Wonderful. The 13 Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee get one faintly rational Republican to join them in a meaningless stab at health care reform and it throws the media into a titillated frenzy about what it all means. It means very little.
The main thrust of the proposal is to forcibly submit even more customers to the tender mercies of the insurance industry while doing nothing significant to cut costs. Insurers will now pretend that the burdens on them are onerous and will demand concessions to make this an even bigger boondoggle for the medical profiteers than George W. Bush's prescription drug coverage initiative.
The insurers' leverage with the few moderate Republicans and with conservative Democrats will prevent the merging of the Baucus bill with the more serious attempts at reform in other Senate and House proposals. While President Barack Obama was celebrating Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, for being "extraordinarily diligent" in working with the Democrats, she was already proclaiming the exit strategy she will use if the bill becomes worthwhile. "My vote today is my vote today," Snowe said Tuesday. "It doesn't forecast what my vote will be tomorrow."
The health care debate has become a convenient distraction, for both political parties, from the far more pressing issues surrounding the banking meltdown. As important as health insurance is as an issue, representing 16 percent of the economy, and with so many uninsured, no sane person can deny that the current system is a sorry mess that needs to be changed. But why now and not after a growth economy has returned?
The answer is that politicians from both parties just love the health care game because it allows them to assume reflexive but irrelevant postures in that tired old debate about "socialized medicine" versus "free-market choice" although it has nothing to do with either ideological fantasy. Consumers do not have meaningful choices as it is--many have no coverage and others are frozen into some company-sponsored plan--and it is insulting to the social democracies of Western Europe to suggest that anything significant is even under consideration in the U.S. Congress.
The health care issue should never even have been brought up at a time when the economy is reeling and we are running such immense deficits to shore up the banks. Instead of fixing the economy by saving Americans' homes and jobs, we are preoccupied with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric on a hot issue that should have been addressed in calmer times. It came up now because, despite all the hoary partisan posturing, it is a safer subject than the more pressing issue of what to do with Citigroup, AIG and General Motors, which the taxpayers happen to own but do not control. While Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner plots in secret with the top bankers who got us into this mess, we are focused on the perennial circus of so-called health care reform.
There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role, and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely secretive government program to bail out Wall Street. Why the agitation over the government spending $83 billion a year on health care when at least 20 times that amount has been thrown at the creators of the ongoing financial crisis without any serious public accountability? On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that employees of the financial industry that we taxpayers saved are slated to be paid a record $140 billion this year.
If you want to know who actually runs this country, just look at the phone logs, released by court order last week, revealing Geithner's nearly constant calls to solicit the advice of the fat cats who caused the banking implosion. It's the same as when he was chair of the Federal Reserve in New York, before Obama appointed him to his current job. Only back then, as he blithely ignored the impending financial meltdown, it was easier to have lunch with the bankers as well as to chat by phone.
In an earlier Freedom of Information exposé, The New York Times reported in April: "An examination of Mr. Geithner's five years as president of the New York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street's giant financial institutions. His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry's interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records."
Nothing has changed since then. Meanwhile, we all get in a tizzy about fake efforts at health reform as immense decisions are being made to ensure the health of financial institutions that should have been left to die.
William K. Black: How the Servant Became a Predator: Finance's Five Fatal Flaws
Five fatal flaws in the financial sector's current structure have created a monster that drains the real economy, promotes fraud and corruption, threatens democracy, and causes recurrent, intensifying crises.
Here's a clue: there's $1,000 trillion of them worldwide. It will be tough to bail all those out, but I'm willing to let our government have a go at it, believe me.
Capitalizing profits and socializing losses wasn't done by main street, it was done by wall street, Rip Van Winkle.
As a determined no-show on fair trade, parceling off our mfg/tech base to the lowest bidding offshore sweatshops is Obama's way "to avoid a trade war" (that we're already losing).
Well, with more jobs here "still years away", he's managing expectations - not the economy.
So for the 52.9% who voted Democratic in 2008, you don't get perks. Hmmmm...taxes raised over here to reduce health care costs over there. A "for the greater good," altruistic, shell game health plan that apparently the AFL-CIO, for one, wants no part of, (along with the 47.1% who did not vote for the Democrats).
By the way, the shell game, also known as Thimblerig, or Three Shells and a Pea (according to Wikipedia's description), is portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud. In confidence trick slang, this famous swindle is referred to as a short-con because it is quick and easy to pull off.
Yup. I just love the smell of big government in the morning.
Even Ted Kennedy never made his case strongly enough - or at least the medie didn't cover it.
But it bodes ill that this means that more economic collapse is required before we get rid of the insurance companies. That will mean years - and years more for economic recovery.
All it mean is that private interests are still too strong and Snowe knows that. So probably does Obama.
I agree with you that the economic situation is also critical, and is being grotesquely mishandled due to corporate control.
These are parts of the same problem. The same corporate corruption that is preventing single-payer and fighting the public option in the one instance is preventing reform in the finance sector in the other instance. But we have to get at least a very strong and broadly used public option before the economy will be fully repaired.
We need to be fixing BOTH at the same time, immediately. And the only way to fix either is to break the corporate stranglehold on the economy, which will pave the way for fixing both. Whether it's even possible to do this is another question, but we have to try.
I'm hoping that perhaps, perhaps Obama will be another FDR in the sense that he'll learn that vested economic interests don't negotiate in good faith and won't give up power easily, and that he'll be radicalized by this knowledge, fire the compromised Geithner et alia, and take on the corporate hierarchy. (By the way, did you know that FDR faced a _coup_ for his relatively moderate reforms?!?! The military guy chosen by the corporations turned the plotters in, and FDR didn't prosecute them in return for their grudging cooperation.)
You rightly compare it to Bush's Pharma deal, in which Bush gave up the opportunity to lower drug prices by as much as 70% through negotiation.
Here's the thing: Obama did the same deal with big Pharma to get them on-side. As for praising Snowe? It's a crime. And because Obama has sacrificed principles for the hollow victory of a Bill -- any Bill -- and the mediaereports on the food fight and not the meal, no one really understands how much of a rip off this bill is.
Look, bi-partisanship is not an end , health is-- with the majorities we have, we should be able to deliver a good bill that helps people, not corporations.
And yes, this probably is a three card monty scam to keep our eyes off something far more pernicsious -- the corporatization of American governance.
Say goodbye to Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison. That's so old school.
Exactly - and for some ungodly reason Obama brought this distraction to the forefront to cover up the fact that he, Geithner and Summers are doing nothing for the people about the Wall St. mess and giving them money rather than busting them up. More and more I'm concluding they own him like they own all of congressmen and women. Until we get the lobbyists and corporate money away from our legislators, we will never see any meaningful legislation of any kind.