The Democrats' Health `Reform' Bill: Kill It Before It Comes to Life!

By Dave Lindorff

Give credit to Howard Dean. This still practicing physician, former
governor of Vermont, former chair of the Democratic Party and former
Democratic presidential candidate has called for progressive members of
Congress in both houses to join their Republican colleagues in killing
what he rightly says has become "an insurance company's dream."

Those namby-pamby, self-described "progressives" in the Democratic
Party who claim that the health bill can still be saved with the
inclusion of a fake, carefully circumscribed and thoroughly emasculated
"public option" government insurance plan that at best would only be
able to offer lousy coverage at high rates to a small number of
self-employed poor people are wrong. This supposed attempt at reforming
the US health care system--the costliest and least effective in the
developed world--is simply past saving.

The only appropriate place for the bill at this point is a dumpster.

What could have been a transformational moment in American
politics--an end to decades of corporate health care and the creation
of a system in which all Americans were guaranteed affordable, quality
care as a basic right of citizenship, the way people are in Canada, in
all the countries of Europe, in Japan, in Taiwan, in Cuba and much of
the rest of the world, has been squandered.

It has been squandered by President Obama, who was too gutless to
take a leadership role, and left matters to Congress, and who then
slithered up to the major players in the medical-industrial complex and
cut secret deals with all of them--doctors, insurance companies,
pharmaceutical companies and the hospital industry--in return for their
"support."

It has been squandered by many leading members of Congress in both
houses, especially those who call themselves the Blue Dogs, but also by
many who call themselves "liberals," who accepted the tainted coin of
those industries (and their lobbyists have been flooding Congress over
the past year with contributions in unprecedented amounts), and who
have transformed the legislation into a huge gift for those industries,
producing a bill that will leave employers as the main agency for
providing health coverage (though not for paying for it--that will be
the employees' responsibility), require those without coverage to buy
it themselves, guaranteeing a vast new market of mostly health young
people for the insurance industry, and that will do almost nothing to
control costs.

Doctors will get richer under this "reform." Insurance companies
will get vastly richer under this "reform". Pharmaceutical companies
will get richer under this "reform". But there will still be millions
of people left with no access to health care. There will still be tens
of millions of people who will get substandard or even pathetically
trashy health care. And the cost of medical care, both for individuals
and for society as a whole, already the highest in the world, will
continue to soar. To make matters worse, taxes will also go up
dramatically, by at least $100 billion a year. For extra laughs, while
these costs would start hitting the public right away, the "benefits"
of the bill wouldn't go into effect until 2013, meaning that a likely
resurgent Republican Party, ousting Obama from the White House, and the
Democrats from the majority in Congress in 2012, would simply undo the
whole thing anyhow.

Dr. Dean is right. This is indeed a bad bill. But it's not
just a bad bill. It is a morally outrageous, politically disgusting and
economically dangerous bill. It moves the country in exactly the wrong
direction--not towards the socialism that the right has been decrying,
but towards an increasingly costly corporatist system that will be even
harder to reform down the road.

There is only one hope, and that is that enough liberal members of
House and Senate will recognize that nothing is better than something
in this case, and that for the sake of their constituents they will
refuse to support this legislative monstrosity.

The Health Insurance Enrichment Act of 2009 must be killed in the
congressional womb before it can emerge to become the monster it has
become.

The only positive thing I can see in this debacle is that perhaps if
President Obama is slapped down by his own most ardent backers on what
he has claimed is his number one legislative goal, he and his
too-clever-by-half advisers will realize that they need to do a U-turn
and rethink how they are trying to govern.

More likely, however, this defeat will be the beginning of the end
of the Obama administration, which has now been revealed as devoid of
principle, incapable of leadership, and in thrall to the most cynical
and greedy corporate interests.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net