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Posts Tagged ‘abortion’

HEALTH CARE BILL PASSAGE MARKS THE DEATHKNELL FOR TRUE REFORM AND REPRESENTS A PROFOUND LOSS FOR ACCESS TO CARE IN AMERICA

COMMONDREAMS 12-24-2009

SENATE HEALTH BILL PASSES, FIREDOGLAKE.COM, WALKER

It was loss for the country. Our broken health care system will remain broken and costs will continue to rise at an alarming rating. Things like drug re-importation and a robust public option, which would have helped bring down prices for millions of Americans, were stripped from the bill at the request of powerful industry lobbyists.

It was also a big loss for the progressive movement. We were out-gunned by industry lobbyists, and many of our movement “allies” failed us. A woman’s right to choose was thrown under the bus just to get something passed. The supposed “progressives” in the Senate refused to go all-out and use every tool to achieve the most progressive reform. Lawrence O’Donnell is right, most importantly,this bill will give liberalism a very bad name.

This is not progressive reform. This is a perverse Democratic version of Regan style trickle down economics. Hundreds of billions will be given to poorly regulated private health insurance companies in the hope that they spend roughly 80% of that money on actually providing people with health care. It forces millions of people to buy very expensive insurance that they cannot afford to get actual health care, so that Democrats can proudly say millions more people are “covered.” Private health insurance companies are what have ruined our current system and are dramatically less efficient than public insurance programs, yet Democrats will use them almost exclusively. It is a massive reward for a history of terrible performance. Instead of reining in the insurance companies, it only enriches, empowers, and entrenches them further. The only “check” on the industry will be new regulations, but with extremely weak to practically non-existent enforcement, it is basically no check at all.

This program is not even a good foundation on which to build later reform. It will be a wasteful, expensive, and probably unpopular program for only a small subset of lower income Americans. That is a recipe for making it a target for cuts by conservatives, not expansion by progressives. This bill could easily discredit the move for true universal health care by being such a poorly designed failure.