The Chris Moeller Archives

Health care woes: The bill's gonna pass

Senate Democrats are thought to have the 60 votes they need now to sidestep a filibuster and pass a health care bill before the Christmas vacation. Vote #60 will come from former holdout, Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, after one last set of legislative compromises. Majority leader Harry Reid agreed to allow states to ban public insurance coverage for abortions, to require all women and families to pay additional out-of-pocket for abortion insurance, and also to an increase in federal contributions to the expansion of Medicare as it applies only to the state of Nebraska.

Americans are about to become the recipients of what's being called the largest overhaul of health care policy for their country in a generation, and Democrats will be claiming victory next year in a collection of political campaigns near you, but what we'll be given in policy is light years from the single-payer health insurance or full-coverage-for-all system that is standard, and no longer even controversial, in nearly every other Western country. Single-payer was never even considered here. A clunky compromise wrapped tightly in insurance company subsidies, called the "public option," went down to defeat next, followed closely behind by the Medicare buy-in proposal for Americans aged 55-64. The concept of "Medicare for every American that wants it" was never proposed, even though 60 percent of Americans, many of them registered voters, want it. As we've grown accustomed to seeing over the last three decades, the United States Senate was a leading light of democratic compromise, the unique kind in which only one side is doing the compromising.

The United States Constitution provides legislative veto power only to the Chief Executive, but the later adoption of the right to filibuster in the Senate gives all 100 members of the Senate effective veto power as well over any and all proposed legislation. On this particular initiative, so-called "moderates" Nelson, Olympia Snowe, and Joe Lieberman became the brokers of power as they threatened to withhold their voting support if their demands for billion-dollar bailout funds to corporate insurance and pharmaceutical providers, in the form of forced purchases, were not met, and of course, these needless provisions cannot even accurately be called "bailouts," but simply "gifts," as the survival of the private insurance and pharmaceutical companies are not currently in jeopardy.

Why do liberals get this kind of government handed back to them in return for all of their sweat and activism exerted on behalf of their beloved country? Simple. They betray their values when it counts the most in favor of some sort of mythical pragmatism that is supposed to help the Democratic Party extend its influence among independent voters. They listen to and absorb internally the personal attacks against uncompromising public servants like Ralph Nader hurled by politicians on the take.

"Some of it has to do with broader questions of political power," Salon's Glenn Greenwald wrote Friday, "If progressives always announce that they are willing to accept whatever miniscule benefits are tossed at them (on the ground that it's better than nothing) and unfailingly support Democratic initiatives (on the ground that the GOP is worse), then they will (and should) always be ignored when it comes time to negotiate; nobody takes seriously the demands of those who announce they'll go along with whatever the final outcome is."

The boldest progressive in the Senate is Vermont's Bernie Sanders, and likewise this time, he's been the most outspoken critic of the current bill. But where is he now? Firmly on board the Reid/Leiberman train, evidently. On Wednesday, he took the floor to propose-- for the very first time by anybody in the history of the chamber-- a single-payer health care amendment, but Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma forced the Senate clerk to read the entire 767-page amendment out loud, bringing the proceedings of the Senate to a halt. Sanders withdrew his initiative so that the body could resume its work.

That's your strategic difference in a nutshell. Sanders concedes on his amendment for fear that the time taken to force consideration will prevent passage of a bad compromise bill in time for the Majority Leader's self-imposed holiday legislative deadline. Nelson threatens to withhold his vote and walk away. Nelson, for his effort, gets concessions up the wazoo. Sanders gets called to the Capitol commissary to play checkers with Dennis Kucinich.

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Greenwald believes there's an enormous divide in the Democratic Party based in the way that two factions view "corporatism" in America. This vast (and I believe, irreconcilable) difference was concealed for eight years, he says, by a shared distaste for the presidency of George W. Bush. Now it's broken free to come to a head.

Greenwald writes, "I've honestly never understood how anyone could think that Obama was going to bring about some sort of "new" political approach or governing method when... what he practices -- politically and substantively -- is the Third Way, DLC, triangulating corporatism of the Clinton era, just re-packaged with some sleeker and more updated marketing. At its core, it seeks to use government power not to regulate, but to benefit and even merge with, large corporate interests, both for political power (those corporate interests, in return, then fund the Party and its campaigns) and for policy ends. It's devoted to empowering large corporations, letting them always get what they want from government, and extracting, at best, some very modest concessions in return...

"The health care bill is one of the most flagrant advancements of this corporatism yet, as it bizarrely forces millions of people to buy extremely inadequate products from the private health insurance industry -- regardless of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it (even with some subsidies). In other words, it uses the power of government, the force of law, to give the greatest gift imaginable to this industry -- tens of millions of coerced customers, many of whom will be truly burdened by having to turn their money over to these corporations -- and is thus a truly extreme advancement of this corporatist model."

This leads back once more to a persistent theme of this blog: that the great philosophical divide in this country is definitely not Democrat/Republican, nor is it even liberal/conservative, but entrenched in the way in which people are willing to acquiesce to our corporate overlords. The true liberals are placed at the greatest political disadvantage, forced to make the difficult case that government exists in service to the people when currently the people have no power whatsoever within a framework that's been merged completely with the bidding of private corporations.

posted by CM @ 11:01 AM