The Democrats' Health "Reform" Bill: Kill It Before It Comes to Life!
Gandalf Grey
The Democrats' Health "Reform" Bill: Kill It Before It Comes to Life!
By Dave Lindorff
Created Dec 18 2009 - 10:53am
Give credit to Howard Dean. This still practicing physician, former governor
of Vermont, former chair of the Democratic Party and former Democratic
presidential candidate has called for progressive members of Congress in
both houses to join their Republican colleagues in killing what he rightly
says has become "an insurance company's dream."
Those namby-pamby, self-described "progressives" in the Democratic Party who
claim that the health bill can still be saved with the inclusion of a fake,
carefully circumscribed and thoroughly emasculated "public option"
government insurance plan that at best would only be able to offer lousy
coverage at high rates to a small number of self-employed poor people are
wrong. This supposed attempt at reforming the US health care system--the
costliest and least effective in the developed world--is simply past saving.
The only appropriate place for the bill at this point is a dumpster.
What could have been a transformational moment in American politics--an end
to decades of corporate health care and the creation of a system in which
all Americans were guaranteed affordable, quality care as a basic right of
citizenship, the way people are in Canada, in all the countries of Europe,
in Japan, in Taiwan, in Cuba and much of the rest of the world, has been
squandered.
It has been squandered by President Obama, who was too gutless to take a
leadership role, and left matters to Congress, and who then slithered up to
the major players in the medical-industrial complex and cut secret deals
with all of them--doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and
the hospital industry--in return for their "support."
It has been squandered by many leading members of Congress in both houses,
especially those who call themselves the Blue Dogs, but also by many who
call themselves "liberals," who accepted the tainted coin of those
industries (and their lobbyists have been flooding Congress over the past
year with contributions in unprecedented amounts), and who have transformed
the legislation into a huge gift for those industries, producing a bill that
will leave employers as the main agency for providing health coverage
(though not for paying for it--that will be the employees' responsibility),
require those without coverage to buy it themselves, guaranteeing a vast new
market of mostly health young people for the insurance industry, and that
will do almost nothing to control costs.
Doctors will get richer under this "reform." Insurance companies will get
vastly richer under this "reform". Pharmaceutical companies will get richer
under this "reform". But there will still be millions of people left with no
access to health care. There will still be tens of millions of people who
will get substandard or even pathetically trashy health care. And the cost
of medical care, both for individuals and for society as a whole, already
the highest in the world, will continue to soar. To make matters worse,
taxes will also go up dramatically, by at least $100 billion a year. For
extra laughs, while these costs would start hitting the public right away,
the "benefits" of the bill wouldn't go into effect until 2013, meaning that
a likely resurgent Republican Party, ousting Obama from the White House, and
the Democrats from the majority in Congress in 2012, would simply undo the
whole thing anyhow.
Dr. Dean is right. This is indeed a bad bill. But it's not just a bad bill.
It is a morally outrageous, politically disgusting and economically
dangerous bill. It moves the country in exactly the wrong direction--not
towards the socialism that the right has been decrying, but towards an
increasingly costly corporatist system that will be even harder to reform
down the road.
There is only one hope (admittedly a faint one), and that is that enough
liberal members of House and Senate will recognize that nothing is better
than something in this case, and that for the sake of their constituents
they will refuse to support this legislative monstrosity.
The Health Insurance Enrichment Act of 2009 must be killed in the
congressional womb before it can emerge to become the monster it has become.
The only positive thing I can see in this debacle is that perhaps if
President Obama is slapped down by his own most ardent backers on what he
has claimed is his number one legislative goal, he and his
too-clever-by-half advisers will realize that they need to do a U-turn and
rethink how they are trying to govern.
More likely, however, this defeat will be the beginning of the end of the
Obama administration, which has now been revealed as devoid of principle,
incapable of leadership, and in thrall to the most cynical and greedy
corporate interests.
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"Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike,
that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in
this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud
of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing
of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to
which we are committed today at home and around the world.
"
-John F. Kennedy, 1961