I was lucky and got tickets in the VIP section in front of the audience literally 10 feet from Obama at Arcadia University. It was a pretty awe inspiring speech with a very supportive and enthusiastic crowd. A few dissenting shouts could be heard and one moment he looked up and people reacted by saying "let the President finish".
The President was introduced by a single woman faced with a doubling of her insurance premiums and saying that something had to be done. The audience had been standing waiting for 3 hours to hear Obama and when he came in, it was a thunderous reception. He began by saying it was good to get out of Washington.
His loudest ovations came when he said that insurance abuses had to end like exclusions for preexisting conditions, that people should be able to buy the same plan as members of Congress and that Republicans had 10 years to do something about health care costs and did nothing and now they are critics of his plan. "If not now, when? If not us, who?".
His message was that Congress needed to pass the bill and that Washington spent more time worrying about the elections and not enough time about the concerns of the people.
At one point he said that, "some people want a government takeoever of health care" to which there was a loud applause including a few of us who shouted, "single payer". He seemed to ignore it, but it was notable and unlikely to be reported by the media.
His final comment was that he wanted us to get Congress to pass his health care bill. Nothing new that hasn't been said.
Monday, March 08, 2010
Reflections on Arcadia
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Hi,
If you have not already seen this, here is a link to a worksheet for comparing costs: http://unionsforsinglepayer.org/files/other/2010-03/Modified_Cost_Sheet-12-13-09.doc.
I subscribe to several health reform blogs that post occasionally (including this one) so I only discovered the worksheet just last week. It's the first and only attempt I've seen that presents the bottom line for regular people in an organized, understandable way.
So I wanted to mention it because I think these numbers are the major selling point for single-payer. But it gets no airplay at all.
The "Subsidy Calculator" over at the Kaiser Foundation site is also a good attempt at estimating a premium payment in the open market: http://healthreform.kff.org/SubsidyCalculator.aspx. It's easy to use but the quotes are very very high.
So if you do the math by using the single-payer worksheet and then compare numbers by using the subsidy calculator, s-p is clearly the winner.
Unfortunately the burden of proof is on the s-p movement to clearly show how the Medicare payroll tax can be a replacement for private health insurance premiums, which will be cost-effective and have a stabilizing impact on personal finances. The worksheet demonstrates that well. It's unfair that the media cannot or will not perform their own arithmetic on this but at least we now live in the 21st century so the blogosphere can help pick up the slack.
Thanks for your efforts with this.
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