Talk about being part of the problem. Did you catch the NY Times photo this morning of the alleged small business owner wagging her finger at Obama over health care reform? The self-described "raging Republican" has another defining quality. Patty Briguglio is obese, a walking incubator of high-cost health problems like diabetes and heart disease. Her profound concern with reform? The cost, naturally, the Republican faux issue. But this is an age where irony is dead. The six allegedly moderate senators in whose hands reform seems to rest are feasting on cookies, chips, and soda pop during their deliberations. Their grave concern is of course cost, but since they already have superb government supplied health care, the cost to the rest of us of ruining their own arteries is not germane.
Indeed the fine people who represent us in Congress work tirelessly at their true vocation: serving their corporate paymasters. Health care reform's congressional critics frame the debate as virtuous free market competition against unfair government intervention. "... Republicans and some Democrats worry it [the public insurance option] would have an unfair advantage in competing with private insurers" Scott Horsley of NPR reported on July 28th.
The clear implication, always unquestioned by Horsley and his fellow transcribers of corporate propaganda, is that the status quo is a free market in health care and insurance, in which consumers benefit from price competition among providers and insurers. That's why you can shop around for the best price on a colonoscopy or kidney transplant, why your mailbox is flooded with insurers touting great deals to cover your cancer treatments, and why your doctor is rated for reliability and quality, just like your automobile. Sure.
Outside the halls of Congress we know that health insurance is a protected oligopoly whose profits depend on providing as little coverage as possible. The provider industry meanwhile combines a closed guild system in which artificial doctor shortages are maintained by medical schools and the AMA with a second protected oligopoly in the form of the giant pharmaceutical companies, hospital chains, and their associated medical groups. Consumer pricing power is limited to paying more or less for greater or lesser care. And that only applies to those who can afford insurance, or even qualify to get it, in the first place. The oligopolists neatly exclude the ill, the poor, and the unemployed.
The greatest fear of the supporters of the status quo is the very thing they falsely claim to champion: real competition. Which is of course exactly what a public insurance plan would provide.