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.
- Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone 9/3/09 (The Beatles are on the cover with a breaking story about their Breakup?)
....and Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone can blow me for not putting this article online for the masses yesterday. Go ahead Jann, enjoy the income because pretty soon the disposable income your customers used to have for a magazine is going to be used to pay for some backroom dentist somewhere.
Meanwhile, Go Buy this Magazine. I've excerpted just a bit below. Taibbi puts forth a scathing indictment of EVERYONE involved in this health care reform fiasco, including Barack Obama and including all of us reading this blog. Well, maybe with the exception of NYCEVE.
There are a precious few nuggets on the Rolling Stone website, but you gotta buy it until somebody decides to post it somewhere.
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
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
Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care.
Almost every single one of the main players – from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus – found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up.
Taibbi points out that Baucus has received $2,880,631 in campaign contributions for the health care industry, Grassley is over 2M as well
A few choice Taibbisms:
Without a public option, any effort at health care reform will be as meaningful as a manicure for a gunshot victim
The White House makes a serial vacillator like Bill Clinton look like Patton crossing the Rhine.
The Limbaugh minions look like morons for protesting as socialism a reform effort designed to preserve our private system at all costs.
The End:
It’s a joke, the whole thing, a parody of Solomonic governance. By the time all the various bills are combined, health care will be a baby not split in half but in fourths and eights and fractions of eighths. Its what happens when a government accustomed to dealing on the level of perception tries to take on a profound emergency that exists in reality. No matter how hard Congress may try, though, it simply is not possible to paper over a crisis this vast.
Then again, some of the blame has to go to all of us. It’s more than a little conspicuous that the same electorate that poured its heart out last year for the Hallmark-card story line of the Obama campaign has not been seen much in this health care debate. The handful of legislators = the Weiners, Kuciniches, Wydens and Sanderses – who are fighting for something real should be doing so with armies at their back. Instead, all the noise is being made on the other side. Not so stupid after all – they at least, understand that politics is a fight that does not end with wearing of a T-shirt in November.