The Next Phase in Health Care Apartheid
By NORMAN SOLOMON
In Washington, “healthcare reform” has degenerated into a sick joke.
At
this point, only spinners who’ve succumbed to their own vertigo could
use the word “robust” to describe the public option in the healthcare
bill that the House Democratic leadership has sent to the floor.
“A
main argument was that a public plan would save people money,” the New
York Times has noted. But the insurance industry -- claiming to want a
level playing field -- has gotten the Obama administration to bulldoze
the plan. “After House Democratic leaders unveiled their health care
bill [on October 29], the Congressional Budget Office said the public
plan would cost more than private plans and only 6 million people would
sign up.”
At
its best, “the public option” was a weak remedy for the disastrous
ailments of the healthcare system in the United States. But whatever
virtues the public option may have offered were stripped from the bill
en route to the House floor.
What remains is a Rube Goldberg contraption that will launch this country into a new phase of healthcare apartheid.
People
who scrape together enough money to buy health insurance will discover
that they’re riding in the back of the nation’s healthcare bus. The
most “affordable” policies will be the ones with the highest
deductibles and the worst coverage.
We’re
hearing that large numbers of lower-income Americans will be provided
with Medicaid coverage in the next decade. Translation: If funding
holds up, they’ll get to hang onto a bottom rung of the healthcare
ladder. Many will not be able to get the medical help they need, from
primary care providers or specialists.
Not
long ago, we were told that the Obama administration was aiming for a
public option that could provide coverage to one out of every four
Americans. Now the figure is around one out of every fifty.
Not
long ago, the idea was that taxpayer-funded subsidies were to be used
only for the public option. But now the entire concept has been
hijacked by and for the private insurance industry. As House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi put it on October 8, private insurance companies “are
going to get 50 million new consumers, many of them subsidized by the
taxpayers.”
Pelosi
was making the argument that the least the insurance industry could do,
in return, would be to accept a higher level of taxation. But her
comment was a telling acknowledgment that all the “public option”
proposals now provide a massive funnel from the U.S. Treasury to the
insurance conglomerates. The individual mandate is a monumental
giveaway to private insurance firms.
The
specter of “healthcare reform” that requires individuals to stretch
their personal finances for often-abysmal insurance coverage is the
worst of all worlds -- government intrusion for corporate benefit
without any guarantees of decent health coverage.
In
effect, the individual-mandate requirement tells people that obtaining
health coverage is ultimately their own responsibility -- and the
quality of the coverage is beside the point. In essence, when it comes
to guaranteeing quality healthcare for all, the gist of the policy is:
“Let’s not, and say we did.”
The predictable result is reinforcement of vast -- and often deadly -- inequities in access to healthcare.
With
Washington making such a corporate mess of “healthcare reform,” the
best way to get what we need -- healthcare for all as a human right --
will be to enact single-payer healthcare in one state after another.
But
the House Democratic leadership has not been content to serve up a
grimly pathetic “healthcare reform” bill. Speaker Pelosi has used her
political leverage to quash Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s amendment --
approved months ago by the Education and Labor Committee -- that would
grant waivers so that states could create their own single-payer
system. Pelosi removed the Kucinich amendment from the House bill.
The
California legislature has twice passed a strong single-payer bill,
both times vetoed by the state’s current execrable governor. The
official position of the California Democratic Party is unequivocally
in favor of single-payer healthcare. And yet Nancy Pelosi, a California
Democrat, did what she could to sabotage the single-payer position of
her own party in her own state.
Sickening.
