[Peace-discuss] President preserves parasites

[C. G. Estabrook]

Published on Black Agenda Report (http://www.blackagendareport.com):

  The generous, expansive public option on the lips of Congressional 
progressives, which would be open to all and compete to lower insurance prices 
is largely imaginary, while the president's stingy, divisive and means-tested 
version is all too real.  But what about the third version of the public option? 
  What is the Congressional Progressive Caucus doing to promote it, and to allow 
states to pursue single payer on their own?

	Why the Public Option is Doomed To Fail, and What Can Be Done About It.
	by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Some highly profitable and job creating industries simply can't be reformed. 
Slavery and child labor cannot not be made humane and reasonable, not with kind 
and solicitous masters or school and limited hours for the kids.  Both these 
practices were eventually cast aside. Allowing soulless, greedy private 
insurance corporations to collect a toll for standing between patients and 
doctors may be next.

The president's health care plan is designed to preserve the parasitic private 
insurance industry a little while longer. In this context, the public option is 
a cruel and cynical hoax, an excuse not to abolish the role of private insurance 
death panels and toll collectors in the nation's health care system.

Nobody can read the president's mind, but he did promise to construct health 
care legislation in an open and transparent manner, even "on C-SPAN."  Instead, 
Obama handed off the drafting of health care legislation to five House and three 
Senate committees.  The most generous view is that he did this to give 
legislators a stake in the bills, and because there is this thing called the 
separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Another view is that the embedded influence of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and 
Big Medicine were easier to conceal when spread out over several committees, 
where the lobbyists are themselves former congressmen, senators and their top 
staffers, and many current members and staff look forward to the same career 
paths.  These are the men and women who wrote what is and will be the 
president's health insurance reform legislation.  The result has been a half 
dozen versions of a thousand-plus page bill, chock full, as Rolling Stone's Matt 
Taibi points out, of deliberately obscure references to other legislation.

Nobody can authoritatively claim to have read, much less understand all of it. 
And that's just the way insurance companies and the president like it.  HR 676, 
the Enhanced Medicare For All Act, which does provide universal coverage at 
reasonable cost, comes in at under thirty pages.

To begin with, there are no less than three versions of the public option.  The 
first is an imaginary public option first conceived by Political Science grad 
student Jacob Hatcher in 2001.  It was to postpone the death of private 
insurance companies by forcing them to compete with a publicly funded insurer 
open to all comers which would drive their prices downward.  This imaginary 
public option has never been written into law, and is not under consideration in 
Congress this year.  It lives pretty much in the minds of the public and the 
lips of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, MoveOn.Org and many others.  It's 
in the mouth of Howard Dean, who says it will be just like Medicare, only 
available to everybody.  To distinguish it from the President Obama's version, 
it is usually called "the robust public option."

The second version of the public option is not imaginary, it is all too real. 
President Obama explicitly outlined its contours in his health care address 
earlier this month.  Unlike the expansive and inclusive imaginary public option 
championed by MoveOn.Org, the president's public option will be stingy, 
means-tested, socially divisive, actuarially unsound and doomed to failure, 
unless its objective is simply to discredit the word "public" in the term 
"public option."  The president has said it will be limited to 5% of the 
nation's population, those Americans too poor to afford the cheapest insurance 
available on his regulated "insurance exchanges" which won't be fully 
implemented anyway till 2013.

Hence those making more than a very small wage will be ineligible for the 
president's version of the public option, and those who currently get insurance 
from their employers, no matter how skimpy the coverage, how high the co-pays 
and deductibles, will also not qualify.  Those who receive relatively good (or 
maybe not so good) coverage from their employers will pay a special tax to 
support both the public option and the subsidies the government will pay to 
enable others not quite poor enough for the public option to fulfill their legal 
obligation to buy shoddy insurance from private vendors.

In a social culture where Americans have been taught to despise poverty and the 
poor, even when they themselves are poor and near poverty, this will be bitterly 
and inherently divisive.  It will provide economic incentive for the working 
poor to look down on and resent whatever benefits those even poorer than 
themselves receive.  It turns medical coverage for the poor into stigmatized 
welfare subsidized by the near-poor, and all to the continuing profit of 
insurance companies.

And since the pool accessed by the public option will be relatively older, 
poorer and thus more chronically ill, it will not be economically viable in and 
of itself, must less of the size needed to compete with private insurers and 
drive their prices downward.

The only good thing one can say about the president's version of the public 
option is that even he is not firmly attached to it, and does not regard it as 
essential to his package. That's actually good news.

Beyond the imaginary "robust public option" of MoveOn.Org, and the divisive, 
destructive public option of the president, there is a third public option, a 
very real one.  It's HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All bill, sponsored by 
John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich.  Unlike the mostly imaginary "robust public 
option" of MoveOn.Org, it actually exists and ordinary people can read and 
understand it.  Unlike the president's public option, which does not take effect 
till 2013, a fact still ignored by most of the mainstream media, HR 676 can be 
put into effect almost immediately.  The first Medicare back in 1965-66 took 
only eleven months to send out the first cards and pay the first medical bills.
The White House of course, is not listening to the public outcry for Medicare 
For All.  For example, a group of Oregon physicians calling themselves the Mad 
As Hell Doctors put up a web site that included an email-the-president page. 
After the White House received only about 5,000 emails in the first few days, it 
elected to block emails [1] coming from the Mad As Hell Doctors as spam.  Never 
mind that tracking polls as late as this June indicate majority support among 
the public for the simple extension of Medicare benefits to everybody.

And although the progressive caucus in Congress continues to wistfully describe 
its imaginary version of the public option as a line in the sand, it is neither 
lining up votes for a promised HR 676 floor vote, nor are they demanding that 
caucus members support amendments to let states to pursue their own versions of 
single payer in the near future.  Congress is being set up to accept anything 
with the name "public option" and be done with it, even the president's cynical 
and divisive proposal.  The die is cast.  The Obama proposals, written by the 
health insurance lobbyists may pass, but they're not worthwhile.  The 
president's version of the public option, if it stays in the bill is doomed to 
fail, and the MoveOn version never existed.  The only possibility for the real 
public option, Medicare For All, this year is on the state level.  That door 
will be opened or closed by the Congress this year.

  The Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus can 
partially redeem their sorry capitulation to the president and Big Insurance by 
insisting that states be allowed to go their own way on single payer, the only 
real public option.

health care. public option HR 676 single payer
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