[Peace-discuss] Obama kills universal healthcare

[John W.]

I weary of Carl's constant carping against Obama in the Subject line, as if
Obama operated in a vacuum and bore sole responsibility for all of
American's many moral and policy failings.  Nevertheless this is a good
article by Norman Solomon.  Thanks for sharing, Carl.


On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 6:38 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:

[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.
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