This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Vermont Enacts Conditional Universal Healthcare Coverage - by Stephen Lendman
Numerous previous articles discussed Obamacare, described accurately as a rationing scheme to enrich insurers, drug companies and large hospital chains in lieu of universal single payer coverage.
Obama hailed its March 2010 passage as answering "the call of history." In fact, Ralph Nader was right calling it a "pay-or-die system that is the disgrace of the Western world," costing double what other Western countries spend and delivering less, rationing care to enrich corporate providers while making a dysfunctional system worse.
Under it, junk insurance policies leave millions underinsured. Costs remain out-of-control. Insurers can still deny care by delaying, contesting, preventing or over-charging people from accessing it. Yet everyone must be covered or penalized if opt out, a provision many states are contesting as a lawless unconstitutional infringement.
Moreover, company-provided policies will be taxed as ordinary income, harming working households most of all.
After passage, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) denounced it, saying the new law "enrich(es) and further entrench(es private insurers, forcing) millions of Americans to buy" defective coverage leaving most worse off than before at a cost of hundreds of billions of tax dollars given predators to game the system for profit, the public losing out. Moreover, 23 million Americans will remain uninsured, "translate(d) into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually and an incalculable toll of suffering."
In fact, Obama's centerpiece domestic policy scammed the public with a package of expensive mandates, new taxes, and sweetheart deals, creating a fragmented, dysfunctional, unsustainable system, denying Americans what they urgently need - universal coverage, an expanded, improved Medicare for all. Everyone in, no one out, what neither party or Obama delivered.
Vermont Perhaps Heading for Affordable Universal Coverage
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
