[Peace-discuss] Obama kills universal healthcare

[C. G. Estabrook]

[We should demand a single-payer system just as we should demand US troops out 
of the Mideast.  Don't be put off by being told its "politically impossible." 
The American mercenaries in both medicine and war are killers.  --CGE]

	August 5, 2009
	A Glide Path to Disaster
	The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan
	By NORMAN SOLOMON

Like soap in a rainstorm, “healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 forego 90 percent of the 
bureaucratic savings achievable under single payer. And a kinder, gentler public 
option would quickly fail in a healthcare marketplace where competition involves 
a race to the bottom, not the top, where insurers compete by not paying for care.”

While the healthcare 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 healthcare 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.

Norman Solomon is the author of Made Love, Got War.