Obama's Deal

Bryan commented on Frontline on 11.19.10
Normally I find Frontline to be hardhitting and informative, living up to high standards of investigative journalism. However, this episode, while instructive, fell flat at the end. We are left from your program with the notion that the bill was worth the effort. Indeed, the final words quoted were that this was an “historic” occasion. Really? Where was the analysis that showed, as Ralph Nader pointed out months ago, that “the fix was in” on this bill even before Obama or any Democrats had been elected in 2008? The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries had long planned for what to do in case the next president was a Democrat. The industries fully expected the effort to reform health care delivery, long dormant since the Clinton debacle, to be revived under a new Democratic president, and accordingly they began positioning themselves for “seats at the table” well in advance of the election. The bill not only leaves in place but also strengthens the role played by the main culprit. As long as insurers are still in the game, then this socalled “reform” bill is not worthy of the name. It is badly compromised. All you need to know about it is that the stocks of the insurance industry rose in response to its passage. What did we, the public, get out of it? Well what do you know insurers can no longer arbitrarily deny people coverage because of “preexisting conditions.” My goodness, for this concession, the industry now has a captive consumer audience of tens of millions more paying customers. I’d say they made out like bandits in the bargain, especially since they still do not have any incentive to lower costs. They still can charge whatever they want, whatever “the market” can bear. Obama and the Democrats performed a complete sellout of their stated principles to get “universal” care. Instead, they forced us to buy a defective product health insurance, not health care in which the insurers can continue ratcheting up the cost of health care and still look for creative ways to limit coverage. That is the inevitable, perverse consequence of insisting that health care be a commodity bought and sold in a manipulated market rather than a public good paid for by society at large. Everything has indeed backfired for the Democrats. Brown’s win here in Massachusetts was an early harbinger of the November elections. The Democrats have predictably snatched defeat from the jaws of their 2008 victory. They chose once again to play to the middle and compromise everything of any value in pursuit of a chimerical “bipartisanship,” a fruitless seeking of nonexistent consensus with their implacable enemies. So it goes for Obama’s “Kumbaya” approach to governing, which belies the notion that people like his chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel were real fighters. They only would up fighting for the insurers in the end, not for the American people.