Like soap in a rainstorm, "health care reform" is wasting away.
As this week began, a leading follower of conventional wisdom, journalist Cokie Roberts, told NPR listeners: "This is evolving legislation. And the administration is now talking about a glide path towards universal coverage, rather than immediate universal coverage."
Notions of universal health care are fading in the power centers of politics -- while more and more attention focuses on the care and feeding of the insurance industry.
Consider a new message that just went out from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, which inherited the Obama campaign's 13-million email list. The short letter includes the same phrase seven times: "health insurance reform."
The difference between the promise of health care for everyone and the new mantra of health insurance reform is akin to what Mark Twain once described as "the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
The "health insurance reform" now being spun as "a glide path towards universal coverage" is apt to reinforce the huge power of the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries in the United States.
President Obama says that he wants "things like preventing insurers from dropping people because of pre-existing conditions." Those are not fighting words for the present-day insurance industry. Behind the scenes, massive deals are taking shape.
The president of America's Health Insurance Plans, Karen Ignagni, "noted that the industry had endorsed many of the administration's proposed changes, including ending the practice of refusing coverage for pre-existing conditions," the New York Times reported on August 3. A couple of days later, in a profile of Ignagni, the newspaper added: "Rather than being cut out of the conversation, her strategy has been to push for changes her members can live with, in hopes of fending off too much government interference."
This year, no more significant news article on health care politics has appeared than the August 4 story in the Los Angeles Times under the headline "Obama Gives Powerful Drug Lobby a Seat at Healthcare Table."
It's enough to make you weep, or gnash your teeth with anger, or worry about the consequences for your loved ones -- or the loved ones of people you'll never meet.
During his campaign last year, Obama criticized big pharmaceutical firms for blocking efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. But since the election, the LA Times reports, "the industry's chief lobbyist" -- former Congressman Billy Tauzin -- "has morphed into the president's partner. He has been invited to the White House half a dozen times in recent months. There, he says, he eventually secured an agreement that the administration wouldn't try to overturn the very Medicare drug policy that Obama had criticized on the campaign trail."
The story gets worse. For instance, "Tauzin said he had not only received the White House pledge to forswear Medicare drug price bargaining, but also a separate promise not to pursue another proposal Obama supported during the campaign: importing cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe."
Meanwhile, with a "mandate" herd of cash cows on the national horizon, the health insurance industry is licking its chops. The corporate glee is ill-disguised as the Obama administration pushes for legal mandates to require that Americans buy health insurance -- no matter how dismal the quality of the coverage or how unaffordable the "affordable" premiums turn out to be for real people in the real world.
The mandates would involve "diverting additional billions to private insurers by requiring middle class Americans to purchase defective policies from these firms -- policies with so many gaps and loopholes that they currently leave millions of our insured patients vulnerable to financial ruin," says a letter signed by more than 3,500 doctors and released last week by Physicians for a National Health Program.
Days ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed an emerging "consensus" and "common ground" on Capitol Hill. In passing, the article mentioned that lawmakers "agree on the need to provide federal subsidies to help make insurance affordable for people with modest incomes. For poor people, Medicaid eligibility would be expanded."
It's a scenario that amounts to expansion of health care ghettos nationwide. Medicaid's reimbursement rates for medical providers are so paltry that "Medicaid patient" is often a synonym for someone who can't find a doctor willing to help.
But what about "the public plan" -- enabling the government to offer health insurance that would be an alternative to the wares of for-profit insurance firms? "Under pressure from industry and their lobbyists, the public plan has been watered down to a small and ineffectual option at best, if it ever survives to being enacted," says John Geyman, professor emeritus of family medicine at the University of Washington.
A public plan option "would do little to mitigate the damage of a reform that perpetuates private insurers' dominant role," according to the letter from 3,500 physicians. "Even a robust public option would forgo 90 percent of the bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. And a kinder, gentler public option would quickly fail in a health care marketplace where competition involves a race to the bottom, not the top, where insurers compete by NOT paying for care."
While the health care policy outcomes are looking grim, the supposed political imperatives are fueling the desires of Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill to produce a victory that President Obama can tout as health care reform. Consider this quote from "a prominent Democrat" in the August 10 edition of Time magazine: "Something called health-reform legislation will pass. The political consequences of not passing anything would be too great."
The likely result is a glide path to disaster.
But above all let's be calm, collected, and think rationally. Let's wait till the final bill is ready.
If the bill fails to address the major issues and help people, then it should be vetoed.
NO mandate. That is a giveaway to the insurance industry that makes profit from people's pain and suffering.
The Mass. plan is awful and doesn't help. check pnhp.org.
Single payer like those in modern countries is the only effective option for people. In Canada, it was implemented in one state first and then adopted by the federal government after it's success. Maybe, as someone else posted, we need to make sure that the single payer option is available on a state by state basis. Go Kucinich. And let the rest of the country suffer. Not ideal. But if the option is reform in name only, then maybe that's the best we can get.
If we wait long enough without passing anything, we will see premiums go through the roof. Even rich people will object. And in this country, only when the rich are affected will there be any real reform. Once again, not ideal. But maybe we need the crisis to get to the point where people are dying in the streets and every other person is going bankrupt. Maybe then there can be real change. Not ideal, but in this country you literally have to scrape the barrel of low expectations
Will it work on the Democrats ?
It will, be the people in the streets who have to fight for their rights, because most of their politicians are owned by Corporate America.
If Corporate America can't buy them then Corporate America will spend millions to REMOVE them from office and the politicians are keenly aware of this fact.
Now the masses are beginning to pay attention and demanding that their politicians work in their collective interests , and this is now proving very difficult for the politicians for they cannot serve two masters
The Corporations and the politicians usually controlled the people with infinite ease, is this about to change?
Will the people control their politicians ?
The Corporations always won because the control the politicians on both sides of the isle
And the sheeple had the privilege to vote
Stay tuned as America Sheeple Awakens
CFJ
People don't buy the lies propaganda and fear tactics as they have.
I think the majority feel health care is a basic right for all Americans.
I hope they are willing to fight for this right, we have lost so many.
I am ready to fight to regain our country.
From the corporate interest that have bought our representation.
Our lawmakers should live as we do on the edge.
More and more are falling off, as they (our reps) count their millions.
If we do not the system will stay as is. We pay tax. Our lawmakers give the money away. The ones that receive the money from our lawmakers pay them to keep the circle jerk in motion... We are slaves and just don't have the sense to see it. Our country could be great for all Americans. If we could get rid of the right wing segment that is still buying the lies or benefiting from the circle...
Cherokee Fred Jesus
I am looking forward to the CBO's costing of the insurance cos. new health care reform package. Naturally we can't pass it if they can't show where they will get the money from without raising taxes (premiums).
http://www.progressive.org/mpwool072209.html
But I do have a concern about Single Payer I'd not considered before. If we go to Single Payer, which I advocate, the for-profit corporations now making money off of us dying will go out of busines, another thing I advocate.
But....
How many of us working people who are forced to have a 401K instead of a pension plan have our money invested in these companies and may not even know it? I sure didnt' like Enron and its manipulations of the energy field, but when the company went bankrupt it was the average people who lost everything they had. How do we keep this from happening when we implement Single Payer?
Maybe we should do forced takeovers of these companies, thus replacing the average's person's stock in the company with U.S. Savings Bonds. This way the government doesn't have to shell out the funds all at once, only as people turn in the bonds.
What do you all think?
http://www.progressive.org/mpwool072209.html
Your column should be mandatory reading for every American.
Words cannot my dismay, anger, outrage, and total disillusionment with this country, and its President.