It seems absolutely assured that there is no American problem or catastrophe that will not be dealt with by our government by lavish, staggering public giveaways to the very corporations most directly responsible for the problem. We are currently mired in a Great Recession, to use the term that seems most commonplace at the moment; the result of which has been trillions of dollars in giveaways and subsidies to the banking and insurance giants whose foolish, outright stupid acts caused the very collapse we are saving them and us from. They are Too Big To Fail, and you and I are not, and so you and I can suck eggs, from our elected leaders point of view. There is apparently no war too costly for us to fund indefinitely; there is no apparently stimulus package that can exist unless it funnels money only to the top of the economic chain, and not the bottom. We talk glowingly about putting Social Security in the hands of Wall Street tycoons, a new and immense treasure chest for them to play with, to collect fees on, and to gamble with at will. We provide lavish tax breaks to extraction companies, to oil companies that make record amounts of cash. America's auto industry has mismanaged themselves for decades, fighting every government request; we will come to their aid now, yet again, because they are also Too Big To Fail.
So it should have been transparently obvious from the outset that the only response our glorious and wizened Senate could come up with, when facing a failed healthcare system that has been steadily bankrupting the country, its businesses and its citizens for decades, would be to invent a solution in which the companies most responsible for the problem would be given cash hand over fist. And indeed, that seems to be the "solution" that is closer to fruition than any of the others.
The premise in this case is a mandate in which every American shall be forced to buy private insurance. Apparently that is uncontroversial, to our leaders, but the notion of providing a government-backed plan for those who do not want their health and welfare tied to the same companies that have been screwing them over for decades, now that is a bridge too far.
Let me be clear. To me, such a plan represents the very pinnacle of corruption, of corporate toadyism, and of the complete dissolution of effective government into merely being a legal framework for corporations to most efficiently extract wealth from the nation. And the day such a plan passes, I will no longer be a Democrat.
Max Baucus is a crook. There, I said it outright. Ben Nelson? A crook. Grassley, Boehner, McConnell, Hoyer and the others? Crooks. Not "conservative", not "fiscal watchdogs", not "representing their own peculiar constituents", none of that hogwash and drivel that churns up our airwaves on a daily basis. They join the long line of leaders that rake in more cash from health insurers, pharmaceutical companies and the like than you or I are likely to see in our lifetimes, and in exchange for that they are the unquestioned _kingmakers_ of reform, and all the nation must bow down to them and to those that have paid them more cash than any of their own constituents have been able to shell out. With regularity, every industry under the American spotlight will turn to "friendly" senators and representatives, where friendly means nothing more than plied with cash, and in them they will find regulatory salvation for a relative pittance. It does not represent corruption under our system of government simply because we have carefully designed our government to freely allow it. Corporations are people, after all, and people have freedom of speech, and dollars represent speech, and therefore the person with the most dollars is entitled to the most representation.
That, then, is the American way. Anything else you may have learned in school is a farce meant for children.
The current premise is that a public option -- that is, the government providing the same sort of insurance program as Medicare, but for all their citizens and not just the elderly -- is very nearly a nonstarter, because we Americans are apparently supposed to believe that our government providing insurance to a seventy year old is a noble service, but providing that same service to a fifty year old is socialism, and providing that same service to a twenty year old or a ten year old is something that only a goddamned Hitler would do. We can have public fire departments, public police departments, federal disaster relief, flood insurance and whatnot, but keeping you alive and out of bankruptcy if you get sick is an abomination. Never mind that we are alone among the most advanced countries in this regard; never mind that our current system is both among the most expensive and least effective. We are supposed to believe chaos will ensue if we follow the same path as other nations, because the industry that has the most profit to lose if a "public option" is available has sent phalanxes of lobbyists out to assert that everything is, in fact, Just Goddamned Fine, and a hellscape elsewhere. Because the lobbyists say it, the legislators say it. Because the legislators say it, the partisan press says it.
Doesn't matter that it's not true. Doesn't matter that there are no death panels, that there are no death booklets, that Stephen Hawking is not, in fact, dead from being British. We have yet to punish any politician or any news organization for baldly lying to us, so long as it is a lie that satisfies us to hear.
Fine; let us presume that we are too corrupt, as a nation, to consider promotion of the health and welfare of our citizens as being equal in importance to the health and welfare of, say, Goldman Sachs. Still, then, at the very least we ought to be able to come up with some solution that does not make the problem explicitly worse than it was when we first tackled it, some solution that does not take a solvable problem and turn it into nothing more than an excuse to funnel yet more money into the hands of corporations already sucking the well-being of their own nation dry. We should be able to, but given the basic structure of our Senate, which cannot pass any legislation that harms a corporate interest in any substantive way, so long as that interest has made the appropriate donations to the appropriate legislators, it seems evident that even that small request might be too much.
The so-called "private mandate" made sense in the context of a truly national solution: like Social Security, all Americans would pay into it, or opt out in favor of their own private insurance, and all Americans would in turn receive benefit from it, or from their own private insurance. It provides universal coverage. It does not rely on each American making a Vegas wager on whether or not they will be injured given a during year, and being reduced to destitution or death if they make the wrong guess.
But absent a public solution, and absent meaningful reform of the existing private system, it is nonsensical. It is worse than nonsensical, because it mandates a marketplace for a product that will not substantively assist people in actual need of healthcare. Each company will price an insurance option to be whatever the subsidy turns out to be; that insurance will be provided to be as shoddy as possible, with massive deductibles, gigantic loopholes, and all the other tricks of the insurance trade rolled into whatever bottom-rung "package" is deemed the minimal necessary.
If someone were to actually get sick, an insurance policy with a $20,000, or $50,000, or $100,000 deductable -- so-called "junk" insurance, of the sort that is becoming more and more prevelant as insurance companies price their other products steadily out of reach of more and more consumers -- will not prevent bankruptcy. It will not provide preventative care, of the sort that would stop illnesses before they became catastrophic. It would do nothing to curtail costs. It would do nothing to fix our broken emergency rooms.
It would act only as massive, all-encompassing national subsidy to the very insurance companies who have made healthcare so unaffordable in the first place. It would be exactly the same as placing Social Security in the hands of the private sector, bidding them farewell, and letting the retirement accounts of the entire nation be funneled into the same barely-regulated, never-accountable companies that have sent the economies of the entire world into a tailspin.
Enough is enough -- that is all I can think of to say. I know full well the underlying premise: the notion is that the insurance companies will, in exchange for having every single American in the country as captive consumers of their products, give up their policy of denying coverage to people who are actually sick. They will begrudgingly trade away their ability to deny "preexisting conditions", which at this point consist of every illness, proto-illness or maybe-illness you have ever had in your entire life, and will be more hesitant to retroactively revoke every cent of your coverage (but not refund your money) if you have the audacity to start costing them serious money.
But a trade of mandated purchase of a for-profit, private product in exchange for a meager promise to not abuse customers is -- let's all say it together, for good measure -- goddamned asinine. The government of the United States should not have to bargain to get an abusive industry to be slightly less abusive. What a fucking insulting thought. Especially when (1) the industry in question has a historical pattern of rampant customer abuse, and (2) when our Noble and Brilliant Goddamn Legislators have no recent history of being able to enforce corporate competence or fairness on any industry, at any point in the last several decades. The notion that suddenly, in exchange for a windfall of a trillion dollars or so, one of the most hated, manipulative, dishonest industries in America will suddenly become worthy of nationally mandated fealty is so preposterous that it could only be dreamed up by someone as crooked as a politician.
So count me against, without reservation, the Worst Possible Goddamn Outcome Yet Devised. I have to believe that a mandate for all Americans to buy private, for profit health insurance, absent a public option, absent serious regulation, is not going to happen. Yes, it looks like there are members of the Senate willing to go for it, but I have to believe that more sensible heads would gut such a moronic plan, such an obvious and transparent corporate giveaway on such a massive scale, as being a ridiculous and humiliating premise even by recent piss-poor standards.
But I am probably wrong, because underestimating the willful cronyism, the absolute craven crookedness in favor of corporate giveaways by both Republicans and Democrats alike is at this point little more than a parlor game: no matter how cynical you may be, you can bet that the reality is worse. You can bet that the outcome will be worse than you thought, that the regulation will be pathetic than you could have imagined, that the oversight after the fact will be totally non-existent.
It is not even about the so-called "public option", at this point. It is not, narrowly, even about the so-called "private mandate" itself. It is about how the Senate can take absolutely any national crisis and turn it into a corporate giveaway. None of these people deserve to be trusted any farther than they can jump to snatch a dollar from your hand; the whole institution seems bent on proving itself irrelevant at best, and devoutly crooked at worst.
So yes, I am spitting mad that such asinine proposals are even being considered. The Senate has totally lost any pretense of being able to effectively govern, and there seems little left to do about it short of running every last one of them out of town on a rail. The notion of forcing every American, by law, to purchase a crappy, barely-regulated, for-profit product that won't actually do them anything but a bare trickle of goddamn good if they do get sick is proof enough that the jury is unabashedly rigged, and the notion of repairing our American healthcare system because it is the right thing to do is a distant and despised thought.
I do not know what the outcome of this legislative dance will be, but all the players have made their intents absolutely clear. If once again, the only outcome acceptable to our senate, our representatives or our president is, yet again, after all this, after every other fight, yet another corporate giveaway piled high on the backs of every last American, I will not support even one of the goddamn politicians that vote for such a thing.
We have been more than patient; we have been more than accommodating. But no more. Our parties are kept properties of those that finance them; our politicians are so intent on not biting the hands of the most powerful one percent that the needs of the other ninety-nine percent are continually reduced to begrudging afterthought. The Republican Party has joyfully reduced themselves to a band of bigots, of know-nothings and nihilists, who to a person would rather peddle the most absurd, fear-mongering lies than engage in actual governance of the sort they were elected to -- they stand for nothing, at this point, and can hardly be called a political movement at all. The Democratic Party continues to be at war with itself, trying to toe the line between being bought and remaining in power, knowing that there is only so many corporate fanfares that can be blared out from Capitol Hill before the public comes to the conclusion that they, too, represent no one but themselves.
Yes, it is a harsh pronouncement, but there are only so many years that a nation can be patient, and only so many crises that can be resolved by funneling cash to America's corporate behemoths. We are either a nation or we are a subsidiary.
So I am done. It is this fight, or nothing. We have been asked to put up with war crimes, because "moving forward" is the more conciliatory path. We have been asked to stomach the politicization of the highest offices in our system of justice, because investigating it would be divisive. Time and time again we have asked for nothing more than our government to enforce its own goddamned laws, or to take action against the worst and most corrupt abusers of its citizens, whether done by government or by balance sheet, and we have gotten between nothing and jack-squat in return. We have gotten worse than nothing: we have gotten corporate immunity for lawbreakers, we have gotten tacit approval of the methods of murdering thugs, we have set in stone the notion that there is absolutely no corporate fuckup so damaging to the economy of the entire nation that it would result in substantive regulatory restraints.
No more. This fight is the last and final test; whether or not our leaders are so corrupt as to be irredeemable should be easily gleanable by whether or not they are able to bring themselves to even try on this, the one fight that every last one of them has supposedly been saving their strength for. It is this or nothing, and I will be damn proud, at the end of it, to abandon those who have so completely abandoned us.
