Would we trust our military to a private company? Our foreign policy? Our tax system? Our election system? Of course not. These are critical needs and processes that Americans rightly demand to control directly. Why then do we trust one of our most vital needs--our health system--to private corporations?
The public option has been declared dead.
The public health insurance option died on Thursday, December 10, 2009, after a months-long struggle with Senate parliamentary procedure. The time of death was recorded as 11:12 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. --Huffington Post
An ungainly mob of conservative Americans, yelling at the top of their lungs, held sway over a United States Senate that ostensibly was charged with doing the peoples' business, a people that overwhelmingly favored a government administered public health plan. For these conservative Americans, healthcare is too important to be left in the hands of "government bureaucrats," despite the fact that the privatization of healthcare has strangled them as equally as it has those who are fed up with a corporate health cartel that has the American people by the throat.
Abraham Lincoln, the most famous Republican, set down in the Gettysburg Address a credo of American spirit that, in a few simple words, summed up the trust upon which the American government--and America herself--existed: of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the standard by which we measure our leaders and our shared institutions. Let us then hold private healthcare to that standard.
Of the people. Private healthcare is not of the people. Yes, it employs American people, but it is not a system the American people shaped or control for their own best intersts. It is a system built by an elite and very wealthy cartel of insurance executives, pharmaceutical executives, hospital executives, and doctors' professional organizations, all with one thing in mind: profits. In a country that willingly socializes its utilities, social services, military and a host of other shared needs, healthcare alone stands as the outlier. It is not of the people, it is of the corporation.
By the people. It is not by the people. The American people have no say-so in the quality or cost of their own healthcare. The mantra of market capitalism--people vote with their feet--does not apply here, because American healthcare is a corporate cartel. It is such a powerful cartel, that it actually has a legal exemption from this nation's anti-cartel laws that were enacted by another Republican--Teddy Roosevelt--to protect Americans from being strangled by those we once called robber barons.
For the people. The healthcare cartel does not exist for the people. How many medical coverage horror stories must we hear before we prosecute some of these companies for torture? How many Americans are denied coverage? How many can't afford the exorbitant costs? How high can this cartel ratchet up the premiums before we must choose between shoes or healthcare for the kids? You see, corporate healthcare does not exist for the people; it exists for the corporate cartel. If we are to judge by the trends we can glean from the thousands of horror stories, the cartel will reach perfection when it is allowed to treat and insure only those who are statistically most likely to not need its services. In other words, pure profit, for the cartel.
American conservatives have abandoned the idea of country that operates of the people, by the people, for the people. They have abandoned their own Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. They have branded of the people, by the people, for the people to be a "socialist" heresy. They have thrown their lot into a nightmare vision where "the corporation knows best." Conservatives like to portray themselves as grass roots. They are anything but. Conservatism today is rooted in the concrete headquarters of the all-powerful corporation, as far away from the grass, as far away from the people, as possible.