I knew that Lanny Davis was perhaps the least principled person in Washington, but I didn’t know that he was willing to make himself look like a complete idiot to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the issues related to health care reform. I mean, who is his audience for such nonsense? If he posted this crap in the USA Today, I could understand. Let me give just one example:
On mandatory coverage with pre-existing conditions, at least some Republicans, such as Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) at the summit, have said they favor some way to address this issue, and apparently some states already do by regulation. Obama and McCain should be able to agree on a base standard for state regulation to minimize denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions.
No, they shouldn’t be able to do that unless they mandate that everyone buys coverage. Insurance companies are in business to make money, and you don’t make money by insuring someone’s home against fire damage if their house is already on fire. Likewise, you don’t give someone with diabetes health insurance and agree to pay the cost of their dialysis. You can’t make insurance companies take on customers whom they know will cost them tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or, more precisely, you can’t do that unless you also force millions of healthy people to buy their product, thereby making it a profitable trade-off.
That’s only the beginning of Lanny’s idiocy. He should go back to shilling for right-wing Latin American generals.
Moronic jackass, that Davis is.
Is this really news? Saying Lanny Davis has no ethics or no scruples is like saying water is wet.
Why give someone with diabetes health insurance?
Why not just give them health care?
Why force people to buy health insurance?
Why not just charge them a payroll health care tax?
Why send the funds thru an insurance company, where 25% will be diverted to overhead & shareholder profits?
So many questions, so few answers even at this late stage of the game.
Davis is not only unprincipled, he doesn’t like being called out for his shilling.
Jane Hamsher did not become controversial on lefty blogs until she called out Davis for shilling for the healthcare industry and did it on The Ed Show. All of a sudden it was somehow unseemly to ask a “good Democrat” the question: Who are you being paid by? To which he responded by raising an unfortunate remark of Hamsher’s for which she apologized that made her appear to be racist. And that predated her co-signing a letter (with other liberals, by the way) that was also co-signed by Grover Norquist asking for investigation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Rahm Emmanuel’s activities when he was on the board. At which point Davis’s defenders unloaded on Hamsher mischaracterizing a single letter as an alliance with Grover Norquist.
If anyone deserved to be hurt by Bunning’s stupid antics, it is Lanny Davis.
It’s interesting because the only reason Lanny knew about that is because it happened to Lanny’s BFF, Holy Joe. Also, I am surprised that Jane wasn’t prepared for that, given Lanny’s reputation and since she had to figure Lanny would drag that out at an inopportune time.
She was prepared for it, but the netroots wasn’t and the African-American netroots went nuts for three or four days.
Exactly.
This is actually all that “single payer” really is here in Canada — instead of paying premiums, we pay taxes (boy, do we ever pay taxes!) and then the government pays the doctors’ fees plus the hospital charges, etc.
This idea people get that our health care is “free” is ridiculous — we pay for it just like anybody else. The advantage we have is that, because we are dealing with politicians instead of health insurance executives, we can eventually force our politicians to provide the coverage we want and to make sure the system is funded so we get timely care.