Fw: [Peace-discuss] President preserves parasites

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "peace-discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2009 3:00 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] President preserves parasites


> 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
> Source URL: 
> http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/why-public-option-doomed-fail-and-what-can-be-done-about-it
>
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