If your head hasn't yet exploded in considering the state of the health care reform legislation process, I offer you Matt Taibbi writing in Rolling Stone, which piece nails, nails, nails it in all its absolute Alice in Wonderland Through the Looking Glass warped and bent glory.
Details below the fold.
So I happen to mostly adore the writing of Matt Taibbi, who is so sly and snarky, and I love the contributions he makes on Bill Maher's show, for example. And he's written a piece for Rolling Stone that Common Dreams picked up which can be found here:
Matt Taibbi: How Washington Is Screwing Up Health Care Reform
You have to hand it to someone who can write this:
Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment - a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable - and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Matt then breaks it all down for us, lays it out. Word is that President Obama has decided he needs to write his own bill now? Because Congress can't write one? Matt reminds us:
Here's where we are right now: Before Congress recessed in August, four of the five committees working to reform health care had produced draft bills. On the House side, bills were developed by the commerce, ways and means, and labor committees. On the Senate side, a bill was completed by the HELP committee (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Ted Kennedy). The only committee that didn't finish a bill is the one that's likely to matter most: the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by the infamous obfuscating dick Max Baucus, a right-leaning Democrat from Montana who has received $2,880,631 in campaign contributions from the health care industry.
And then, says Matt, Baucus himself instead of reveling in his status of chairman from the majority party, turns the whole shebang over to an evenly split gang of six, putting the Republicans back in the drivers seat again! And of course the three Republicans are also deeply in thrall to the big health care corporations, especially Grassley. (However, he reveals that Snowe got about 700K from the industry. Surely the DNC could just offer to replace that funding if she votes our way???)
Taibbi really helped me by laying out the ways Congress has already sabotaged this reform process (with some help from the White House). Discrete steps, starting with "aiming low" by ignoring the single payer option from the get-go, "gutting the public option" and putting in plenty of loopholes, and wrapping it all up by "blowing the math."
It's so deeply depressing to see the process described in such detail. But if you have to read about it, Matt Taibbi is one to read. It's just like a toothache you obsessively probe with your tongue to read bits like this:
If things go the way it looks like they will, health care reform will simply force great numbers of new people to buy or keep insurance of a type that has already been proved not to work. "The IRS and the government will force people to buy a defective product," says Woolhandler. "We know it's defective because three-quarters of all people who file for bankruptcy because of medical reasons have insurance when they get sick - and they're bankrupted anyway."
There's so much choice and pithy and snarky writing in this piece; go read it, and laugh/weep at our government's process and performance as Matt sees it. Here's the one that really was the nail in the coffin for me:
We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.