Obama's Health Care Waterloo

By Dave Lindorff

The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally
hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of
the president’s congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because
of the party’s toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class
New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the
Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to
victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential
election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs
and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people,
while leaving the profit centers of the current system—doctors,
hospitals and the health insurance industry—in charge and in a position
to continue to reap profits.

Watching President Obama address the American Medical Association
was a cringe-inducing experience as he assured the assembled doctors he
was not going to expand Medicare payments “broadly” to cover all
patients, or end the current “piece-work reimbursement” system that has
so enriched physicians, or as he told them that savings would “not come
off your backs.” It was particularly cringe-inducing when he told the
AMA that he knew that making money was not why its members were in the
profession, saying, “That is not why you became doctors. That is not
why you put in all those hours in the Anatomy Suite or the O.R. That is
not what brings you back to a patient's bedside to check in or makes
you call a loved one to say it'll be fine. You did not enter this
profession to be bean-counters and paper-pushers. You entered this
profession to be healers - and that's what our health care system
should let you be. “

Oh please. I know there are plenty of wonderful doctors who are
dedicated to their patients and to patient care. But I also know plenty
of doctors who have told me how half their classmates in medical school
were mainly in it for the money, and that study halls and cafeterias of
American med schools echo with the conversations about what can be made
working in particular specialties. Not to mention the corrupt and
insidious profit-sharing arrangements doctors enter into with labs,
CAT-Scan and MRI test centers, pharmaceutical companies and other
businesses, to earn profits by sending patients for unnecessary tests
and treatments.

One can only imagine what he would be saying to insurance industry executives about his “reform” plans.

Because Obama and Congressional Democrats are unwilling to cut
themselves off from the lucrative campaign-funding bonanza that is the
health care industry, they cannot address seriously either the cost or
the access crisis that plagues health care in the US, and that makes
health care in this country cost 20 percent of GDP—twice what it costs
in any other modern nation on a per capita or GDP basis, and that still
leaves one in six Americans without ready access to even routine health
care.

The answer to this crisis is obvious: a single-payer “socialized”
system, in which you still have private doctors, and private or
publicly run hospitals, but where the government sets the payment rates
for treatment, and provides all compensation to health care providers.

If Democrats in Congress were serious about health care reform,
they would immediately order the Congressional Budget Office to conduct
a cost study of instituting such a program—a study that would include
an estimate of the savings to individuals and employers if
health care costs were lifted entirely off their backs (because
obviously it would require considerable new government revenue to fund
a single-payer program, but that’s only half the equation—the other
half, the savings, is simply ignored by critics and doomsayers on the
right and in the health care industry). Instead, Obama and the
Democratic Congress are studiously avoiding even allowing any mention
of the single-payer option. (A New York Times report today on
the various health care plans working their way through Congress, and
coming out of the White House, completely blacked out any mention of a
single-payer bill in the House authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI),
chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which the House leadership
has prevented from even getting a token hearing.)

Obama’s unwillingness to lead on this issue will doom his health
care plan. There is obviously no way Congress is going to shake off its
corrupt leech-like attachment to corporate sponsors and their
cash-spreading lobbyists, but had the new president wanted to make a
historic mark and cruise to victory in 2012, he could have, like
President Lyndon Johnson before him in his campaign for Medicare in
1965, put himself solidly behind a single-payer plan and made the case
that it could cut America’s collective health bill in half while opening the door to every American.

Instead, he’s likely to end up with worse than nothing—that is with
even more uninsured Americans come 2012, and with health care costs
moving up as a share of GDP—and could well find himself out of a job.
The policy that his handlers, like White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm
Emanuel, had conceived of as Obama’s ticket to re-election, health care
reform, could well prove instead to be his Waterloo.

That is if his adoption of a policy of expanded war in
Afghanistan—another example of a failure to lead—doesn’t prove to be
this president’s bigger policy disaster.

___________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. He is author of
“Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”
(Bantam Books, 1992), and most recently of “The Case for Impeachment”
(St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net