[Cross-posted at The Left Coaster.]
Reading Matt Taibbi and the absurdity of the Obama administration trying to reform healthcare without repealing health insurance anti-trust exemption a plain fact forever clicked into place: nobody represented the little people in this outrage called healthcare reform, so the little people can expect little or nothing to change for the better when this Lucy-kabuki-summitry-insanity is finally over.
Single Payer? The one solution the rest of the industrialized world uses that could make such a difference for everyone? Surely you jest, liberal. Public Option? Mandates were campaigned against but suddenly here they are1, and after a cruel tease to the Democratic base the public option was finally dropped, God forbid competition could enter this hell of a forced market. Anti-trust? A year after starting a pathetic attempt will fail, according to Taibbi. Transparency and fairness? Right from the git-go of this torturous nightmare big pharma and Billy Tauzin got a secret deal so the drug industry got all kinds of breaks and protection. Did a group for the little people get a secret deal for all kinds of benefits at the end? Right.
Leaving aside the unforgivable potential electoral disaster this represents (one can endlessly debate the intelligence of the electorate, fine, but every single citizen in the Republic is going to instantly see how the little people got shafted and un-rescued when this nightmare is finally over) and the mystifying phenomena of a candidate promising Hope™ and Change® delivering nothing of the sort on both counts, just how in the hell did the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries get to be such all-powerful inviolate badass political power centers, the chump wannabee representatives of Congress mere pipsqueaks in their pockets?
Energy, Defense and Finance were and are the traditional bogeymen in thwarting change and equality in the United States, they certainly got theirs and damn well want the status quo to stay precisely the same. To this dubious list we can now add Health Insurance and Pharmaceuticals, they own Congress, obviously, and one can simply forget real meaningful progress and change for the little people in healthcare.
I’d like to know how an industry like health insurance and big pharma become one of the Inviolate Ones, forever coddled and protected by our government in their exploitation and cruelty. Does one have a GDP hurdle, does the industry have to be such-and –such percent of the economy? Can an industry just rankly decide to buy it? Of course they do, but how much does it cost?
I remember Obama emphatically stating during the campaign not to call him a liberal, he was on a new path free of the old battles of the past. At the time and since I chided him on the naïve childishness of it all, but in fact this absence of self-identification with liberalism and the little people should have been a huge warning sign that this politician wasn’t and isn’t going to work. Not for those struggling here, not for those yearning and desperate for change.
Only in Iraq and the Supreme Court has the promise come through, which isn’t nearly good enough. Until we elect an unabashed liberal proud to fight can we expect little change anywhere else.
[1] Proponents of this farce, I’ve noticed, have been playing a ridiculous and slimy trick of proclaiming Obamacare delivers universal coverage. Ah, yes, yes it does, with the fun little trick of forcing the uninsured to buy insurance from the sick bastards who got us into this unholy mess in the first place with their outrageous greed.
I forever wash my hands of this political insanity; subsidizing it only makes it worse. America has a stupid, atrocious journalism corps coupled with a brutal, cruel, authoritarian bitch opposition Republican Party; if and when mandated insurance is passed there is going to be vicious hell to pay, any possible faint merits of this absurd situation will be blasted to smithereens by viciously effective Republican talking points that will be gleefully carried on by the American propaganda corps, the truth nowhere to be found.
Good luck and have fun, Benen and Cole and Drum and Krugman and all the rest, you demanded this insanity, called on the little people and the base relentlessly to badger Congress to pass it. Are you going to be there every day, every hour as the US propaganda machine smashes our Party and people with it? Right. Even if you tried it couldn’t be done, and again, this political suicide has not one iota of my brain cells in it, when the Reaper arrives don’t look at me.