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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=lduncan@igc.org href="mailto:lduncan@igc.org">Larry Duncan</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=lduncan@igc.org
href="mailto:lduncan@igc.org">lduncan@igc.org</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Monday, March 22, 2010 10:09 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT size=+1>Published on Monday, March 22, 2010 by
TruthDig.com</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1>The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed<BR>by Chris
Hedges<BR><BR>Rep. Dennis Kucinich's decision to vote "yes" in Sunday's House
action on the health care bill, although he had sworn to oppose the legislation
unless there was a public option, is a perfect example of why I would never be a
politician. I respect Kucinich. As politicians go, he is about as good as they
get, but he is still a politician. He has to run for office. He has to raise
money. He has to placate the Democratic machine or risk retaliation and defeat.
And so he signed on to a bill that will do nothing to ameliorate the suffering
of many Americans, will force tens of millions of people to fork over a lot of
money for a defective product and, in the end, will add to the ranks of our
uninsured.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1><BR>The claims made by the proponents of the bill are the
usual deceptive corporate advertising. The bill will not expand coverage to 30
million uninsured, especially since government subsidies will not take effect
until 2014. Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and
co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes,
will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies
can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local
markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade
will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and
ultimately unsustainable system.<BR><BR>The mendacity of the Democratic
leadership in the face of this reality is staggering. Howard Dean, who is a
doctor, said recently: "This is a vote about one thing: Are you for the
insurance companies or are you for the American people?" Here is a man who once
championed the public option and now has sold his soul. What is the point in
supporting him or any of the other Democrats? How much more craven can they
get?<BR><BR>Take a look at the health care debacle in Massachusetts, a model for
what we will get nationwide. One in six people there who have the mandated
insurance say they cannot afford care, and tens of thousands of people have been
evicted from the state program because of budget cuts. The 45,000 Americans who
die each year because they cannot afford coverage will not be saved under the
federal legislation. Half of all personal bankruptcies will still be caused by
an inability to pay astronomical medical bills. The only good news is that
health care stocks and bonuses for the heads of these corporations are shooting
upward. Chalk this up as yet another victory for our feudal overlords and a
defeat for the serfs.</FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1>The U.S. spends twice as much as other industrialized nations
on health care -- $7,129 per capita -- although 45.7 million Americans remain
without health coverage and millions more are inadequately covered, meaning that
if they get seriously ill they are not covered. Fourteen thousand Americans a
day are now losing their health coverage. A report in the journal Health Affairs
estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent
by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Private insurance bureaucracy
and paperwork consume 31 cents of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment
through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year,
enough, Physicians for a National Health Plan points out, to provide
comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans. Check out
www.healthcare-now.org. It has some of the best analysis.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1><BR>This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the
common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense.
It is the health care industry's version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes
hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies.
The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are
all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The
bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic
Party. The party is owned and managed by corporations. The five largest private
health insurers and their trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans, spent
more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the
world's biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter
of 2008 and the first three months of 2009. The Washington Post reported that up
to 30 members of Congress from both parties who hold key committee memberships
have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and
$27 million.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1><BR>President Barack Obama's director of health care policy,
who will not discuss single payer as an option, has served on the boards of
several health care corporations. And as salaries for most Americans have
stagnated or declined during the past decade, health insurance profits have
risen by 480 percent.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1><BR>Obama and the congressional leadership have consciously
shut out advocates of single payer from the debate. The press, including papers
such as The New York Times, treats single payer as a fringe movement. The
television networks rarely mention it. And yet between 45 and 60 percent of
doctors favor single payer. Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people,
including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer
not-for-profit health care for all Americans. The ability of the corporations to
discredit and silence voices that represent at least half of the population is
another sad testament to the power of our corporate state to frame all
discussions.<BR><BR>Change will come only by building movements that stand in
fierce and uncompromising opposition to the Democrats and the Republicans. If
they can herd Kucinich and John Conyers, the sponsors of House Resolution 676, a
bill that would create a publicly funded National Health Program by eliminating
private health insurers, onto the House floor to vote for this corporate theft,
what is the point in pretending there is any room left for us in the party? And
why should we waste our time with gutless liberal groups such as Moveon.org,
which felt the need to collect more than $1 million to pressure House Democrats
who had voted "no" on the original bill to recant? What was this purportedly
anti-war group doing anyway serving as an obsequious recruiting arm of the Obama
election campaign? The longer we tie ourselves to the Democrats and these
bankrupt liberal organizations the more ridiculous and impotent we
appear.<BR><BR>"I'm ready to listen to the White House, if the White House is
ready to listen to the concerns about putting a public option in this bill," the
old Kucinich said on the "Democracy Now!" radio and television program before he
flipped. "I mean, they can do that. You know, they're still cutting last-minute
deals. Put the public option back in. Make it a robust public option. Give the
people a chance to really negotiate rates with the insurance companies ... from
the standpoint of having a public option. But don't just tell the people that
you're going to call this health care reform, when you're giving insurance
companies an even more powerful monopoly status in our economy."<BR><BR>© 2010
TruthDig.com</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=+1><BR>Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com .
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a
foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books,
including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning , What Every Person Should Know
About War , and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of
Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle .<BR> </FONT></DIV><br />--
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