Yet again, Sharron Angle brings on the full CRAZEE!!! No wonder why "Birther Queen" Orly Taitz is jumping in to help Sharrrrrrrrron!
There are some political endorsements that Senate candidates dream of getting. There are others they'd rather do without. Having the lead skeptic of President Obama's country of birth support your campaign probably falls into the latter category.
On Wednesday, without much public recognition, Orly Taitz threw her support behind Sharron Angle, posting a plea for readers to donate to the Nevada Republican Senate candidate on her website. The birther queen (as she's known) even urged people to head to Vegas on a late-October bus trip to help with the Senate election.
The Angle campaign, as spokesperson Jarrod Agen told the Huffington Post, neither sought nor asked for the help.
The "#1 Race in America," Taitz wrote on her website, is "Angle versus Reid! Retire Harry Reid, support Sharron Angle."
I know... Crazy! But you know what's just as crazy? This...
What? You didn't think I'd get back to health care policy? Well... HA!
But really, this is pure insanity. When she talks about "getting rid of mandates", she means this:
So yet again, Sharrontology Obtuse Angle wants the insurance companies to decide for us "what we need" and what "we don't even really need".
Treatment to help kids with autism become independent adults? Nope, that's something "we don't even really need".
Screenings to detect colon cancer? Nope, that's something "we don't even really need".
Screenings to detect breast cancer? Nope, that's something "we don't even really need".
Making sure pregnant women have health care? Nope, that's something "we don't even really need".
See a pattern here? Again, preventive care works and preventive care saves lives and preventive care costs less! But because Angle is so short-sighted and so much more concerned about insurance company profits than saving real people's lives, she'd rather just deny us that much needed preventive care simply because she and her "Tea Party, Inc." buddies think they're just "things we don't even really need".
And if you don't believe me, listen to Maven.
Watch this ad - and then tell me, if you are an Angle supporter - how you can support this position? Explain to me - an eight year survivor of Stage III breast cancer - just what I should have done without insurance to pay the bills for my cancer treatment?The bills came to over $150,000 just for the medical treatments alone. That doesn’t include the follow-up care as a survivor over the last eight years, the additional surgeries I needed on my radical mastectomy site, or the travel expenses to go back and forth for treatment. That has probably amounted to another $100,000.That’s right. Nearly $250,000.That was eight years ago. It would no doubt cost more today. How many of you could afford that without insurance? Please tell me.Have you lost anybody to cancer? Next month is Breast Cancer Awareness month - so while you’re out at the Komen and other events, walking for breast cancer research, ask the attendees if they think Sharron Angle’s bizarre position is alright with them.This woman is the poster child for outrageous, dangerous speech.Sharron Angle also doesn’t give a good goddamn about women, cancer patients, or anybody other than herself.
She survived breast cancer. And she probably knows much more about what she needs that Sharron Angle for some HMO.
What Angle is really advocating here is enriching the insurance companies even more by allowing them to cut back on coverage, even such basic essentials as cancer screenings, and offering "basic plans" like those bargain basement car insurance plans in California that don't really cover anything. It's "insurance for the sake of insurance", which means more padding of HMO profits while patients can't get basic preventive care, like cancer screenings, unless they pay exorbitantly more in premiums.
Mammograms save lives. Colon cancer screenings save lives. Preventive care saves lives. And Sharron Angle cares more about giving insurance companies maximum opportunity to profit off it than patients' ability to access it. She's essentially putting their profits ahead of our lives.
And yet again, she proves why she's unfit to serve in The US Senate.
Interesting, this...I plowed through lists of the bills for which Assemblywoman Angle was the primary sponsor (1999-2005) and could not find a bill, other than AB 425 (2001) that directly addressed the issue of mandated coverage. This bill would have allowed local Chambers of Commerce to form local pools (albeit ones with precious little leverage)for employer sponsored health insurance plans. http://bit.ly/d0vB1P
ReplyDeleteThe coverage to be offered by these plans would most likely have been minimal. A cynical rendition of the insurance corporation's position might be that they don't want to cover preventative and early detection procedures and tests, nor do they want to offer coverage for extended treatments (witness the abuse of rescission clauses). In fact they seem to want to cover only the healthy and wealthy who will not add to their medical loss ratio.
The real bottom line may be that health insurance corporations are not all that upset about coverage mandates, nor about mandated insurance purchases -- What they are upset over is that ACA requires that 85% of the premium revenue be used to PAY for the treatment policy holders thought was covered in the policies they bought.
Thanks so much for your support on this issue. It's time we exposed Angle for the cynical anti-woman opportunist that she is.
ReplyDelete-maven
I am surprised that you don't seem to realize that allowing the government to dictate mandatory coverage increases the cost of health insurance for everyone. If it makes insurance more expensive, it will discourage or even prevent some people from getting health insurance, or increase the cost to the public, if mandated as a tax-supported requirement.
ReplyDeleteIf you have objective data on this issue, rather than subjective comments without any foundation, it would strengthen your position.
By the way, my wife is a 25 year breast cancer survivor, and I am fully supportive of breast cancer screening for women, where and when appropriate. However, if you mandate the coverage, that means that my insurance as a male will cost more without any option to delete it if I don't want or need that specific coverage. n I am already forced to pay for Medicare part D coverage in spite of the fact that 1) I don't take any prescription drugs, and 2) if I did want a prescription for a condition that I can treat with OTC medications, they are not covered under any of the health insurance plans that I can find.
However, the information at http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/screening/breast/Patient/page4 shows that there are significant issues of increasing the risk of breast cancer associated with the screening tests themselves.
Can you not see that universal mandates would increase the incidence of screenings that may not be necessary or appropriate?
The decision for screening should be between the patient and her doctor, and changing the cost structure to affect that decision without considering the impact is unsound public policy in my view. I suspect that your bias against Sharron Angle is political rather than purely medical.