Think of it as taxes directly to the Company

Kagro X expects to have to pay taxes to the Guvmint. But taxes to the Corporations that have bought the Congresscritters? It's enough to make a progressive into a Libertarian.

...I don't get how you can possibly hand me a health care bill with an individual mandate and no public option. If I'm uninsured or poorly insured, and the answer coming out of Congress is that I now have to buy crappy insurance from some private company that has no plan to actually help me pay for my health care without raking me over the coals, then I've gone into this fight an ardent supporter of strong reform, and come out a teabagger.

You're going to force me to pay an insurance company for shit insurance that as a free market actor I decided not to even try to buy?

Fuck the hell out of that. Come and get me if you want my money. Paying the government against my will I can understand. It's the government, and it takes things. I might not like it, but I get it. Now, "libertarians" will no doubt scoff haughtily at that, but look, we differ on how much intrusion we'll tolerate. BFD. Welcome to Earth. But if I'm gonna lose that money one way or the other, to my mind it had damn well better be to pay for insurance that actually covers something, and not to be burned on executive bonuses, advertising, or 30% overhead when there's a 4% plan on the market.

Paying an insurance company whose product I don't want? That makes no goddamn sense to me whatsoever, and I want nothing to do with it.

Now, it should come as no surprise that the dingbats at Third Way are pushing this nonsense as a "compromise." As you may have heard me say, I don't believe in a third way. When the chips are down, all third ways are just new excuses for voting for one of the two ways you're allowed in Congress: yea or nay. And while Third Way may get warm in the shorts over a "compromise" that keeps the mandates and chucks the public option, I note that it's once again the DLC and their allies that come up with the plan that has me ready to turn my back on the Democratic Party's Big Plan of the Day.

But keep this in mind: that mandate is already in the bill. It was written in right alongside the public option. So the mandate isn't Third Way's invention, it comes from and has the tacit support of Congressional Democrats, both progressive and otherwise. But if you ask me, it only made sense in a context that included the public option. For Third Way or anyone else to suggest it makes sense all on its own is insanity, and I won't play...

So let's get this straight. The banksters that own the insurance conglomerates blew their wad in the derivatives market during the "Bu$h Boom" years. You know, those years of "jobless recovery" so similar to what Barry O. has tried to recreate, when the market bubble just sucked in all the money in every bank in Amerika with the promise of a pyramid of cash for the heavily invested. Then, strangely enough, when enropy finally won out and the whole mess crashed around their ears, said banksters got the promise of all the cash Helicopter Ben and Bu$hie and Barry could print with a signature of the Presidential sharpie. Said promise to back their bets turned Wall Street into a bubbling casino anew. "Twas morning in Amerika again.

For the banksters, anyway.

But that obviously isn't enough. To give them even more capital (read: money to bet with), the DINOcrats decided to run this dog-and-pony show of a Health Care Reform that made great noises about what great favors it was going to do for Mom & Pop Amerika, paying their bills for all the things they needed to stay healthy and in business. Except, you know, it wouldn't really pay for these things- it would demand they pay for them.

To people who weren't obligated to provide anything.

Once again, the banksters are Recovering, aren't they?