osted on Apr 9, 2012
Chris Hedges
The debate surrounding the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act illustrates the impoverishment of our
political life. Here is a law that had its origin in the right-wing
Heritage Foundation, was first put into practice in 2006 in
Massachusetts by then-Gov. Mitt Romney and was solidified into federal
law after corporate lobbyists wrote legislation with more than 2,000
pages. It is a law that forces American citizens to buy a deeply
defective product from private insurance companies. It is a law that is
the equivalent of the bank bailout bill—some $447 billion in subsidies
for insurance interests alone—for the pharmaceutical and insurance
industries. It is a law that is unconstitutional. And it is a law by
which President Barack Obama, and his corporate backers, extinguished
the possibilities of both the public option and Medicare for all
Americans. There is no substantial difference between Obamacare and
Romneycare. There is no substantial difference between Obama and Romney.
They are abject servants of the corporate state. And if you vote for
one you vote for the other.
But you would never know this by listening
to the Democratic Party and the advocacy groups that purport to support
universal health care but seem more intent on re-electing Obama. 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 have no fight
in us, 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.
Protesting outside the Supreme Court
recently as it heard arguments on the constitutionality of the
Affordable Care Act were both conservatives from Americans for Prosperity who denounced the president as a socialist and demonstrators from Democratic front groups such as the SEIU and the Families USA
health care consumer group who chanted “Protect the law!” Lost between
these two factions were a few stalwarts who hold quite different views,
including public health care advocates Dr. Margaret Flowers, Dr. Carol Paris
and attorneys Oliver Hall, Kevin Zeese and Russell Mokhiber. They
displayed a banner that read: “Single Payer Now! Strike Down the Obama
Mandate!” They, at least, have not relinquished the demand for single
payer health care for all Americans. And I throw my lot in with these
renegades, dismissed, no doubt, as cranks or dreamers or impractical by
those who flee into the embrace of empty political theater and junk
politics. These single payer advocates, joined by 50 doctors, filed a brief to the court that challenges, in the name of universal health care, the individual mandate.
“We have the solution, we have the
resources and we have the money to provide lifelong, comprehensive,
high-quality health care to every person,” Dr. Flowers said when we
spoke a few days ago in Washington, D.C. Many Americans have not
accepted the single payer approach “because people get confused by the
politics,” she said. “People accept the Democratic argument that this
[Obamacare] is all we can have or this is something we can build on.
“If you are trying to meet the goal of
universal health coverage and the only way to meet that goal is to force
people to purchase private insurance, then you might consider that it
is constitutional,” Flowers said. “Our argument is that the individual
mandate does not meet the goal of universality. When you attempt to use
the individual mandate and expansion of Medicaid for coverage, only
about half of the uninsured gain coverage. This is what we have seen in
Massachusetts. We do, however, have systems in the United States that
could meet the goal of universality. That would be either a Veterans
Administration type system, which is a socialized system run by the
government, or a Medicare type system, a single payer, publicly financed
health care system. 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. All the data point to a single payer system as the
only way to accomplish this and control health care costs.”
Obamacare will, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a
National Health Plan (PNHP), leave at least 23 million people without
insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated 23,000 unnecessary
deaths a year among people who cannot afford care. Costs will continue
to climb. There are no caps on premiums, including for people with
“pre-existing conditions.” The elderly can be charged three times the
rates provided to the young. Companies with predominantly female
workforces can be charged higher gender-based rates. Most of us will
soon be paying about 10 percent of our annual incomes to buy commercial
health insurance, although this coverage will pay for only about 70
percent of our medical expenses. And those of us who become seriously
ill, lose our incomes and cannot pay the skyrocketing premiums are
likely to be denied coverage. The dizzying array of loopholes in the
law—written in by insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists—means, in
essence, that the healthy will receive insurance while the sick and
chronically ill will be priced out of the market.
Medical bills already lead to 62 percent of
personal bankruptcies, and nearly 80 percent of those declaring
personal bankruptcy because of medical costs had insurance. The U.S.
spends twice as much per capita on health care as other industrialized
nations, $8,160. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31
percent of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a
single, nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year,
enough, the PNHP estimates, to provide comprehensive, high-quality
coverage for all Americans.
But as long as corporations determine
policy, as long as they can use their money to determine who gets
elected and what legislation gets passed, we remain hostages. It matters
little in our corporate state that nearly two-thirds of the public
wants single payer and that it is backed by 59 percent of doctors.
Public debates on the Obama health care reform, controlled by corporate
dollars, ruthlessly silence those who support single payer. The Senate
Finance Committee, chaired by Max Baucus, a politician who gets more
than 80 percent of his campaign contributions from outside his home
state of Montana, locked out of the Affordable Care Act hearing a number
of public health care advocates including Dr. Flowers and Dr. Paris;
the two physicians and six other activists were arrested and taken away.
Baucus had invited 41 people to testify. None backed single payer.
Those who testified included contributors who had given a total of more
than $3 million to committee members for their political campaigns.
“It is not necessary to force Americans to
buy private health insurance to achieve universal coverage,” said
Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action.
“There is a proven alternative that Congress didn’t seriously consider,
and that alternative is a single payer national health insurance
system. Congress could have taken seriously evidence presented by these
single payer medical doctors that a single payer system is the only way
to both control costs and cover everyone.”
