[progchat_action] The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind
Steven Robinson
subsidizing of private profit is becoming something of a habit."
The Senate Health Care Bill: Leave No Special Interest Behind
By Arianna Huffington The Huffington Post December 21, 2009
With Monday morning's 1 a.m. 60-40 vote, the Senate's health care
bill took another step towards passage, prompting a fresh round of
public celebrations.
"I think it's very exciting," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told
HuffPost.
"It's a big day."
Even many of those with serious reservations about the bill were
slipping on their party hats. "Make no mistake about it," said SEIU
president Andy Stern, "for working Americans, this vote signals
progress."
And Paul Krugman, while calling the legislation "a seriously flawed
bill we'll spend years if not decades fixing," applauded it as "an
awesome achievement."
This typifies the current thinking of the "Don't let the perfect
be the enemy of the good" crowd. Unfortunately, there are three
faulty premises at work in this line of reasoning. First, that those
who oppose the bill do so because it's not perfect (as opposed to
because it's a hot health care mess). Second, that the bill is,
well, good (as opposed to a total victory for Pharma and the insurance
industry -- witness the spectacular spike in health care stocks
following Monday's vote).
Third is the premise that this is as good a bill as we can get right
now, and we can always go back and improve it later.
It doesn't work that way. We heard the same kinds of sentiments
about No Child Left Behind when it passed in 2001. Backers on both
sides of the aisle had problems with it, but both sides celebrated
it as a major step forward -- and promised to make it better in the
future.
"The agreement we reached reflects the best thinking of both sides,"
said Sen.
Joe Lieberman.
"This was a reform bill. We can't have reform without resources,
and that will be the next step," said Sen. Tom Daschle.
"This is a good bill... And there are going to be many additional
steps that will be necessary along the way, but all of us are
committed to following in those steps," said Sen. Ted Kennedy, the
primary Democratic co-sponsor of the bill.
But despite the widespread commitment to taking the "many additional
steps"
needed, the steps were never taken, the resources were never
allocated, the bill was never improved, and, indeed, is now generally
regarded as a disaster (or, as Bill Clinton put it last year, "a
train wreck").
In an ominous sign of things to come, Vicki Reggie Kennedy, Sen.
Kennedy's widow, made many of the same arguments that were used in
support of No Child Left Behind in her Washington Post op-ed promoting
passage of the current health care bill.
It's a moving piece of writing -- and nobody doubts her late husband's
heartfelt dedication to health care reform. But nobody doubted his
dedication to education reform, either.
If the miserable Senate health care bill becomes the law of the
land, it's only going to encourage the preservation of a hideously
broken system. Just how broken the system is is summed up in the
fate of Byron Dorgan's drug re-importation amendment.
This is an idea that Obama co-sponsored when he was in the Senate
and unequivocally championed on the campaign trail: "We'll allow
the safe re-importation of low-cost drugs from countries like
Canada."
But when Dorgan introduced an amendment that would do just that,
the White House, sticking to the deal it made with the pharmaceutical
industry, lobbied against it -- and the commissioner of the supposedly
non-political FDA just happened to release a letter citing "significant
safety concerns" about all those dangerous drugs from Canada. Big
Pharma's many congressional lackeys trumpeted the letter and the
amendment was killed.
But that didn't stop David Axelrod from insisting in an interview
with John King this weekend that "the president supports safe
re-importation of drugs into this country. There's no reason why
Americans should pay a premium for the pharmaceuticals that people
in other countries pay less for."
No reason other than our broken system surrendering to the special
interests.
From start to finish, the insurance and drug industries -- and their
army of lobbyists -- had control over the process that resulted in
a bill that is reform in name only. The postmortems of how they
pulled it off have already begun. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune
published an exhaustive front-page analysis by Northwestern
University's Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive
Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: "a revolving door
between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with
a stake in health care legislation."
The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 Congressional
staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues
on the bill. The companies they were working for -- some 338 of
them -- spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well
spent -- delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy
product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law
the public subsidy of private profit.
As we approach the end of Obama's first year in office, this public
subsidizing of private profit is becoming something of a habit. It
is, after all, exactly what the White House did with the banks.
Just as he did with insurance companies, Obama talked tough to the
bankers in public but, when push came to shove, he ended up shoving
public money onto their privately-held balance sheets.
This is not just bad policy, it's bad politics.
Sharp-eyed opponents are already seizing on the opportunity to
rebrand Obama and the Democrats as the party beholden to special
interests.
Sunday night, just before the post-midnight vote was taken, John
McCain took to the Senate floor and, hearkening back to his days
as a crusader for campaign finance reform, lambasted Obama and the
Democrats' "negotiations with the special interests," adding: "We
should have set up a tent out in front and put Persian rugs in front
of it. That's the way that this has been conducted.
So the special interests were taken care of, then we had to take
care of special senators."
This kind of populist rhetoric resonates with voters across the
board, including independents. If Democrats cede this turf by
celebrating a bill that is a victory for special interests and
special senators, look for a lot more of this kind of rhetoric in
the run-up to 2010.
President Bush brought us preemptive war. President Obama's specialty
seems to be preemptive compromise. He gave the farm away to Pharma,
and then had to keep on giving when Lieberman, Nelson, and the other
industry-backed Senators came calling.
There are many reasons for hoping the current Senate bill doesn't
become law.
But the biggest reason of all is the desperate need for a DC pattern
interrupt. The desperate need to draw a line in the sand against
the continued domination of our democracy -- and the continued
undermining of the public interest -- by special interests.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-senate-health-care-bi_b_
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