An American Lion

Actually, there’s nothing admirable about failing to do something good for the American people. It’s admirable that they would try to reform health care; it’s inexcuseable that they would fail to do the right thing. Jacob Hacker give us this assessment of what is going through the Congress right now:

The public option in the Senate bill, it should be emphasized, is a compromise of a compromise already. The first compromise was to have the public plan negotiate its rates directly with providers, rather than set them based on Medicare’s rates. This compromise meant that the Congressional Budget Office was unlikely to score the public plan as producing the huge savings that it projected for a plan that used Medicare-based rates. Whether CBO was right in discounting the negotiated-rate plan’s savings is another matter—as I have written on this site, it’s likely underestimating the cost-containment potential—but the CBO’s numbers rule on Capitol Hill.

The second compromise was to allow states that did not want to have the public plan operating within their borders to “opt out” with the passage of a state law. How many states will take advantage of this option is unclear, but it’s certain to reduce the impact of the public plan even further. Indeed, the CBO is now projecting—again, pessimistically in my view—that only a few million Americans will enroll in the public plan. Yet none of this has apparently appeased the handful of hold-outs. Emboldened by the White House’s lack of clarity and pressure on the issue, they are digging in their heels and spewing false claims about the public plan (for example, that it’s a budget buster when there are no special government subsidies for it and the CBO projects it will exert downward pressure on private premiums, thus lowering the price tag of reform). Hence the new push to find some kind of middle road.

The problem is that the “middle-ground” ideas that are currently flying around aren’t in the middle at all.

They represent abandonment of the public plan idea altogether. One proposal that is being floated, for example, is the chartering of a national nonprofit plan, similar to the “cooperatives” that Senator Kent Conrad has advocated. But the whole point of the public plan is to create a plan that is up and running quickly and constructed on the existing infrastructure of Medicare so that it can create competitive pressure for insurers and serve as a backup for consumers on day one. In 35 states, after all, the largest private insurer enrolls more than half of privately insured patients. Many of these plans are nonprofits already—the problem is that they don’t face a credible alternative.

That there is not a reasonable level of anger directed at the Senators who are sabotaging the health care reform efforts in this country is largely the fault of the media, which goes out of its way to emphasize Bi-partisanship when it should be excoriating lobbyist-directed obstructionism.

If there’s a reason why health care has failed to actually reform the system, it is because the media did not reveal the sordid process of creating the legislation. The public needs to inform itself, and use alternate media to stay informed on how their government and their money are being combined into an unholy alliance of influence and greed. If you haven’t figured out yet how money and influence work, you can’t really complain when the two are used to screw the American people. It should be a fairly simple and transparent process—when Senator or Congressman A makes a statement about scuttling needed reform, the media should immediately highlight the quarterly donations made by various health care corporations to the politician’s re-election coffers or PAC. The politician should then be forced to give a credible explanation as to how they can oppose the reform. The public should have all of that information well in hand on election day and vote accordingly. Politicians who can be bought off shouldn’t be re-elected. They should be thrown out of office, no matter what party they’re in.

If there’s no danger of being thrown out of office for unethical behavior—taking campaign donations in order to influence how a vote is going to be decided—then the American people get the government they deserve. I don’t know who’s more culpable—the public at large, that doesn’t seem to care, or the politicians who know the public doesn’t care.