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In 2010, Ralph Nader called Obamacare a sellout to Big PhAMA and other healthcare giants, saying:
It doesn't "provide universal, comprehensive or affordable care to the American people. It shovels hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money (to predators that) created the problem.""It requires no contractual accountability or other benefits for people denied coverage under a pay-or-die system that's the disgrace of the Western world."
There's no public option. Millions are left uninsured, millions more underinsured, and as poverty increases, so will their ranks exponentially.
"There's (also) no free choice of doctor and hospital under this. There's all kinds of exploit(ive provisions to let) health insurance (and drug) companies continue their ravenous ways over people who are (the) most vulnerable....when they're sick or injured."
Former CIGNA vice president, Wendell Potter said Obamacare lets insurers shift costs to consumers, offer inadequate or unaffordable access, force Americans to pay higher deductibles for less coverage, and end up scamming them.
"What worries me," he said, "is that people who are forced to buy coverage and all they can afford to buy is a high deductible. (So) if they get really sick, they have to pay so much out of their own pockets that they're going to be filing for bankruptcy or (lose) their homes."
What the 1913 Federal Reserve Act did for bankers, PPACA may do for insurance, PhAMA, and hospital chain predators. Controlling one-sixth of the economy, they're more than ever able to game the system by:
- making it dysfunctionally worse;
- selling junk insurance, leaving millions underinsured;
- keeping premiums unaffordable for full coverage;
- adding high deductibles and co-pays for less coverage;
- denying care by delaying, contesting, or preventing access;
- letting pharmaceutical companies provide toxic drugs at unaffordable prices, and avoid generic competition on new products by lengthy patent protection periods;
- assuring providers more customers and higher profits by requiring individuals and families buy insurance or be penalized; and
- by 2018, imposing an excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" plans to cut corporate costs, make workers pay more, force many to settle for less, be underinsured, and unable to obtain costly care without paying for what they can't afford.
In March 2010, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) took "no comfort in seeing aspirin dispensed for the treatment of cancer."
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