Late last week, Firedoglake highlighted this stunning exchange between activist Mike Stark and retiring GOP Rep. John Shadegg over health care:
SHADEGG: Both the House and Senate bills contain mandates that compel, or would compel you and I as individual Americans to buy insurance from Americas private insurance industry. I think America's private insurance industry is the problem...
STARK: So are you for a public option?SHADDEG: Well, you could better defend a public option than you could defend compelling me to buy a product from the people that have created the problem. America's health insurance industry has wanted this bill and the individual mandate from the get go. That's their idea. Their idea is "look, our product is so lousy, that lots of people don't buy it. So we need the government to force people to buy our product. And stunningly, that's what the Congress appears to be going along with. Why would they do that?...The notion of forcing Americans to buy a product they don't want to buy from companies that aren't doing it right right now is goofy...Making the IRS the bill collector for Aetna and the rest of America's insurance companies...Blue Cross/Blue Shield and United...isn't the way to do it.
Let's first get the issue of Shadegg's integrity out of the way here -- he's obviously a hypocrite. This is a lawmaker who could have voted for the public option that he suggests has value, and could have voted for much stronger overall health care reform bills in the past.
However, hypocrisy by a politician is hardly interesting in an age when President Obama has broken so many explicit promises it's hard to even count them anymore. What is far more notable is the substantive argument Shadegg is voicing -- it's both accurate and politically telling.
Shadegg is absolutely correct that "America's private insurance industry is the problem." He is also correct that this legislation is exactly what that industry wants -- not, as the Orwellian White House spokesholes insist, some great victory over that industry. And Shadegg is right that compelling people to buy an expensive (and faulty) product from a private corporation without giving people at least the choice of a public product is unprecedented and grotesque.
If the health care bill is not improved, this is exactly the kind of argument the Republicans will make in the 2010 and 2012 election. And I say that not just because one lone GOP congressman is making the argument, but because you are starting to hear a similar case being made by top Republican Party officials.
Case in point is the interview I did last week on my AM760 radio show with Colorado Republican Party Chairman Dick Wadhams. You can listen to it here -- and specifically, listen to him rail on the insurance industry.
Again, it's obviously disingenuous coming from Republicans as the GOP has been shilling for the insurance industry for years. However, that doesn't mean it won't be powerful. It will be -- and it will be precisely because the Democrats -- in weakening the health legislation -- have allowed Republicans to potentially outflank them (at least image-wise) as the populist party of the little guy.
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Remember that these are the same Republicans who in 2003 voted to pass an unfunded mandate extending Medicare benefits to prescription drugs and for private health insurance. They're not exactly fiscal hawks as they make themselves out to be now that the Dems are in power.
Clearly, many are smart enough to realize that a public option would have made sense, but they still acted like they were against it.
It's all dirty politics, and the Dems who were too busy kissing up to Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe and this gang of Senators and that gang of Senators got shafted.
Add to that the GOP teapartiers (and lets not fool ourselves - the teaparty is a wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP) and the birthers (yet another division of GOP Inc), and the Dems were always on the defensive.
Sickening that the Dems are such patsies.
today proves that very point.
The fact that democrats totally screwed this entire thing up is only the fault of the democrats who allowed it to be watered down and took single payer off the table as well as reconciliation!
The democrats squandered their majority and to date have done nothing to help the people over the corporations! If that's what we wanted, we would have voted for republicans!
No one ever analyzed the situation and determined what was broken and needed to be fixed. Instead, they were driven by passion and political ideology. Neither one of which has much of a connection to reality.
Now, they can't deny that progressives and independents find their stance on health care to be entirely unacceptable.
Too bad our Congressional Progressives were too consumed with triangulating a vote from Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman to find a way to articulate an alternative to the "bi-partisan" sellout the White House and Max Baucus cobbled together.
The progressives were locked out. As Rahm said, "Don't worry about the Left. Where else are they gonna go?"
The took every kick and came back, like pathetic dogs. In the end, they always rolled over.
The mandate only applies to people in the individual market and those happen to be the people who most benefit from the subsidies and the exchange. I put myself through the Massachusetts Connector online to see what mandated insurance - a higher mandate with less subsidies than this plan - would cost me. I don't qualify for subsidies and have to buy on the individual market and I would still pay less then I paid for a policy through my employment agency last year.
You may want to consider the actuarial value of the plan you applied for. If you chose something with higher copays and deductibles, of course it cost you less.
It's ludicrous to think that killing the current House and Senate bills will take us back to a status-quo-ante of two years ago. No: the research has been done, and ideas have been hammered out, and there will some kind of alternative healthcare bill passed by mid-2010, all with a shiny new "bipartisan" glow on it.
Things will change for the worse and the better but with all due respect, choose a Side not an Abstraction.
The best possible outcome of all of this would be to scrap this mess and start all over with the process that Candidate Obama advocated. Otherwise, we will only regret it all later...
Let's not forget: It was Obama who promised to have negotiations broadcasted on C-SPAN, so the country could have the open, honest discussion that is so desperately needed. It was the Congress--the party elected to 'dredge the swamp' of corruption--that led closed-door negotiations and gave handouts wherever they could (not only Ben Nelson's 'Cornhusker Kickback', but also the union exemption for the 'Cadillac Tax' ).
Many Americans like myself wanted the 'hope and change' that we believed Obama could deliver -- all he has done was to make people have even less faith in the government and to further inflame tensions. This bill wasn't about health care -- it was about power.
What would a Republican suggest? How about:
* Being able to purchase insurance directly (like with auto insurance), rather than relying on your employer to arrange your insurance. (This would be done by giving individuals the same tax breaks companies get)
* Letting individuals in one state purchase cheaper (yet equally good) insurance offered for sale in another state. (This breaks the stranglehold many insurance companies have--I think there are more than 40 states with only 2 providers?)
* Subsidising insurance costs for those who genuinely need it.
* Banning the exclusion of pre-existing conditions and keeping insurance companies from dropping people who get sick (yes, Republicans are for this, too...).
First, I want to ask why? Why is healthcare a right? There is no factual follow-up to this arguement.
If healthcare is a right, what other comodity is a right? Food is a basic human need. Is food a human right? Should the government take over restaurants and grocery stores to ensure that everyone has enough food, and no citizen can eat steak if others must eat hamburger.
What about shelter? Shouldn't shelter be a basic human right? No one should live with better shelter than another. Shouldn't the government redistribute shelter equally so there isn't anyone who doesn't have this basic human right. The number of homeless could be used to justify the legislation, even if the numbers are made up like the number of uninsured.
There is nothing that insurance companies do that we can't live without!