Tag health care reform

As I’m sure you know, the House of Representatives very narrowly passed the Democratic health care reform bill in a late-night session on Saturday. The House bill did manage to include the so-called public option and doing away with pre-existing condition exclusions, but otherwise is very little more than what President Obama himself famously called “putting lipstick on a pig” in terms of making any substantive changes to the system.

Thirty-six Democrats voted against the bill. The New York Times offers this excellent infographic about the “nays” and concludes that 22 of the 36 are freshman representatives in districts that normally go Republican, and those who aren’t are the infamous “Blue Dog” Democrats. But standing alone among these is Dennis Kucinich.

Congressman Kucinich voted against this bill for one very good reason: IT IS JUST ANOTHER HANDOUT TO A CORPORATE CONSTITUENCY. Just in case you can’t be bothered to read Kucinich’s entire statement, I’ll share a couple of points with you:

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick…

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies….

This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.

In the spin cycle that has followed the bill’s passage, the apologists for the Democratic leadership and the administration have argued that something is better than nothing, but that’s like saying instead of putting two dog turds in your hand, they only put one. There’s no serious reform aimed at the insurance companies at all, least of all the notion that the existence of the “public option” will force the insurance companies to give up their profit-driven denials of care and stonewalling of payments. Instead, what really happens is that the Democratic House leadership gets to score some questionable points, even when the Senate inevitably rejects their version of the bill, and Obama gets to avoid the blame for not being able to deliver on one of the most important domestic issues facing the country. So I guess that’s a “Win”, right? Bah.