Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid

Home »

Al Franken On Why He Supports The Health Care Bill

1:09 pm EST December 20th, 2009 | News | 16 Comments

Franken has written a diary over on Daily Kos:

This bill will end annual and lifetime limits on the dollar value of your benefits. Eliminating preexisting condition exclusions for all new medical plans and funding high-risk pools to insure those with preexisting conditions who are currently without insurance means Minnesotans won’t be locked in their jobs or afraid to start their own businesses for fear of losing coverage. Requiring that 85 cents of every premium dollar go toward coverage will limit insurers’ profits and skyrocketing insurance premiums.

These are all real, strong reforms that this bill enacts with the urgency this crisis demands. Small businesses will immediately receive tax credits to make covering employees more affordable, and insurers will have to cover recommended preventive services at no cost to the patient. Again, these changes take effect immediately.

In coming years, health insurance exchanges will be created to give more Americans access to affordable coverage. For those who already have coverage, but live in fear that they’re just an illness or pink slip away from losing their health insurance, this bill provides the peace of mind that comes with access to secure, stable, affordable coverage.

These reforms are fiscally responsible and crucial to our long-term economic health. By bringing down costs and focusing on prevention and high-value health care, more Americans will get screenings to prevent diseases before they become costly and disabling. We’ll also make providers accountable for making people healthier, rewarding them for efficient care. In the end, this bill will save money and keep our country healthier while cutting the deficit by $132 billion in the first ten years and $650 billion in the second ten.

Topic: Al Franken, Daily Kos, Health Care

« The Danny’s Other Revolt
Jacob Hacker Supports Health Care Bill »

16 Responses to “Al Franken On Why He Supports The Health Care Bill”

calling all toasters says:

December 20, 2009 at 1:26 pm

He conspicuously doesn’t mention terrorism. Is Franken in al Qaeda? [/conservapundits]
Rex Mundane says:

December 20, 2009 at 1:43 pm

So only 15% of the multi-hundred-billion-dollar giveaway to the insurance companies can go to their bonuses and advertising? Wow, someone hold me down, I may begin dancing wildly out of pure excitement.

Whether or not these are positive reforms (and what few things there are still remaining are, at the very, very, very least, positive) its like they can’t neither comprehend nor care what the actual issue is.

I don’t want insurance.
I don’t want an insurance exchange.
I don’t want insurance subsidies to buy the insurance from the exchange with.
I don’t want consumer reporting agencies to be created to be able to assist me in making decisions where to spend those subsidies on exchange-provided insurance.
I don’t want better availability of methods to retain insurance offered through an employer in the event that I should find work elsewhere (or at all, these days) and still be able to transfer coverage seamlessly to positively consumer reported insurance companies I’ve elected to spend insurance subsidies through the exchange upon.

I just want to be able to go to the Doctor.

In all the talk of how many more Americans will be able to just marginally afford insurance or have freedom to choose or retain, what are the numbers of how many of them will legitimately be healthier?

What are the numbers on how many of them won’t be driven into bankruptcy over medical debts? How many will be able to afford time off work unpaid so they can see a physician? How many will be able to comfortable afford the copays to see their physician regularly or afford the best medication they require or the countless other incidental payments that are part of the reason that even those who have insurance rarely see the doctor, which is a large part of why we as a country are so sick?

How in the seven hells are they defining “Help” where seeing a doctor doesnt qualify but being forced to buy insurance from a criminal company does?
NCSenior says:

December 20, 2009 at 1:57 pm

And how will we ever know the answers to your questions if we don’t give this upgrade opportunity a shot? There has to be some good reasons why the rest of the industrialize nations have better health care systems than Americans do!
Quaker in a Basement says:

December 20, 2009 at 3:38 pm

So come on, all you true “progressives.” Tell us how that cheap sellout Franken is standing in the way of real progress!
SaveFarris says:

December 20, 2009 at 4:15 pm

And how will we ever know the answers to your questions if we don’t give this upgrade opportunity a shot?

I agree. Let’s apply this logic to school vouchers, Missile Defense, and Social Security Privatization.
Oliver says:

December 20, 2009 at 4:23 pm

There’s giving a decent idea a shot and throwing bad money after dumb ideas. Health care reform is the former, the ideas you list are the latter.
Rex Mundane says:

December 20, 2009 at 5:16 pm

“So come on, all you true “progressives.” Tell us how that cheap sellout Franken is standing in the way of real progress!”

You want to go there? Well, by selling a hardly-even-mediocre bill in terms of a nigh impossibly lofty goal, and by calling the process of having their asses handed to them a ‘victory’.

Franken isn’t the only one calling this a “historic step toward universal health care in America,” and neither is he the only one who hasn’t made even the slightest suggestion that there ever will be a “Step 2,” much less what it could possibly be, how long it will take to get where we want to be, etc. It’s all well and good to say we’re getting there, but nobody’s bothering to explain how.

Look, I get that, for instance, sometimes you have to re-break an arm to set it right, but if they’re gonna do that they’ll explain why and how it works and everything. Can anyone actually explain how, by making the insurance industry richer, bigger, and invincible, we end up with universal health care? Has this possibly worked somewhere before and nobody’s mentioned it yet or something, or are we just completely winging it on the hope that it might?
Wilbur says:

December 20, 2009 at 5:46 pm

Can anyone actually explain how, by making the insurance industry richer, bigger, and invincible, we end up with universal health care?

First we force them to swallow the reforms that Sen. Franken enumerates (among others), then we wait for antiquated assholes like Lieberman and Nelson to die or get retired and we force them to swallow more.

Make no mistake about it: this is a defeat for the Republicans and the insurance brontosaurs. It’s not a 56-to-nothing-Patriots-over-Titans blowout, it’s more of an embarrassing need-two-blocked-field-goals-and-some-helpful-calls-from-the-refs-to-beat-Tennessee win, but in the end a win is a win. What the repubs, dinos and their bankrollers really want is no reform at all, and for the past several decades they’ve managed to get their way completely every time. Not this time. They know that this is a defeat for them and that’s why they continue to fight against the bill tooth and nail and pocketbook.
White Whale says:

December 20, 2009 at 5:53 pm

Wilbur,

Roll Tide buddy _ Obama should have taken the reigns on this bill but while I am not estatic about this bill, I do think that some progress HAD to be made. Hopefully, like Alabama’s season…it wasn’t always pretty but in the end a win.
Pryme says:

December 20, 2009 at 6:23 pm

Add Howard Dean to that “list;” he’s apparently changed his mind.
Zython says:

December 20, 2009 at 6:26 pm

I agree. Let’s apply this logic to school vouchers, Missile Defense, and Social Security Privatization.

I won’t comment on the first two, but we actually have empirical evidence of why the latter is a bad idea.
Rex Mundane says:

December 20, 2009 at 9:07 pm

Force them to swallow reforms? Jesus God, yeah I bet they’re so damn tore up about keeping their anti-trust exemption and being handed hundreds of billions of dollars. Money they’ll get to keep collecting after losing your job, since being fired doesn’t kill your insurance now. Money that will be subsidized with taxpayer money that they’ll need to be able to handle all the additional money they’re taking in.

Bet they’re terrified of what we might do next, like what, force them to eat chocolate and visit a brothel or something. I mean so long as de facto president Lieberman is okay with that, of course, we certainly wouldnt want to upset him and, I dunno, actually make him go through with the political suicide of filibustering a widely popular public option. Certainly wouldnt want to have to punish him in the slightest, heaven forfend we should do so ghastly a thing.

But okay, so we force them to take more and more of our money while not forcing them necessarily to provide more and better care. Then, what, another year of such wide, impressive stretches of progress? Then another and another and… what?

I ask again, what step 2 is supposed to be? What is the next round of reform that we’ll ask Joe Lieberman nicely to let us hold a vote on that builds upon this hearty, lovely framework of forcing the American people to give money to the insurance companies that they know better than to trust at all? I mean dammit, there is a plan, right? So what’s the next thing?
Quaker in a Basement says:

December 21, 2009 at 2:06 am

If Franken isn’t progressive enough for you, then nobody in Congress is progressive enough for you. It’s not Obama or Franken or any one politician, it’s all of ‘em.
Dave in SoCal says:

December 21, 2009 at 6:17 pm

First we force them to swallow the reforms that Sen. Franken enumerates (among others), then we wait for antiquated assholes like Lieberman and Nelson to die or get retired and we force them to swallow more.

You must be expecting all of this to happen before Nov 2010.

This is already an unpopular bill (over 50% disapproval for some time now), but once people realize just exactly how this “historic, cost saving, deficit-reducing, coverage expanding” legislation is going to hit them in their wallets (buy pricey insurance or pay a yearly tax) and what it’s going to do to the existing coverage (increased costs and many dumped by employers) that 85% of all Americans have, it’s going to be not just unpopular but hated.

If you really think that Democrats are still going to be in control of both houses of Congress after the midterm elections (let alone 2012), then you my friend are seriously delusional.
Dave von Ebers says:

December 21, 2009 at 10:43 pm

“[S]chool vouchers, Missile Defense and Social Security Privatization” … This is like the Zombie Reagan version of “A Christmas Carol,” isn’t it? I mean, really, the guy’s been dead for, like, six years, but his lamest ideas never seem to lose traction on the right.

Note to Mr. or Ms. Save Ferris: You left out School Prayer and Banning Flag Burning.
liberalrob says:

December 22, 2009 at 1:50 am

I’m not going to hold this one against Franken. It’s true that there are some good things in the bill. Unfortunately none of the good things address the overwhelmingly bad thing that makes them all irrelevant: having the profit motive involved in health care ensures that some people will be denied needed care due to inability to pay. The only true reform would be adoption of single-payer, taking the profit motive completely out of the equation and eliminating the useless, parasitical health insurance industry. Until that is done, we will never contain costs nor ensure all Americans.

I eagerly (actually with some sense of dread) await the statistics on the number of people forced to declare bankruptcy and go on welfare in order to avoid the penalties for not buying the mandatory insurance we will now all be required to carry, and for which the federal subsidies will inevitably not cover the gap between disposable income and cost of coverage. Just watch. It is as predictable as the sun rising in the east.