Freedom Rider: Health Care Deceit
As if we needed (by now) further proof of Obama’s and the Democrats treacherous nature. When will Americans learn that the so-called two-party system is a cruel hoax?
By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
The health care fiasco has bared the cowardly underbelly of the Democratic Party, which is putty in the hands of President Obama and his co-conspirators in the insurance industry. The “public option” has been stripped down to a tiny two percent of the people, while the private insurers get tens of millions of captive, subsidized consumers. The conclusion is inescapable: “Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.”
“Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.”
As an Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama enthusiastically called for single payer health care. He said he wanted a system with “everybody in, nobody out.” Now that the very same Barack Obama is president of the United States, single payer is nowhere to be seen on his agenda. The words of the ambitious politician are inconsistent with his actions now that he is the president.
Not only did State Senator Obama say that he wanted single payer, but he laid out a road map [1] for achieving his stated goal. “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.” Now that all of those conditions have been met, he is the person currently occupying the White House, the health care “reform” plan currently under discussion does not include single payer.
What we do have is a plan to force the uninsured into purchasing health insurance. Single payer, Medicare for all, call it what you will, is now off the presidential and congressional table. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t even allow a vote on a Dennis Kucinich plan to give individual states the right to seek a public option. The little bit of change in the so-called reform amounts to nothing more than a bailout of the health insurance companies responsible for making American health care the deadly disgrace that it has become.
“The so-called reform amounts to nothing more than a bailout of the health insurance companies.”
The systemic corruption in the Democratic Party has never been more obvious. The proposals put forward by Pelosi and Harry Reed are by the insurance companies, for the insurance companies and of the insurance companies. Not only is the party’s allegiance to corporate interest becoming clearer all the time, but so is their intention to do nothing for the people who gave them electoral victory.
Obama is not alone among Democrats in repeating the well-worn lie that they will be different and better than Republicans once they are in office. If a Democrat is president and if Democrats control the House, and if they have not only a majority but the magic number of sixty in the Senate, why is there no plan for true health care reform?
There is no plan for health care reform because too few Democrats really care about the issue in the first place. Some may care but have greater fear of insurance industry power and money going to bat for an opponent in a future campaign. And as in all other things, the fish still stinks from the head. President Obama made it crystal clear that his previous words on health care reform were nothing but empty campaign promises. He didn’t even directly involve the White House in crafting a bill. He left that to conservadem Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. It must have been the first time in history that a president handed off an issue to a member of congress who never even claimed to want the same thing.
“The uninsured will be forced to buy insurance at a rate up to 125% of current costs.”
The public option plan currently under consideration would cover approximately 2% of the public [2]. Most workers will be in the same position after the over hyped “reform” takes effect in 2013. If they are lucky enough to be employed and to be offered coverage they will see no change in price, or quality of coverage. The uninsured will be forced to buy insurance at a rate up to 125% [3] of current costs.A true public option will only be available to those without insurance who live in states choosing to opt in instead of out. Red staters will in all likelihood be out of luck.
Business Week magazine hit the nail on the head [4] all too succinctly in their analysis of health care reform. “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.”
Republican posturing against the insurance company victory is just that, posturing. They are struggling with a moribund brand which has no appeal beyond their ever shrinking base. They obstruct for the sake of obstructing. The tea parties, town hall riots, and opinions of hateful pundits like Beck and Limbaugh are currently of no consequence and should not play a role in Democratic strategy. Their enmity does nothing but give Obama and the rest of the Democrats another excuse to stab the people in the back.
“No matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.”
The unnecessary bowing and scraping to Senate Republicans like Olympia Snowe is a farce meant to keep us quiet and fool us into thinking that single payer is an impossibility. Sadly, the ruse will probably work. Too many progressives are the cheap dates of politics and will swoon if their idol emerges with a bill, any bill. In the end, they will all claim that the final product is the only possible outcome and those of us who dare to say otherwise ought to be ignored.
No one should be fooled by the idol worshippers. We are entitled to our opinions, but not to our own facts. The facts in this case are not debatable. Barack Obama and the majority of the Democrats never had any intention of bringing reform to health care.The citizens of this country won’t have true change in health care or anything else unless they fight for it and unless they acknowledge they will be fighting Obama and the rest of the Democrats too.
Margaret Kimberley
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/freedom-rider-health-care-deceit
Links:
[2] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091101/ap_on_go_co/us_health_care_public_plan
[4] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_33/b4143034820260.htm
If Democrats Don't Pass Health Insurance Reform This Year, What Do We Lose? And What Do We Gain?
The recent defeats in Virginia and New Jersey are likely to stampede the cowardly Obama and his Democrats in precisely the wrong direction–further to the right.
By Bruce A. Dixon, Managing Editor, Black Agenda Report [BAR]
Created 11/04/2009 [print_link]
"Yeah, stop with that single payer whine. It's beginning to annoy me."
The version of health care reform championed by the White House and Congressional Democrats will force millions to buy crappy insurance from private providers with no interest in health care but plenty of interest in profits. Its pubic option is a cruel hoax that will not take effect till 2013 and even then will leave tens of millions uninsured. Now Democratic leaders in Congress say it might not pass this year anyway. Is that really so bad?
The president said it himself in early September. His public option will be neither public nor optional for any more than a tiny percentage of Americans, and unlike his wars and bank bailouts, has to be “deficit neutral.” It will force millions under penalty of law to buy the deceptive and defective products of greedy private insurers.
Most alarmingly, the Democratic version of the public option will be rigidly means-tested to ensure that only the poorest get in, and financed with a John McCain style tax on those who receive nearly adequate benefits from their employers. This is a patented recipe for ghettoizing and socially stigmatizing those who do avail themselves of the public option, setting one segment of society against another poorer one, the exact reverse of the everybody in, nobody out spirit of social security and Medicare.
And though we are told that insurers will not be able to deny policies on the basis of pre-existing conditions, there is mounting evidence that insurers intend to enforce the same discriminatory requirements by claiming that conditions such as diabetes, overweight, smoking and more are the result of patient behaviors and “lifestyle choices” for which the insurance company cannot be liable unless it is able to charge more. The president has even deceitfully lowered the number of uninsured referred to in all the Democrats’ pronouncements by subtracting the 12 or 15 million undocumented from all its numbers, as though they are expected to live in our midst as an underclass with no access to health services.
In the year since the last election the president has made concession after concession to drug and insurance companies, to private health care providers and their lobbyists. The White House, establishment Democrats and their echo chambers in the corporate media and even on the internet have worked hard to suppress voices advocating the simple, practical and elegant solution of single payer Medicare For All, which is still favored in polls by a substantial majority of Americans.
The longer the health care reform drama takes to unfold, the shabbier the president and his party are looking. With overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress, the Republicans can no longer be blamed for anything, and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are sending signals that they may not be able to pass the president’s health insurance reform this year. They can’t blame Republicans for this because there are not enough Republicans to stop legislation in either chamber. The Republican talking point on health care now is that the president is spending too much time on it, and needs to concentrate on something, anything else, like sending another 40 or 50 thousand troops to Iraq.
Ever men and women of their word, Democratic leaders in Congress have stripped out of the president’s bills any chance for states to pursue their own single payer regimes, and backtracked on promises to allow a floor vote on the Medicare For All measure, HR 676.
Deceit has its price. The initiative has passed to the forces of single payer, the solution championed by Barack Obama up until his 2004 election to the US Senate.
In dozens of cities and towns across the nation Americans are seizing that initiative. The wave of demonstrations and sit-ins at the offices of insurance companies continues to grow. At the beginning of October, www.mobilizeforheathcare.org [1] initiated actions in New York and DC. A month later more than a thousand people have volunteered to be arrested to put single payer back on the table in cities and towns across the country. Sit-ins are planned for more than two dozen cities today, and by year’s end at this rate, will be occurring in more than sixty cities by the end of the year.
What Single Payer Health Care Will Do For Ordinary Families
In fact, the next job for most Wal-Mart workers will be very like the last, and the next after that one too. But if workers in dead-end jobs had the security of guaranteed health care, they’d be much more inclined to stay where they are and organize and fight for better working conditions. Service workers are underpaid not because of the nature of the work, any more than west coast dockworkers seventy years ago were underpaid because they were drunkards and thieves. They are underpaid because they have not succeeded in organizing and fighting for their rights. This is why elite bodies like the US Chamber of Commerce are stubbornly resisting anything like Medicare For All. The economy, and the present health insurance regime serve them well, and they want to preserve it.
Medicare For All, single payer will enable the working poor to make a stand where they are, and lift themselves out of poverty by organizing for and demanding a greater share of the wealth they produce every day. By removing the dread of financial ruin due to illness or injury, single payer will enable working people to fight for their own collective economic uplift. That’s why the struggle for guaranteed and universal single payer, Medicare For All is the real deal right now, the key to unlocking a better life for millions in the near future, a concrete focus of the civil and human rights movements of our time.
It’s time to mobilize for Medicare For All, now. Go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org [2] and take your future, your family’s future into your hands. Donate to provide legal assistance and bail money and other expenses. Volunteer to be present at a legal demonstration, or to put your body on the line in a nonviolent demonstration for health care now at the offices of an insurance company near you.
The incorruptible Bruce Dixon.
Bruce Dixon is based in Atlanta, and is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. He can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.
Links:
[1] http://www.mobilizeforheathcare.org/
[2] http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/
Harry Reid, Democratic Leaders and the White House Still Faking the Funk on Universal Health Care
The fraud continues while the media pretend not to see it
Crossposted with Black Agenda Report (BAR) on 10/28/2009 [print_link]
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Obama, the Great Mesmerizer, listening (?) to doctors pleading for solutions.
This week the Senate’s Harry Reid announced the consolidation of the Senate Democratic caucus version of health care reform. How central the “public option” is or is not depends on who you ask, as do precisely how many people it would be offered to and on what terms. What is clear is that it remains a Massachusetts-style bailout plan to subsidize private insurers, rather than one providing universal care at affordable rates. Meanwhile the gap between the actual public option and the imaginary ones sold by progressive Democrats is growing. How long it can be concealed, and what will happen when it is revealed are anybody’s guess.
This Halloween a couple of persistent spooks haunt Congressional Democrats and the White House on the health care front.
The first is the overwhelming public sentiment in favor of a government-run, everybody in nobody out Medicare For All type health care system. The proper name for this kind of setup, single payer, is rarely mentioned or acknowledged directly, except in tandem with exculpatory phrases like “…but it’s politically impossible…” or “…I’m in favor of it but we don’t have the votes…” or dismissed with in favor of some “…uniquely American solution…”
The fact is, single payer is so popular that Congressional Democrats have taken to describing their so-called public option to voters in terms that make it hard to tell the difference between it and a real single payer system. This deliberate falsehood has been perpetrated by some Democrats in the progressive caucus from the beginning of the current congress, and it continues to this day.
Single payer partisans were the first to call it. Back in May Kip Sullivan of Physicians for a National Health Care Plan detailed the differences between the real public option and the one described in glowing terms by progressive legislators. He called it a “bait and switch” job. And when Howard Dean declared on Democracy Now that the public option is best thought of as Medicare, Harvard’s David Himmelstein labeled him a liar. That kind of deception works fine as long as there are multiple versions of the Democratic health care bill, each well over a thousand pages long in dense legalese, studded with hundreds of cryptic references to other legislation. It holds up as long as most people don’t know the effective date at which the uninsured will begin to be covered under the president’s plan is 2013. It’s good enough as corporate media stick to the script and mention few or none of these things, and the day of reckoning is months or years away. Lies are good and useful things, until you get caught.
Thanks to the relentless work of single payer forces, including some members of the Congress, the web of deception around the public option is unraveling. The day the Senate version of the health care bill was finalized even Rachel Maddow got around to posing many but not all of the same deal-breaking questions Kip Sullivan, PNHP and others single payer activists were asking five months ago, questions that the public option’s sponsors couldn’t answer then, and can’t answer now.
- How can the public option “compete” with private insurers to lower their costs when it will be limited to only a few million people?
- How can the public option “compete” with private insurers when its pool will be disproportionately poor and sick?
- Why must we wait until 2013 for the Democratic plan to cover the uninsured?
The behavior of some leading Democrats on single payer is positively schizophrenic, poo-pooing, downplaying and dismissing single payer while they describe their incredibly complicated some-of-you-in and most-of-you-out versions of the public option and the “robust” public option as Medicare For All in everything but name and unique American-ness. There are, of course other questions Maddow and company could ask whose answers, or non-answers would be even more damning. But these are a good start.
The second scary trick looming ahead of Democrats is of course the 2010 election cycle. When the truth comes out, and voters eventually see the gap between what they want, what Democratic leaders are claiming for their versions of the public option, and what they seem likely to get, it’s easy to envision a lot of very unhappy Democratic voters, and not so easy to predict what they might do. Many of them won’t vote Republican in any case, but might stay home in numbers big enough to tip the balance in some congressional districts.
The foundation of the president’s plan, and the plans of Democratic leaders isn’t single payer, it isn’t Medicare For All, and it’s not even any kind of public option, robust or otherwise. The foundation of of their health care reform remains bailing out the private insurance companies, guaranteeing them a lucrative market by forcing Americans to buy their policies, some of them with taxpayer subsidies and funds squeezed from existing Medicare, Medicaid and other care for those at high risk and low incomes.
Democrats can lie about or suppress discussion on these things for a little while to come. But the truth will come out, much of it well before the 2010 elections. The standard alibi of blue dog Democrats has always been that they can’t support any “robust public option,” let alone single payer because their districts are sooooo conservative. But this doesn’t hold water. Many blue dog districts are among the highest in proportions of the uninsured, and rife with bankruptcies, caused in large part by unpayable medical bills. These blue dogs have been shielded from progressive challengers in primary elections by none other than Rahm Emanuel for two or three terms now, and they expect that protection again for standing with private insurers against the voters of their districts.
2010 is beginning to look a lot more like Clinton’s first mid-term election, in which Democrats lost dozens of seats and the political initiative passed to Republicans for the next 14 years.
If Democrats refuse to pass a health care bill that is very close to Medicare For All, they are storing up trouble for the near future. They only thing, increasingly, that congressional Democrats have to recommend them is that they aren’t Republicans. Whether that will be enough to re-elect them in 2010 is anybody’s guess.
Private insurance companies have a business model to protect. They are making a killing. 120 killings a day, in fact, and 45,000 a year. Single payer activists, whose aim is to take private insurance companies out of the health care equation, aim to raise the price of doing business for private insurers to unacceptable levels with tactics that have begun to include nonviolent civil disobedience in and around the offices of insurers, who are the only real death panels.
Congress and the White House are continually bombarded with letters, phone calls, faxes and emails demanding the consideration of Medicare For All, HR 676, simple and effective single payer legislation introduced by Congressmen Conyers and Kucinich, and sponsored by 90 of their colleagues in this congress. The initiative in the struggle for universal health care remains where it always has been, in the streets and in the public and private meetings of single payer advocates. The harder they press, the more divided congressional Democrats become, between those who adamantly oppose single payer AND the imaginary public option, and the faction that keeps telling us their “robust public option” is so much like single payer that we’ll hardly know the difference.
If you want to become involved in the fight for universal, everybody in, nobody out health care, go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org [1] and sign up to be included in the flow of information and connected with like minded activists in your city or town. It’s time to demand what most people voted for last year. Health care for everybody. Now.
Brother Bill Dixon has devoted his life to social justice activism. With fellow radical journalists Glen Ford and Margaret Kimberley, he manages BAR, by far one of the most authoritative and indispensable news and commentary sites with a multiracial audience. TGP is proud to feature their commentary.
Links:
[1] http://www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org/
GLEN FORD: Poll Shows Public Wants Medicare for All
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford [print_link]
President Obama attempts to depict proponents of Medicare for all as lefty health care “extremists.” But that’s precisely the kind of “robust” public plan favored by two-thirds of Americans, according to a recent poll. Obama is to the Right of the people, and the GOP is off the map.
“Most people favor a public option that is a lot more “robust” than anything the Congress is offering.”
Despite the infamous Max Baucus Senate committee’s long-anticipated rejection of even a fig leaf of a public health care “option,” public opinion remains remarkably firm in support of allowing everyone access to a comprehensive government health plan. A New York Times/CBS News survey last week provided the best polling evidence in recent months that most people favor a public option that is a lot more “robust” than anything the Congress is offering, aside from straight-up single payer.
The poll once again confirms that something very much like single payer remains an idea whose time has come. After all these month’s of the Obama Administration’s attempts to shrivel into near nothingness the very concept of health care “reform,” and despite the mad howlings of Republicans about the evils of “socialized medicine,” two-thirds of the American people still support a Medicare-like government health care plan. Unlike some recent surveys, the language of the pollsters’ question was straightforward and unambiguous:
“Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans?”
That is the definition of a very “robust” public health care option. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they were in favor.
“Americans overwhelmingly endorse expanding Medicare to all who want it.”
It’s a pity that the New York Times and CBS News neglected to ask how the public feels about a full-blown single payer plan, which has for years commanded strong majorities. But the poll does show conclusively that Americans overwhelmingly endorse expanding Medicare to all who want it – and let the private insurers sink or swim on their own.
Still, it is a wonderment that, with all the disinformation from the Hard Right, and almost a year of backroom dealing, backstabbing and dissembling from President Obama and other corporate Democrats, who have mangled reform into a giant subsidy for the privateers, the people still know what they want: Medicare for all, at the very least.
HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All single payer bill – but the measure is anathema to President Obama, who spent most of his energies marginalizing Conyers and his allies in the early months of the administration. Obama has consistently (and viciously) tried to depict single payers and their “robust” fellow travelers as the “extremist” lefty mirror images of rightwing “tea-baggers.” Yet at the end of the day, the public center of gravity on health care remains situated in the political realm of the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Obama is way off to the Right somewhere, in the general vicinity of his soul mate Sen. Baucus, whom the president early on empowered as his health care torchbearer (more like fire-quencher).
“The ‘robust’ public option does not exist in any practical sense.”
The NYT/CBS poll shows the public is not in the least confused about what it wants from the president and the congress on the health care front. Rather, they are befuddled about what Obama wants (55 percent say he has not clearly explained himself), and near-totally up in the air about what the Republicans want (76 percent don’t understand the GOP’s position). The more the people learn about both, the less they’ll like either of them.
Which brings me to the most uplifting aspect of the poll: It is the best recent evidence that Obama has not succeeded in narrowing public perceptions of the scope of health care “reform” to fit his own puny, corporate-vetted positions. The real reform genie is permanently out of the bottle, and he is quite “robust.”
Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .