Those who were trying to predict how
the Supreme Court would come down on the “Affordable Healthcare
Act” should have taken a cue from the Citizens United decision.
It shouldn't have been a big
surprise that the high court would
uphold a scheme hatched by the conservative think tank Heritage
Foundation and supported by crony capitalists Newt Gingrich, Orrin
Hatch, and Richard Lugar.
A
quick history: The individual mandate was first proposed
in a 1989 book by members of the Heritage Foundation. In 1993,
Republicans included it in their
alternative to “Hillarycare.” Hillary was against the mandate at that time. But after becoming Senator, and after becoming the second
largest recipient of health industry contributions in the Senate
(behind Rick Santorum), she magically reversed her stance and argued
FOR an individual mandate. Then Presidential candidate Barack Obama
argued against it. A few months later, after becoming President,
Obama included the mandate in his healthcare plan, but surely it had
nothing to do with the fact that the healthcare industry had, by that
time, become Obama's third largest source of campaign contributions,
right behind lawyers and banksters.
Are
you starting to see the pattern?
The
“Affordable Health Care Act” is really just more corporate
welfare behind a facade of providing universal healthcare. Written
largely by corporate lobbyists, the law provides nearly a half a
trillion dollars in subsidies for
the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, forces public citizens
to purchase a product from those same industries, and is not
universal.
According
to Physicians for a National Health Plan, Obamacare will leave at
least 23 million people without insurance, a figure that translates
into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths per year.
Obama
himself recognized that the individual mandate was a bad idea, that
is until he had a “change of heart.” During his 2008 campaign he
argued, “If a
mandate was the solution, we could solve homelessness by mandating
everybody to buy a house.”
Obama was right! (before he was wrong)
– against it before he was for it (just like Hillary). And in
wonderfully amusing twist, his opponent Mitt Romney was for it before
he was against it. Together these two ass clowns have probably been on
every side of every major issue in the last ten years, depending on
which way the wind was blowing the money in from.
What
the healthcare issue has highlighted is that very few of our
politicians have a core, and frankly, most American voters don't
either. Republicans are against everything Obama is for, even if it's
the same freedom smashing Patriot Act they were FOR when Bush was
President. Democrats support everything Obama supports, even if it's
assassinating U.S. citizens, forgetting how loudly they cried when
Bush was torturing suspected terrorists. Personal integrity hasn't
survived the onslaught of political idiocy any more than governmental
integrity has... but I digress.
There
are three basic options in how healthcare can be delivered:
- Free market
- Single payer
- Corporatist
Even
from a libertarian perspective, it's not hard to see that the least
efficient option, the one most likely to trample our freedoms, and
the one most likely to perpetuate division among the citizens, is
number three. Now I know I may get some heat from some of my
libertarian friends, but I wouldn't fight a single payer system for a
New York minute. There are far more evil things that our government
does, and far more important issues to get worked up over like... oh,
I don't know... the imminent collapse of our entire economic system.
While
I would have serious concerns about cost, efficiency, and
availability under a single payer system, I think we could figure it
out, especially if we scrapped the chin deep shit pile of regulations
and programs that we currently have, and started from scratch. Should
we really be rewarding poor people for pumping out more kids? And
what is the only part of our current medical system that doesn't
totally suck? Medicare. And guess what folks, it's single payer.
Public
healthcare advocate, Dr. Margaret Flowers, makes the point much more
eloquently than I ever could (minus the colorful language), “If
the U.S. Congress had considered an evidence-based approach to health
reform instead of writing a bill that funnels more wealth to
insurance companies that deny and restrict care, it would have been a
no-brainer to adopt a single payer health system much like our own
Medicare. We are already spending enough on health care in this
country to provide high-quality, universal, comprehensive, lifelong
health care.”
Regarding
the goodies in Obamacare: requiring insurance companies to cover
people with pre-existing conditions is fine by me, and I'm happy as a clam in a pool of rum that
my 17 year old daughter will be able to remain on my insurance plan
for another decade, because god knows she might not be able to find a
job before then. There is a shiny object or two in this plan for
almost every crow, but sadly, like most things that
come out of Washington, it's mostly
window dressing. Until something changes drastically in government
and society as a whole, the rich will continue to get richer and the
powerful will become even more powerful.
Perhaps
Chris Hedges, journalist and self-described socialist, said it best,
“It is the very sad legacy of
the liberal class that it proves in election cycle after election
cycle that it espouses moral and political positions it will not pay
a price to defend. And since we will not punish politicians like
Obama who betray our core beliefs, the corporate juggernaut rolls
forward with its inexorable pace to cement into place our global
neofeudalism.”
Similar
admonishments could be made of the conservative class. After all, Republicrats
are all cut from the same cloth, the only difference is some is
wearing red and some is wearing blue, and the Supreme Court may as
well be wearing purple. Not in the compromise way, but in the monarchal
way.
As
with Citizens United, the SCOTUS healthcare decision was nothing more
than another victory for crony corporatism. Didn't see that comin'.
