Make him STOP! My brain is about to explode from the freakin’ outright lies that Bush keeps spewing.
His rich vs. poor war continues on all fronts, today the salvo was fired at people who have been abused by a money-grubbing health care system.
He lies outrageously, massages figures, and just makes stuff up… and people believe him. For example, he claims that by protecting highly profitable insurance companies and HMOs, our health care costs will go down. This is about as likely as, oh, our phone bills going down after competition. Um, yeah. Sure.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, malpractice costs amounted to about $24 billion in 2002, a figure that represents less than 2 percent of overall health care spending. Reducing those costs by 25 to 30 percent would lower health care costs by no more than 0.5 percent, and “the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small,” the nonpartisan budget office said in a report last year.
There are, obviously, examples of abuses of the system. But rather than address this, the president feels that malpractice rewards should be capped — no matter what the validity or merit of the case. On top of this, he wants to make huge drug and HMO corporations immune to lawsuits. We’ve seen recent evidence of how drug companies rush drugs to market without appropriate testing; soon, no one will be able to do anything about it.
If your HMO refuses to cover your health care expenses — or worse, refuses to provide care — you can’t do a thing about it. Because in the Bush world, CEOs and huge corporations are worthy of protection, and American citizens are on their own.
Oh, and if you needed yet more evidence of the pro-corporate, anti-citizen leanings of our president, read between the lines on this one:
A recent report by the National Center for State Courts based in Williamsburg, Va., said the number of tort lawsuits in recent years has been overtaken by filings of lawsuits over contracts. Such lawsuits, usually filed by businesses, have not been mentioned by Bush in his calls for reform of the U.S. legal liability system.
Using data from 35 states that account for more than three-quarters of the U.S. population, the center said tort filings have dropped by 4 percent during the past 10 years. Data from 17 of those states that were able to provide comparable figures — including New York, California, Texas and Florida — show that from 1993 to 2002, filings of tort lawsuits fell by 5 percent while contract lawsuits increased by 21 percent.
The dismantling of our nation continues unabated, in small pieces so that people don’t notice. They’ve taken over the executive branch by dirty tricks, legal wrangling, and “activist” judges. The legislative branch is solidly theirs after gerrymandering and sneaky redistricting. They’ve re-written laws to keep themselves in power. And the judicial system is slowly becoming theirs — on top of which, they’re taking away our rights to protect ourselves against those who would harm us… like big corporations that answer to no one at all.
