The Chris Moeller Archives

Democrats derail their own health care plan, nation sighs

One of the exciting things to watch on the national political scene this year is whether Americans are betrayed more by the Democratic-controlled Congress or the Democratic-controlled White House. The Congress took a resounding lead in the horse race today. The Senate Finance Committee killed the public health insurance option that President Obama was championing, providing insurance instead for the fact that the United States will remain the only industrialized country in the world in which access to health care is not treated as a human right. Let's not give the president a free pass on this one either, though. He hardly promoted the public option during his campaign (let's call Obama's promises "purposely vague"), and it's difficult to educate Americans on the merits of a public health coverage guarantee when hospital, insurance, and pharmaceutical corporations are spending millions a week in advertising attacking the concept and the only people in Washington selling a public option, let alone single-payer, are Vermont Socialists.

Let's be honest about why there is to be no public plan: Because that public option would effectively wipe out competing private-insurers. Individual or employer, who the hell would choose to sign up for the profiteering, the coverage restrictions, and the uncontrolled costs when they could choose instead from a well-funded government-mandated option of full health care benefits-- and with no prejudice against pre-existing health conditions besides?

The Obama strategy and plan was flawed from the start. Only a single-payer plan will fix our broken system, and the Obama team has never stood behind that idea. A President Kucinich might have been your man, but not Obama. Private medical insurance has taken us down the road to financial and social ruin because it hasn't really been insurance. Sixty-two percent of personal bankruptcies are being contributed to or caused by illness and medical expenses, and three-quarters of those individuals and families that have become medically-bankrupt had insurance, at least at the point in which they got sick. They were railroaded by co-payments, deductibles, and those pesky loopholes; and losing their jobs due to illness often met losing the insurance entirely.

Congress' idea of a public health care plan instead is to make it a crime not to purchase this disastrous private coverage. As a pair of medical observers pointed out, why not then require that we purchase other defective items? "A Ford Pinto in every garage? Lead-painted toys for every child?"

Always clever-minded Democrats evidently don't realize it, but they've also just politically-eviscerated their own president and effectively dismissed the potential they had to set the agenda in Washington for more than a generation, the way they did after they pushed through the Social Security Act of 1935. Said Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina about this health care debate: "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." The well-insured senator is correct. Democrats had the numbers and the moment to secure the political-support-for-life of 47 million uninsured Americans and they've just pissed it away. With all the squishy compromises to minority Republicans and the deal-cutting with rodent industry lobbyists, the only difference between Barack Obama's health care "reform" effort and Bill Clinton's 16 years ago was that Obama didn't put his wife in charge of it.

posted by CM @ 6:44 PM