[Peace-discuss] Health Reform - Paul Street

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Health Reform: Theirs and Ours
	By Paul Street
	Wednesday, March 24, 2010

...Majority sentiment on the health care issue had long stood well to 
the left of business parties and the dominant political class and media, 
as polling data revealed.  Contrary to politicians’ and dominant 
(corporate) media pundits’ insistent claim that the public insurance 
option lacked popular support:

* 69 percent of Americans think it is the responsibility of the federal 
government to provide health coverage to all U.S. citizens (Gallup Poll, 
2006).

* 59 percent of Americans support a single-payer health insurance system 
(CBS/New York Times poll, January 2009).

* 59 percent of doctors back a single-payer system (Annals of Internal 
Medicine, April 2008).

* In a remarkable CBS-New York Times poll conducted in late September of 
2009, 65 percent of more than 1,000 Americans randomly surveyed by CBS 
and the Times responded affirmatively to the following question: “Would 
you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a 
government-administered health insurance plan – something like the 
Medicare coverage that people 65 and over get – that would compete with 
private health insurance plans?”

But so what? Who cares? Certainly not the editors of Business Week or 
the executives and owners of the leading insurance companies, for whom 
the “reform” bill is a boon. Citizen opinion and democratic theory – 
according to which the government and the citizenry are the same – are 
fine and dandy. Things are different in the real world of wealth, power, 
propaganda, and policy, where government is beholden to the Few, the 
“real players” are the ones with the deep pockets, and “politics is the 
shadow cast on society by big business,” as John Dewey noted more than a 
century ago...

Yet again we see that true progressive change can never come from within 
or through the Democratic Party. Nor can such change be achieved with or 
through such “progressive” and activist organizations as Move.On, which 
gathered more than $1 million to pressure House Democrats who had 
originally voted “no” on corporatist health reform to recant their 
previous rejection of Obama’s proudly "centrist" (by his own 
description) bill,  The corporate-managed fake democracy that cloaks the 
unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire in the U.S. 
is a richly bipartisan affair.  The Democrats’ health reform offers more 
evidence of this harsh reality.

Full article at
http://www.zcommunications.org/health-reform-theirs-and-ours-by-paul-street

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.