Democrats have one fact on their side and bringing it up at the right time will also be very much in their favor. How many times an insurance bureaucrat gets between the doctor and the patient. That every medical consultation has three people in the room. The patient, the doctor and and insurance claims denial specialist. There are tens of thousands of individual cases. I can see a few dozen of them in a commercial at almost any time in the near future.

The same group that is doing commercials opposing health reform, AHIP, recently had to do an article about the wide difference that hospitals doctors and other providers bill for providing the exact procedures but with patients covered by different insurance carriers. AHIP used Medicare prices to try to foist off the blame onto the providers, but the providers were very ready for this. They had documentation that the reasons that the billings were different for each provider was because each provider reimbursed at different low rates, that they denied parts of claims which brought down average reimbursements even further and outright denied entire claims in other cases, plus the additional costs of having to continually try to fight to get more claims and more portions of bills paid for after an insurer had denied the claims. Doctors then stated that they were finding that they were having to drop more and more private insurers because they could be treating patients they could be reimbursed for with the time they have to waste arguing with insurers over the telephone and by mail as well as the insurance experts they have to hire to try to get a higher percentage of claims accepted rather than denied. Then the amount of time they have to wait to get the money from the private insurers. This is something they rarely have to do with Medicare. Medicare coverage, according to doctors is much more transparent, require much less non medically related work on their part to deal with. Medicare still has a higher rate of doctor participation than any single private employer based health care plan, and the doctors are more inclined to drop a private health care insurer when they drop their rates of reimbursement that they are to drop Medicare.

On average Medicare reimburses a doctors and hospitals 48.9 dollars per patient over the complete spectrum of care. Medicaid reimburses them 38.8. Commercial insurance reimburses 88.8, but they deny claims far more often than either Medicare or Medicaid, and doctors lose far more patient contact time with commercial health insurers that the difference between the public health insurance reimbursement and the private employer based health insurance is not large enough for them to worry about accepting all of their private employer based insurers. They will keep their older patients and close the book on the company and not accept new ones. It is much more common to walk into any doctors office in the Atlanta metropolitan area and see signs at the front desk that say “We no longer accept this insurance companies POS plan, or we no longer accept that companies PPO plan as of x date” than it is to see a sign that says the same about Medicare.

I recently read the letter that the 7 top private commercial insurers sent to President Obama stating that they could easily cut costs by 2 trillion dollars over the next ten years to deal with the need to reform health care. Most of the places that they were finding this two trillion was found in some of the most egregiously non medical related fat imaginable. Corporate jets, limos, executive golf courses, original masters paintings for the CEO’s office wall’s multi million dollar housing in the city center where the corporate headquarters was located so the executives didn’t have to drive home to their suburban homes.This makes up a considerable amount of insurance premiums.

In fact as the number of health enrollees has dropped by millions over the last year because of unemployment, the top health providers are seeing record profits, out of premiums at the same time that share prices have dropped. They have dropped enough for the CEO of one insurer to vote himself another 1.6 billion dollars in stock options this year. All paid for with premium increases this year of 40 percent. Employers have little choice but to find coverage that provides less benefits but they will find no difference between any of the companies if they are seeking to retain benefits. There is for all effects an insurance OPEC that controls the prices of health insurance at whim, but unlike OPEC, the price of health insurance never goes down. Demand is down at this point in time, again, because of the high rate of unemployment, but what one would expect in a competitive market is not occurring. Premiums are not coming down to attract more enrollment. They have a captive market and they press that advantage to the max.

The medical profession is the sickest of the intrusion of the insurance industry into their practices. of all Americans involved in the current system.

Also polls seem to indicate that the public is less more afraid that the eventual legislation will simply be another giveaway to the insurance industry allowing business to make more money while cutting benefits. Newspapers today are seeing letters to the editor praising the Single Payer options that have been accepted by Pelosi and the Senate in the last two days.

I see one very loud incoherent guy spamming, and yes, he’s kind of annoying.

On the other hand you shouldn’t blame all of the people who disagree with you for the actions of the loudest one, nor should you start talking like him yourself. I don’t really see a difference between “the pubtards are going down!” and “when the libtards fall!”

Neither really adds much to the debate.

Reconciliation. Reconciliation. Reconciliation. 51 votes in the Senate.