There's a vile scent in the air; maybe you can smell it too. It ebbs and floes, but it never quite goes away.
What I mean is, I have the sense that we're going to get screwed yet again over health care.
More below the fold.
Let me first state something as fact, despite that it has been lied about mercilessly in the political process: anyone who has seriously looked at the situation knows that a single-payer universal health insurance system is better than any other known means for providing health care to a modern society. F. A. Hayek, the doyen of the modern theory of free market capitalism, knew it; other than that little matter, he'd probably be the most widely cited economist among right wing conservatives.
Anyway, there can be no serious question about it: a single-payer universal health insurance system would hands down be the best possible outcome of the health care debate. If you're not entirely convinced, compare the ratio of administrative expenses to premiums among private health insurance (around 15%) with the same ratio for Medicare (around 3%). There is absolutely no room for legitimate debate. I'm actually semi-qualified to state that as a professional opinion.
And still, our politicians have been dancing around the issue, from Obama on down. (To be fair to Obama, it is likely that the lying about the matter is so thick and the fix is in so deeply that he regards doing the obvious right thing as a political impossibility.)
So maybe it's time to raise the stakes.
The insurance and pharma industries that have been funding the obfuscation about health care are selling politicians the following story, basically: put a band-aid on the gaping bleeding wound of health care in this country, and the majority of the people in the country who are not immediately and directly affected by how badly our health care system has failed will believe for the moment that the problem has been addressed (until the hemorrhaging inevitably starts to endanger the patient's life again ...).
And the people who are directly affected by the problem are a minority that probably is under-represented in voting, given that they accept that the government is uninterested in serving their interests (a vicious circle, when you get down to it).
So, after seeing Michael Moore's film "Sicko," what really made the biggest impression on me was one of the American expats he interviewed in France saying that in America the people are afraid of the government, but in France the government is afraid of the people. And indeed you generally don't have to wait too long before you see a news item about this group or that shutting down a big part of the French economy through their protests.
Why can't we do something like that here?
I don't think we can generally do a massive labor strike here: we have very conservative worker protections here, and a lot of people would just be fired if they participated in a labor strike over something like health care. I expect that I'd be fired, for example, if I announced too openly that I was skipping work to participate in a strike over health care (it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for me, but it wouldn't be my first choice, other things being equal). Anyway, a labor strike affecting government policy would have to be monstrously huge and monumentally organized to be effective, and if it fell short it would probably result in punishments for its participants and a major setback for labor rights in America.
But something we can do pretty easily is to have a consumer strike. We're in a very deep and bad recession now, and our economy can ill-afford even a mild intentional consumer strike. Our general thinking in this country is that, unlike employment, consumption is accepted as being fully within the individual's control, with no explanation required for anything and no repercussions for any political statements made through it: if you went on strike to protest something political, you're employer might fire you for missing work for a political reason; but if you refuse to buy goods and services from a long list of companies over the same political cause, few people would bat an eyelash. And indeed if someone punished you over it (as for example your employer firing you), he rather than you would widely be viewed as the bad guy.
Given the precarious state of the economy, again it would not take much of a consumer strike to tank the entire thing: everyone could continue to buy all necessities; it would just be the optional purchases that are avoided. Keep the car running another year or two rather than buying a new one; curtail dining out; let your clothes get a little more threadbare than you'd normally tolerate; go camping rather than vacationing in a hotel. Etc.
And make no mistake, tanking the entire economy should be the threat: if Congress decides on a course of chronic disease for the economy, symptomized by the regular failure (even death) of its most vulnerable participants, we should co-opt the course by instead directing the economy to a precipitous and immediate collapse. Hopefully, it would never come to this, but it seems pretty clear to me that Congress is owned by big insurance (I happen to know more about that aspect of it than what you read in the papers, and trust me it is really, really bad) and big pharma, and they are once again going to screw the people they are supposed to be representing -- that would be us -- unless there is an overwhelming reason to do otherwise.
I think we should give them that reason, and be unapologetic about it.