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SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: President Barack Obama is planning to sign the main healthcare overhaul bill this morning at a White House ceremony. The legislation is seen as the President’s signature domestic priority and has been described as the broadest piece of social policy legislation since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Corporate health “reform” has gotten the congressional votes it needed and the public relations spin is on. Now that the “deeply conservative” Barack Obama[1] and his fellow corporate Democrats have pushed their big business-friendly measure – devoid of any public insurance option to counter the power of the insurance oligopoly– through the House and Senate, the reigning bipartisan U.S. political-media culture is pushing two childish narratives: the “liberal” Democratic one of an “historic" people’s victory and the “conservative” Republican one of a dangerous and “socialist” “government takeover.”
REVISITING THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
Three analysts lay bare the multiple layers of deceit involved in this huge con on the American people
EXHIBIT 1: Michael Moore: Healthcare Bill “A Victory for Capitalism”
(Prepared by Amy Goodman's DEMOCRACY NOW!)
President Barack Obama is signing the main healthcare overhaul bill this morning at a White House ceremony. We speak with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. "The healthcare bill that was passed ultimately will be seen as a victory for capitalism," Moore says. "It protected the capitalist model of providing healthcare for people—in other words, we are not to help unless there is money to be made from it." [includes rush transcript]
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: President Barack Obama is planning to sign the main healthcare overhaul bill this morning at a White House ceremony. The legislation is seen as the President’s signature domestic priority and has been described as the broadest piece of social policy legislation since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans are planning to make a last push this week to derail a package of amendments to the healthcare legislation passed by the House. In addition, eleven state attorneys general—all Republican—are also planning lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the bill for mandating people to buy health insurance.
The legislation has also been criticized by advocates for a single-payer system and abortion rights. In order to secure support from anti-choice Democrats, including Bart Stupak of Michigan, President Obama issued an executive order affirming the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funds from being spent on abortion.
On Monday, Amy Goodman and I interviewed someone who has taken on the healthcare system in a big way.
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PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We got an issue in America: too many good docs are getting out of business; too many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their—their love with women all across this country.
NARRATOR: When Michael Moore decided to make a movie on the healthcare industry, top-level executives were on the defensive. What were they hiding?
SECURITY: That’s not on, right?
MICHAEL MOORE: No.
SECURITY: OK.
LEE EINER: The intent is to maximize profits.
MICHAEL MOORE: You denied more people healthcare, you got a bonus? UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: When you don’t spend money on somebody, it’s a savings to the company.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: I want America to have the finest healthcare in the world.
MICHAEL MOORE: Four healthcare lobbyists for every member of Congress. Here’s what it costs to buy these men and this woman, this guy, and this guy. And the United States slipped to thirty-seven in healthcare around the world—just slightly ahead of Slovenia.
LINDA PEENO: I denied a man a necessary operation and thus caused his death. This secured my reputation, and it ensured my continued advancement in the healthcare field.
NARRATOR: In the world’s richest country…
MARY MORNIN: I work three jobs.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: You work three jobs?
MARY MORNIN: Yes.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic.
NARRATOR: Laughter isn’t the best medicine.
LAURA BURNHAM: I get a bill from my insurance company telling me that the ambulance ride wasn’t pre-approved. I don’t know when I was supposed to pre-approve it. After I gained consciousness in the car? Before I got in the ambulance?
NARRATOR: It’s the only medicine.
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AMY GOODMAN: That’s Sicko. And today we’re joined by the director of Sicko, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. His latest film is called Capitalism: A Love Story, and he’s made many others. We spoke to him late yesterday and began by asking Michael for his reaction to the House vote on healthcare reform.
• MICHAEL MOORE: I’ve been pretty vocal about this. This bill was never about universal healthcare. It, you know, did a couple of good things that could have been done anytime, I guess, like ending the pre-existing condition rule for children. It doesn’t end it for adults for four years, so you can rack up another, you know, probably 20,000 to 40,000 deaths in the meantime from people who otherwise would have received help had we truly gotten rid of the pre-existing condition thing for all citizens. But six months after the bill is signed by Obama, kids will be able to get coverage from a private, profit-making insurance company.
I mean, I don’t mean to sound cynical, because I understand the importance of this vote. Certainly, had the vote gone down to defeat and the Republicans had won, I would say that it would probably have been near impossible for President Obama to get anything through for the rest of this Congress. So that would not have been a good idea for that kind of paralysis to set in.
The larger picture here is that the private insurance companies are still the ones in charge. They’re still going to call the shots. And if anything, they’ve just been given another big handout by the government by guaranteeing customers. I mean, this is really kind of crazy when you think about it. Imagine Congress passing a law that required every person to buy—I mean, name any product—or watch my next movie. There’s a law that says now that you have to buy a DVD of every Michael Moore film. Woohoo! It’s like, hey, not a bad idea! I mean, I don’t know why—that’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why they’re so upset this week, because this bill is going to line their pockets to an even greater extent.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, Michael, on that issue of the mandatory—the mandatory provision, individual mandate, you’re forced to buy this product that many view as defective, that has been shown to be defective for many years. But also, on the issue of abortion, you’re forced to buy a product where it doesn’t cover a legal medical procedure. I mean, that’s a key issue here.
MICHAEL MOORE: Right, and not only that—I mean, I understand why President Obama had to issue his declaration, to get the right-to-life Democrats, led by my own personal congressman here in Michigan, Bart Stupak, why he had to get them on board, but, boy, that’s a sorry sight to see a president, such as Obama, from the Democratic Party, endorsing the Hyde Amendment, which, trust me, history will view as one of a number of discriminatory practices against women in our society.
So they—I mean, this is, of course, another whole issue, that, you know, we’re always so afraid, because we’re just—we always feel like we’re hanging on by a thread. You know, it’s a five-to-four Supreme Court decision right now. One more vote, and that could mean the end of legal abortion in this country. So I think that liberals, people on the left, sometimes are maybe a little bit too afraid of going too far, but frankly, if not us, who? If we don’t stand up against this, if we don’t say this is wrong, if we don’t speak out against it, you know, what’s—then who’s going to do it?
But in the long run, at least 15 million Americans are still not going to have health insurance. And as you said, those who have it are going to be forced to buy a defective product. And trust me on this one thing: the insurance companies, they’re not going to go quietly into the night on this, even though they lost. They’re going to find ways to trick up the system to get around it, to raise premiums.
It’s not going to be as easy as it sounds. “Oh, you’ve got a pre-existing condition. No problem.” Well, not exactly “no problem.” You know, the so-called controls that this bill puts on them are Mickey Mouse. For instance, if they deny you health insurance—let’s say Aetna won’t give you health insurance because you have a pre-existing condition, and you say to them, “Hey, wait a minute. That’s against the law.” And they’re going to go, “Whoa, yeah. Sue me.” Because you know what the fine is, the fine for them for denying somebody because they have a pre-existing condition? One hundred dollars a day. So if you’re Aetna, and you’ve got a patient who maybe needs, you know, a $100,000 operation, what would you do? Would you pay out the $100,000 operation because the law says you have to? Or do you break the law but just get a $100-a-day fine? Because, let’s see, after a year that would be $36,500 versus a $100,000 operation. Gee, I wonder which one Aetna’s going to go for. And of course, they could just hope against hope that within a year the person without the operation might be dead, so they won’t have to be worrying about shelling out any more money to a doctor or to a hospital.
AMY GOODMAN: Academy Award-winning Michael Moore. We’ll come back to our interview in a minute.
[break]
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: We return right now to our interview with the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore.
• AMY GOODMAN: Michael, you wrote a letter, “How the People in My District Got Stupak to Change His Mind—and Thus Saved the Health Care Bill,” this letter from Michael Moore—you, of course. Now, talk about Bart Stupak, ’cause he is your congressman.
MICHAEL MOORE: Bart Stupak is my congressman. I’ve known him for quite some time. I live up in northern Michigan. It’s a fairly rural area—very rural, actually. His district covers thirty-one of Michigan’s eighty-three counties. So that’s quite a hefty portion of real estate here in the state. It’s not that populated, and in the last few elections has tended to vote Republican. They voted for Mr. Bush up here, and they voted for Mr. McCain. But they have elected a Democrat to Congress under the name of Bart Stupak. He’s a moderate to conservative Democrat.
He’s done some good things. He stood up to the NRA here a few years ago, when he voted for a very small amount of gun control, which, up here, voting against gun control is like, you know, one of the worst sins you could commit in the woods of northern Michigan. But he did that. And the NRA ran Republicans against him to try and get him out of there, and the people voted for him. He’s a former Michigan state police officer whose teenage son took a gun, a revolver, in his house, and he was on a lot of medication that Mr. Stupak says he probably shouldn’t have been on, and it was misprescribed, whatever, but sadly, his son killed himself with that gun. And so, Congressman Stupak voted for this gun control legislation, when the NRA went after him.
So, you know, he’s a pretty decent guy. He’s a decent person. He’s not a typical politician. But he has done something that I think, as Americans, we don’t generally like, if I could just paint us all with one brush here. And that is, your private spiritual or religious beliefs, Amy, are yours, as mine are mine, or my lack of beliefs or your lack of beliefs are yours or mine, too, and it’s nobody’s business, and nobody has a right to tell me how to behave because of how they choose to behave. And for some reason, he took it upon himself to try and derail this healthcare bill, because, for some reason, he saw some kind of ghost, some kind of I don’t know what, in the bill that was going to somehow fund abortions, which, of course, it wasn’t going to do, and so he decided with some other right-to-life Democrats to stop the bill.
And those of us who live up here, who—and I speak, I think—and I’m not saying this just because of Democrats or Republicans or independents up here—I think, generally, people in northern Michigan are pretty much, you know, live and let live, and your business is your business, and mine’s mine, and when we have things that affect each other, then we care about that, but what you do in your bedroom or in your house, as long as it’s not harmful to anyone, is not any of our business. And he decided it was his business to become chief of police for fertilized eggs of the United States of America. And so, he set out to stop this. And we decided that we had to stop him.
So myself and dozens of others here organized over the last week or two to get everybody calling his office and emailing him, sending him letters, going to his office, and telling him in no uncertain terms that this August, in the Democratic primary, where the base votes, the liberal base votes, he will be removed from office at that point. We may or may not win in November, but we will remove him in August. And I think, I hope, that that message got through to him, because he changed his mind in the last moment and decided to go along with the bill.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Let me ask you about the White House strategy on this. We saw in the final weeks a lot of pressure coming down on progressives, most noticeably Dennis Kucinich. He was taken on Air Force One with Obama and forced—the next day he switched his vote. Well, not forced, but that’s what he ultimately decided to do. There didn’t seem to be any consideration from the White House, from President Obama, for the public option throughout the months over this debate. They said they supported it, but they have not actually done anything actively to support it. And we didn’t see the same kind of pressure brought to bear on people like Bart Stupak. He eventually did vote for the bill, but after a lot of concessions were made, Obama signing this executive order. Your thoughts on how President Obama led this debate?
MICHAEL MOORE: I don’t think he really cared about a public option. I don’t think he really believes in true universal healthcare that’s managed by we the people. He was the number one recipient of health industry money in the Senate and when he was running for president, so I’m not surprised that he had very little interest in doing any of that.
So, I mean, Obama, right now, he’s our—you know, he’s the guy that isn’t the last eight years of Bush and Cheney. Boy, there’s a rousing endorsement for him. I mean, I’m sorry, I’m just so—I feel so disillusioned. And I sit here on this camera here, and I’m thinking, you know, I’ll try and sound upbeat and positive and optimistic and all this, because people are filled with such despair right now. But I’m sorry, I, too, am filled with that despair.
And I think that he isn’t really going to take on the powers that be. He’s not really going to take on the banks and Wall Street. He cut a deal with the pharmaceutical industry so that they got completely left out. There weren’t even touched by this bill, so they get to go on their merry way of bilking the public out of billions of dollars every year.
So, no, I’m sorry, I just—I just don’t—you know, and I have felt through most of my life, actually, that sometimes it’s worse to have the kinder, gentler version of the same bad thing than the actual bad thing, because at least when it is that bad thing, you can deal with it, because you know what it is. But if you’ve got, as is often the case with Democrats, this mask over it that looks like a nice mask, it looks like—wow, it looks like one of us. He’s, you know, saying the same things we say and feels the same way we feel, you know, and then every now and then does some incredibly good things. I mean, they’re about ready to finally quit lying about where the poverty level is in this country. The Obama administration is going to set that bar where it really should be. You know, little things like that that you hear about every week or two they do, and you think, ah, jeez, that’s a hell of a lot better than Bush and Cheney.
But if you step back from it, here we are now in the first week of the eighth year of the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, which Obama has decided to make it his war, and a very, very weak banking regulation bill that Chris Dodd has proposed, that I believe yesterday made it through some committee or whatever there. I just—I haven’t read all the news on it today, but it’s not really going to do anything to really put the reins on Wall Street or these banks in the way that it should be.
AMY GOODMAN: How does this tie into your film, Michael, Capitalism: A Love Story, which you’ve just released on DVD?
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, I mean, to me, it all comes back to this issue of an economic system that is truly evil. And the healthcare bill that was passed ultimately will be seen as a victory for capitalism, because it protected the capitalist model of providing healthcare for people. In other words, we’re not to help people unless there’s money to be made from it. That is so patently disgusting and immoral, but that’s the system. That’s where we live.
And that’s why they’re not really going to do anything to the banks. Chris Dodd, the other day, saying—you know, when he proposed his bill, he says, “Well, you know, we don’t really want to punish Wall Street or these banks.” Oh, really? I want to punish them. I know a lot of people that want to punish them. In fact, I thought that was the whole idea of those of you who believe in your criminal justice system, that the way we reduce crime is to make examples out of those who commit crimes. If people know that they’re going to go to jail for a certain period of time, that may act as an incentive not to commit the crime. All we’ve—we’ve done the exact opposite: we’ve rewarded the criminals by giving them more money.
So I think that—you know, I mean, I’ve been making these movies for twenty years now, and I said this to you a few months ago, Amy, at—we were out there in Utah—that‘s right, we were in Utah—and it all comes back to this central issue, that unless we restructure our economic system, where we the people control it and it’s set up to fairly divide the pie, so that nobody goes without, we’re going to continue to see more decisions made that benefit the richest one percent that control more of our financial wealth in this country than the bottom 95 percent combined.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, remember 2004, when you went on bended knee on the Bill Maher show and begged Ralph Nader not to run for president?
◦ MICHAEL MOORE: Ralph, please, Ralph!
BILL MAHER: Don’t run for president.
MICHAEL MOORE: Ralph, please, don’t do this to the country! Don’t do this!
BILL MAHER: Because you’re a great American, don’t run, please. Please! MICHAEL MOORE: Don’t do this, Ralph!
• AMY GOODMAN: Michael, do you still feel the same way? You and Ralph Nader pretty much agree on a lot of things.
MICHAEL MOORE: I have this basic position about Ralph. I’ve known him for many, many years. He has done so much good for this country. People are alive as a result of the things that he worked on over the years. I also believe that he doesn’t really have a handle on what the proper strategy is to get this country in our hands. And, you know, unlike Ralph, I guess maybe I’m not in this for just to say it so I can hear myself talk or to be some—or to take some poser position. And I hope that doesn’t sound too harsh, but I don’t see him ever working with the grassroots or with the people or being in touch with the people in any way, shape or form.
And so, I just—I think that—I mean, what I’ve proposed for the last few years is that if we really want to try and get this power in our hands, in the people’s hands, in the hands of the working people of this country, then we should, on a very grassroots level, from the bottom up, be doing things to—whether it’s running for local office, taking over the local Democratic Party. The game is rigged in America when it comes to third parties. There’s no way that that’s ever going to work. And so, then how—instead of letting the game, I guess, rig us, what can we do to the game itself? And if the game is, well, we have these two political parties which are really very much like one party, why don’t we make sure that one of those parties actually is a second party and start locally and do that? And that’s what I encourage people to do. That’s my approach.
Ralph’s approach is, put his name on the ballot and run for office. Where are we as a result of that? I don’t—you know, I don’t see us anywhere other than in the same pitiful state we’ve been in for some time.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Michael, back on the issue of healthcare, where does the single-payer movement go right now? It’s also known as Medicare for All.
MICHAEL MOORE: I think that Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers, Alan Grayson have to immediately be putting forth the next bill. We should not let anybody rest on any laurel here. There’s nothing to be proud of with this bill being passed, other than maybe a temporary satisfaction of watching Republicans—you know, watching their spray-on tan fall off out of utter—through utter anger. But these bills have to be introduced, and we have to start working on them. All of us have to start getting behind this. And maybe this will turn out to be one of these things where, you know what, people saw that it was a little bit and they wanted it a little more, and so a year or two from now we get a little more.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of President Obama’s strategy of accepting hundreds of amendments by Republicans on the healthcare bill? In the end, not one Republican voted for it. Was it worth it?
MICHAEL MOORE: No, of course not. I mean, but I get this part of him. I do believe that he wanted to get along. I think he saw himself in this moment in history, and he knew that there was a lot of anger toward the fact that he—he—was elected, and he held his hand out. And of course, all they wanted to do was crush that hand.
So I hope the “Kumbaya” is over now, because the Democrats and President Obama need to start behaving like they won. They won, by a huge margin. So, at least until November, can I see a version of what that would look like? You know, just, you know, play with me a little bit here. Just give me—give me something. I don’t think, Amy, that whenever the next bill is, that he will be welcoming their 100 amendments. I don’t think we’re going to see that again. I think he got pretty beaten down by this, hopefully and learned a lesson.
AMY GOODMAN: Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore. By the way, if you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to “democracynow.org”. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
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EXHIBIT 2
Health Reform: Theirs and Ours
March 24, 2010
By Paul Street
Corporate health “reform” has gotten the congressional votes it needed and the public relations spin is on. Now that the “deeply conservative” Barack Obama[1] and his fellow corporate Democrats have pushed their big business-friendly measure – devoid of any public insurance option to counter the power of the insurance oligopoly– through the House and Senate, the reigning bipartisan U.S. political-media culture is pushing two childish narratives: the “liberal” Democratic one of an “historic" people’s victory and the “conservative” Republican one of a dangerous and “socialist” “government takeover.”“The Industry Has Already Accomplished Its Goal” (August 2009)
These two, mutually reinforcing fairy tales both delete the harsh state-capitalist reality imposed by the “unelected dictatorship of money”[2] in this as in so many other Washington policy dramas. As Business Week candidly told its elite readers last August:
“As the health reform fight shifts this month from a vacationing Washington to congressional districts and local airwaves around the country, much more of the battle than most people realize is already over. The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and WellPoint. The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling.”
“...The [insurance] industry has already accomplished its goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business.”[3]
Significantly, Business Week noted that industry executives had “already offered” such “concessions…as accepting all applicants, regardless of age or medical history.” Such concessions “make a government-run competitor unnecessary,” UnitedHealth’s Oxford-educated Vice President Simon Stevens (a former advisor to neoliberal British Prime Minister Tony Blair) told leading administration and elected officials in Washington. "We don't think reform should come crashing down because of [resistance to] a public plan," Stevens argued. “Many congressional Democrats have come to the same conclusion,” Business Week noted.
The key point for the corporate “health” insurance syndicate was to block any public competition/alternative and the insurance moguls were quite ready to give on “pre-existing conditions,” lifetime benefit caps and the like. “Reform” was in the air and had support from many large business, political, and professional interests, not just the nation’s working-class majority. A popular new president had staked his reputation and perhaps his re-elections chances on some (almost any) version being passed. It was going to happen, the insurance and drug companies knew. The leading insurance firms' goal, successfully achieved more than half a year ago, was to “redefine” and set the terms of reform in a way that left core corporate prerogatives intact and unchallenged by popular public alternatives.
Of course, the insurance industry’s big managers and investors will make out like bandits in ways that go beyond killing the public option and which will more than compensate them for “concessions” on some of their most vile and egregious practices (which they knew to be doomed). Insurance premiums can be expected to continue their deadly rise and the mandate that tens of millions of Americans buy private insurance or face fines will boost profits. The “reform” bill prohibits the government from negotiating prices with drug companies and from permitting the importation of drugs. The insurance companies will remain exempt from antitrust laws.
Irrelevant Public Opinion
"And dominate policy” in defiance of irrelevant public opinion," Business Week might have added to its description of the big insurance firms. 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?”[4]
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.
In detailing how the insurance giants were compromising Obama’s initial promise to increase government’s role in the health care market at every step last summer, Business Week noted the special contribution of John Sheils, an actuary employed by the Lewin Group, a corporate consulting firm in Falls Church, Va. According to Sheils, in a dubious “finding” that UnitedHealth used again and again to move federal legislators (including Democratic Senator Mark R. Warner of Virginia) off the public option, “88 million people, or 56% of those with employer-provided coverage, would desert private insurance for a government-run program. That would destabilize the marketplace and potentially kill the private insurance industry.” As it peddled this suspect “scientific” claim (questioned by the Congressional Budget Office) purporting to project a supposedly horrible outcome – many Americans would be less than devastated to hear that the extortionist insurance industry had collapsed (!)– resulting from a public insurance option, UnitedHealth did not advertise the fact that it owned the Lewin Group and therefore paid Sheils’ salary.
Obama’s Secret Accomplishment
Obama is already being hailed by his “liberal” and partisan base for “heroically” leading and the passing “the first comprehensive health reform inU.S. history.” This narrative should not be accepted without serious qualification. It is unwise for leftist critics of corporate power (I am one) to downplay the significance of the bill’s promise to expand coverage to tens of millions who currently lack insurance or of the bill’s measures to end some of the insurance industry’s most revolting practices (yearly and lifetime benefit caps, slashing coverage for people who become sick, and refusing coverage to older people and those with pre-existing medical conditions). These are changes that anyone who is not hopelessly alienated would want to support; we should not be seen as sneering at them (or as being allied with right-wingers denouncing the reform for some very ugly reasons).
Still, a health reform of some “comprehensive” nature has been in the offing for some time now, for reasons (not the least of which includes the fact that much of the corporate sector has come to want [business-friendly] “health reform”) already mentioned. And contrary to propaganda on both sides of the (narrow) bipartisan spectrum, the insurance companies have been more than ready to “give” on their most vile practices and to see coverage nearly universalized as long as the policy deal leaves their core cost-driving and profit-making powers and oligopolistic structure intact and as long as they were nicely compensated for their “concessions.”
The real question was not whether there would be a health care reform, but whether the reform would be on the people’s terms or on those of the big insurance and drug companies and their Wall Street backers. Obama’s great hidden accomplishment – certain to be buried and ignored by dominant U.S. mass media – has been to secure a reform that expands coverage and abolishes vile and arcane industry practices without fundamentally challenging concentrated corporate and financial power in the health care sector.
What “the Left” (and the Majority of the Population) Wants as “Too Disruptive” and “Politically Impossible”
During an interview with FOX News’ Brett Baier last week, Obama said this about his health bill: “Now, we can fix this in a way that is sensible, that is centrist. I have rejected a whole bunch of provisions that the left wanted that are – you know, they were very adamant about because I thought it would be too disruptive to the system.”[5]
That was a very revealing statement. It speaks volumes about Obama’s “deeply conservative” essence (see note 1 below). What horrid “disruptive” and “system”-threatening provisions were advanced by the “left” and properly rejected by the supposedly “progressive” president? The public option, drug re-importation, and direct Medicare drug price negotiations, not to mention single-payer option, designed to save the country $350 billion a year in corporate insurance company bureaucracy (dedicated largely to denying care to and to marketing) and profits – the two major and interrelated factors behind escalating health care costs.
Never mind that these sane and sensible “Left” measures were supported by most Americans. They had to be demonized by the President and his fellow noble “centrists” as too dangerous and radical because big insurance and drug companies and their Wall Street backers hate such policies - for obvious reasons.
Along the way, conventional political and media wisdom claimed that such measures lacked “political support.” They “didn’t have ‘political support,” the leading left intellectual Noam Chomsky quips, “just the support of the majority of the population, which apparently is not political support in our dysfunctional democracy.” As Chomsky ads, “There should be headlines explaining why, for decades, what’s been called politically impossible is what most of the public has wanted. There should be headlines explaining what that means about the political system and the media.”[6]
There’s a lot of big money behind the insistence that Obama and the Democrats advance the notion that the truly progressive health reform irrelevantly favored by most Americans is too hazardous and extremist to consider. The health sector poured a remarkable $178,252,901 into congressional and presidential campaigns between the beginning of the 2008 election cycle and the summer of 2009. The insurance industry invested $52,739,320. Obama received more than $19 million from the health sector for the 2008 election cycle – a new record.[7] The prolific author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges reports that “the five largest private health insurers and their trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent more than $6 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2009. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug maker, spent more than $9 million during the last quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009.”[8]
“About Increasing Corporate Profit at Taxpayer Expense”
What can we expect from the “historic reform” now moving its way to the president’s desk? After overdue and elementary changes (many maddeningly delayed until 2014 and after) that any civilized human would want (the expansion of Medicaid and abolition of the right to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, for example), the bill gets much less than exciting from a progressive perspective. Besides blocking single payer (banned from the health policy debate from the beginning of the neoliberal Obama administration) and a public option (downsized and then completely stripped out over the last year) and thereby leaving the for-profit insurance mafia essentially unchallenged, the bill will grant untold billions (trillions over multiple years and decades) of dollars worth of subsidies to that mafia. It will identify “universal care” with government coercion requiring citizens who are not deeply poor to buy that mafia’s persistently pricey products. As Hedges notes, “Families who cannot pay the high premiums, deductibles and co-payments, estimated to be between 15 and 18 percent of most family incomes, will have to default, increasing the number of uninsured. Insurance companies can unilaterally raise prices without ceilings or caps and monopolize local markets to shut out competitors. The $1.055 trillion spent over the next decade will add new layers of bureaucratic red tape to what is an unmanageable and ultimately unsustainable system….This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry’s version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies.”
No wonder that “health care stocks and bonuses for the heads of these corporations are shooting upwards.”[9] It’s a good time to invest in the insurance syndicate.
“First We Have to Take Back the White House…”
For what its’ worth, my sense is that the United States cannot have truly progressive health reform in accord with the national majority’s longstanding support of progressive change without removing the for-profit insurance companies from the equation by introducing the obvious social-democratic and cost-cutting solution: single-payer government health insurance. Obama knows this himself - in a part of his mind rendered inactive by his love for power. When Obama claims (soon) to be the first president to have passed real health reform in the U.S., he won’t say anything about the following comments (available on YouTube) he made as a state senator (speaking to the Illinois AFL-CIO) in the summer of 2003:
“I happen to be a proponent of a single--payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan.”[10]
This statement was made just prior Obama's realization that he had a serious shot at national office - a realization that sharpened his willingness to subordinate himself to the aforementioned “unelected dictatorship.”
Speaking of the struggle for single-payer in 2003, Obama said “we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House”[11]. Nearly seven years later, the federal legislative and executive branches have been “taken back” by the Democratic Party. Sadly, however, the United States’ corporate-managed “dollar democracy” and its narrow “one-and-a-half party system” (Sheldon Wolin) have yet to be taken back from concentrated wealth and the related giant military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower had warned about upon leaving the White House.[12] The United States’ “representative democracy” remains crippled by “too much [corporate and military] representation” and too little [actual popular] democracy” (Arundhati Roy)[13] under Obama no less than in the Bush-Cheney years. Far from being an exception to this tragic reality, the current “health reform” is an epitome of it.
The Conyers-Kucinich Congressional Cave
The most pathetic part of the story, perhaps, is the willingness of such supposed fierce congressional single-payer advocates as John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich to support the corporate reform model advanced by Obama, Pelosi, and Reid et al. One might (naively) think that a president who exhibits such clear and unprincipled scorn for progressive ideals he once trumpeted would face strong resistance from the Progressive Caucus. But no, every single member of that group that once pledged to oppose any final bill without a public option caved in and traded in their not-so deeply held principles to help score a partisan victory for a bill that will “enrich and strengthen the same industries that comprise our immoral health care system.”[14]
Yet again we see that true progressive change can never come from within or through the Democratic Party.[15] 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 [16], 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.
PAUL STREET (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman Littlefield, 2007; Segregated School: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008). Street’s next book The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010), will be released next summer.
RECOMMENDED PIECE: Chris Hedges, “The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed,” Truthdig (March 22, 2010), https://www.greanvillepost.com/?p=9429
NOTES
1. This accurate description of Obama belongs to the centrist journalist Larissa MacFarquhar in the spring of 2007. “When he talks about poverty,” MacFarquhar noted, “he tends not to talk about gorging plutocrats and unjust tax breaks: he says that we are our brothers’ keeper, that caring for the poor is one of our traditions.” Such refusal to advance large reform – e.g. single payer health insurance on the Canadian model (which Obama claimed to advocate as late as the summer of 2003 however) – reflected what MacFarquhar found to be Obama’s “deeply conservative” take on history, society and politics: “In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside”…Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says, “I’m probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can solve every problem. For example, I think the impact of parents and communities is at least as significant as the amount of money that’s put into education.” MacFarquhar found that Obama’s “deep conservatism” was why “Republicans continue to find him congenial, especially those who opposed the war on much the same conservative grounds that he did.” She noted that some of Bush’s top fund-raisers were contributing to Obama’s campaign and observed that Obama garnered 40 percent of the Republican vote in his 2004 Senate victory. See Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?” The New Yorker (May 7, 2007).
2. This excellent phrase belongs to Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Riding the ‘Green Wave’ at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond,” Electric Politics, July 22, 2009.
3. Writers and editors are often more candid about things in the business press since the relatively privileged and heavily indoctrinated audience of that press is considered safe. At the same time, the elite business and coordinator class audiences/markets of the business press have (since their members commonly play managerial roles that matter) to be somewhat accurately informed about events and developments. They can't be kept in the fantasy world that corporate media creates for the dangerous working- and lower -class majority – the dreaded citizen mass or “rabble.”
4. New York Times-CBS Poll, “Confusion Over Health Care,” survey of 1,042 adults, September 19-23, question number 57, p. 15 of 26, poll results at http://documents.nytimes.com/new-york-times-cbs-news-poll-confusion-over-health-care-tepid-support-for-war#p=15
5. “President Barack Obama Talks to Bret Baier About Health Reform,” FOX News, March 17, 2010, read athttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,589589,00.html.
6. Sahil Kapur, “Chomsky: Health Bill Sustains the System’s Core Ills,” The Raw Story (March 22, 2010), read at http://rawstory.com/2010/03/noam-chomsky-health-bill/.
7. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics “Open Secrets” Web site.
8. Chris Hedges, “The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed,” Truthdig (March 22, 2010), read at The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed https://www.greanvillepost.com/?p=9429
. To make matters worse, Hedges notes that “Up to 30 members of Congress …who hold key committee memberships have major investments in health care companies totaling between $11 million and $27 million. President Barack Obama’s director of health care policy, who will not discuss single payer as an option, has served on the boards of several health care corporations.” Pretty vile.
9. Hedges, “Health Care Hindenburg.” “Take a look at the health care debacle in Massachusetts, a model for what we will get nationwide,” Hedges rightly ads. ”One in six people there who have the mandated insurance say they cannot afford care, and tens of thousands of people have been evicted from the state program because of budget cuts.”
10. "Obama on Single Payer Health Insurance," June 30, 2003, YouTube video clip at http://www.1payer.net/All-Videos/obama-on-single-payer.html. See also YouTube link at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpAyan1fXCE
11. “Obama on Single Payer Health Insurance.”
12. “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address” (January 17, 1961), read at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Military-Industrial_Complex_Speech
13. Arundhati Roy, “Democracy’s Fading Light,” Outlook India Magazine (July 13, 2009) at http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?250418.
14. Firedog Lake, March 18, 2010, read at http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/35866.
15. For an excellent history and analysis of the Democratic Party, see Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008). For a detailed review of Selfa’s book, see Paul Street, “A Left Case Against the Democrats,” International Socialist Review (May-June 2008).
16. Hedges, “Health Care Hindenburg.”
