Health Care Flim Flam

You’d think the end of the world is nigh the way President Obama and the Democrats are talking about the health care bill. “Now or never,” they say, or “a flawed bill is better than no bill,” and “if we don’t pass a bill now, we won’t have another chance.” Much of the jabber is of a political nature, with the Democrats focused on the implications of failing to pass a bill rather than passing a bill that will really qualify as “reform.” Obama is campaigning for the bill as if his political future depends on it, framing his talk as the American people against the special interests, which is about as dishonest as it gets if you examine the history of this legislation over the past year.

The special interests -- insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospital lobbies, the American Medical Association, the United States Chamber of Commerce – controlled the debate from the outset. The first thing they made sure of was to sweep real reform from the table by dismissing Medicare for All as unrealistic, even though a majority of Americans support expanding Medicare. Average people understand that a publicly financed, privately delivered health care system is efficient and cost-effective.

If the bill about to emerge from Congress becomes law, some citizens will be forced to buy health insurance from the very companies that have been reaping profits by denying care, dropping the sick, and creating a gauntlet of barriers that only a team of corporate lawyers can decipher.

What will this “historic reform bill,” as the New York Times describes it, do for you and yours? As far as I can tell, it won’t do squat to reduce my employer’s $10 million annual premium, which means that cost increases will continue to be passed to employees. Another two or three years of double digit premium hikes and it won’t surprise me one bit if my employer is forced to drop its health insurance plan all together.

Politics is said to be the art of the possible, but what can one hope for when what is possible is limited from the opening bell? Regardless of what happens with this health bill, the United States will still have a dismal health care delivery system that is expensive, inefficient and unfair. Sick people, be they young or old, will continue to die unnecessarily because to treat them appropriately would cut into insurance company and Big Pharma profits, and that’s a no-no in a country dominated by corporate interests.