Republicans are right to oppose health care reform, for it will change the balance of power between their corporate sponsors and the working people of the United States. And to the extent that it shifts that power balance, it will break the chains that currently bind so many into a form of indentured servitude and near-slavery. To the naked capitalism that has fought every extension of labor rights in this country, from the Ludlow Massacre to the Pullman strike to the air traffic control strike, the consequence may well look like socialism.
I don’t know the numbers, and I am not sure it has ever been researched carefully, but everybody knows somebody (or YOU may be somebody) who has stayed in a miserable job with a miserable boss and a lousy package of pay and benefits because if you quit, you would lose health insurance coverage. Even if you got another job, if you have a pre-existing condition, the coverage in the new position might be reduced and/or more expensive. And although they are not supposed to consider this, your pre-existing condition may deter another employer from taking you on, because that would increase its health care costs.
People in this situation are basically locked in, and this gives the employer enormous leverage over work conditions, pay levels, benefits, and other intrusive practices. Objections meet with a pink slip, and now you are really screwed. So health care coverage becomes the tool by which American industry reduces labor mobility, undermines bargaining rights, controls labor unrest, and enjoys higher profits.
Health care reform undermines all that by breaking the link between health care and employment and by so doing it breaks a major element of indentured servitude and wage slavery.
But wait! There’s more!
The whole notion of pre-existing conditions developed by for-profit insurance companies that is so essential to block the mobility of labor in big and small business is created and fostered by big pharma, big food, and agribusiness. What proportion of the ads that you watch every night on TV come from agribusinesses that pack their products with corn syrup and encourage fast food and snack food, strongly linked to the epidemic of obesity and heart disease in America? And how many ads come from pharmaceutical companies that are pushing pills for the related bundle of medical conditions - heart disease, high cholesterol, sexual dysfunction, eye glasses, rheumatism, and neuropathy? And not to mention treatments for Alzheimer’s, asbestos poisoning, cancer. They urge you to go ask your doctor, and thereby sign up for a pre-existing condition!
It is not surprising that the opposition to health care reform is so virulent – health care reform is at heart a continuation of the civil rights movement, and the same opposing forces that were unleashed at the Pettis Bridge are stalking the streets in the Tea Party, with Dick Armey as the Grand Kleagle. The outrageous abuse and spit hurled at black Congressmen in DC makes the underlying racism clear. And the same arguments were used by the white supremacists against civil rights – states rights, socialism, "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it", tradition, and individual choice are all at work again, to maintain a system of slavery and indentured servitude that wreaks misery, reduces labor mobility and productivity, and fattens the purses of those who prosper from that system.
I’m just sayin’.