That assessment comes from about as far inside corporate America as you can burrow, Business Week, in a report appearing Thursday.
While the rightwing mobs storming the town halls are attracting much of the media notice, most of the press has again missed this major story line on the healthcare debate.
While that assessment seems to have escaped some, many in labor have noticed and are furious and fed up with their supposed champions in Congress, as the Las Vegas Sun reports today.
The Sun cites a dramatic letter to other labor leaders from Michael Sullivan, president of the Sheet Metal Workers International Association, who issued a letter to labor leaders at the AFL-CIO’s executive council meeting last week, announcing:
The Sheet Metal Workers have suspended "all future financial or intangible contributions" to federal candidates. He asked the federation’s affiliates to join him, saying a small group of "pro-business" Democrats were reneging on their health care promises after they won office with labor’s support. "One union will not have much effect," Sullivan said. "However, working together will send a strong message that will not be ignored."
Sullivan is not alone. Greg Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, sharply criticized some Democrats for, as the Sun put it, "what he called cowardice in the face of Republican opposition.
"These coin-flipping Democrats haven’t shown themselves to be strong advocates for anything resembling real, responsible reform," he said. "Apparently there are a heck of a lot of people in the Democratic Party who seem to have short memories. If we don’t get health care or labor law reform, our members are going to come back to us and ask, ‘What was all that work for?’ " As for those Democrats who don’t deliver: "They are not getting anything from us — not a penny, not a phone call, nothing."
The Sun also quotes Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, citing the fateful and shortsighted decision of labor to not unify behind a "single payer" health care plan, which she says ceded too much ground to the administration and congressional Democrats.
"You wonder how labor ever negotiates a contract when you look at the health care debate," she said. "We walked into these discussions with a white flag. Now no one is pushing Obama from the left, he’s getting bombarded from the right and he’s out there by himself. In some ways we put him in that position."
Labor leaders, the Sun concludes, said Democrats "were backsliding in the face of steady opposition, efforts they blamed on Republicans and their allies." As DeMoro put it: "Corporate America is winning this debate."
If you think that is hyperbole, take a long look at the Business Week report:
much more of the battle than most people realize is already over. The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and WellPoint. The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable.
They've won, says Business Week, in a variety of ways. For example:
The industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business.
UnitedHealth has distinguished itself by more deftly and aggressively feeding sophisticated pricing and actuarial data to information-starved congressional staff members. With its rivals, the carrier has also achieved a secondary aim of constraining the new benefits that will become available to tens of millions of people who are currently uninsured. That will make the new customers more lucrative to the industry.
And, that doesn't include the billions in new profits the insurance industry will harvest from the millions of new customers forced to buy insurance as a result of the requirement mandating everyone buy insurance or face major penalties, the subsidies the government will provide to some low income people that is a pass through to the insurers, and the failure to curb the insurance industry price gouging in premiums and out of pocket costs that is driving millions of Americans into bankruptcy or prompting them to self-ration needed care.
Here's how Business Week puts it:
What people in Washington tend not to discuss, at least on the record, is the open secret that insurers are minimizing their forecasts of the eventual windfall they will enjoy from expanded coverage for Americans.... "The bottom line," says an aide to the Senate Finance Committee, "is that health reform would lead to increased revenues and profits (for the insurance industry).
The fight is not over, but to use a football analogy, it is the fourth quarter and the insurance industry and its allies are up by about three touchdowns.
There's still time for progressive activists to pressure legislators to support HR 676 (Conyers) and S 703 (Sanders) coming up on the House floor -- which would at least send a strong signal to the opposition -- and to support the "Kucinich amendment" to HR3200 permitting states to innovate and establish single-payer systems by waiving federal ERISA limitations.
If the compromises and catering to corporate interests all seem to be going in one direction in this healthcare debate, the outcome will be sadly predictable. That should be a message to all of us.