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Who's Blocking Health Care Reform Now? Blue Dogs? Senate Dems? House Progressives? Or the White House Itself?
By the summer of 2008, Democrats had stopped pretending there was much difference between them and Republicans on foreign policy. Their candidates were younger and smarter, but they weren't going to stop the wars or bring more than a few of the troops home anytime soon or lift the Cuban blockade. Forget about that stuff, leading Democrats said. Where the Party of Change would deliver for sure, they told voters, would be health care. Voters listened, and delivered Democrats the White House, a crushing majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate.
The president's timetable called for passage of a health care bill in the summer of 2009, but it didn't happen. The White House blames almost everybody --- blue dog Democrats, a handful of right wing Democratic senators, Republican birthers and teapartyers, even the large number of Democrats who want single payer health care or its shadowy stand-in, the public option. But the games are wearing thin. Democrats are running out of time, room and excuses.
Anyone who can add knows Republicans are not blocking universal health care. The performances of Republican teabaggers at a few town halls notwithstanding, there are just not enough Republicans in the House and Senate to block anything. The president and his party can roll over Republican opposition any time they want to.
Blue dog Democrats aren't to blame for blocking the White House health care bills either. The political careers of many House blue dogs are the creation of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dispensed them bags of corporate cash to win primary elections against left leaning Democrats. The interests that owned Rahm, and still do, own his successor at DCCC, so the blue dogs are White House puppies it can rein it any time it chooses.
"The fact that Lyndon Johnson fired up Medicare, enrolling and providing care to millions of seniors in only eleven months back in 1965-66 when small computers were the size of cargo vans should be a immeasurably potent pro-reform argument..." |
Senator Baucus and a handful of right wing senators are not to blame either. Some are Republicans, who simply don't matter. They don't have the votes. And the Senate Democrats with their hands on the bill are all choices of the White House, and all dependent on the good will of that same White House for a percentage of their corporate campaign contributions. Senate Democrats are keenly aware that a sitting president of their own party has literally hundreds of ways to exert pressure on any single legislator. None of them is crossing the White House either.
The only obstacle to passage of the president's health care --- or health insurance legislation is the White House itself. Barack Obama knows better than any of us the difference between what he promised and what is about to be delivered. The undeniable difference is dawning on much of the public too, and is reflected in sagging poll numbers for Democrats and the president. The dozens of Democrats who have declared they will vote against any health care --- or health insurance --- bill that does not contain what they call a "public option," are only trying to insulate themselves and protect President Obama from the worst consequences of his own treachery in selling out the vision of universal health care to big pharma and the insurance companies. They aren't blocking the president's bill. They're trying to ensure that there is something in the bill they can defend to the outraged public who elected them to pass health care reform.
From the beginning the president hamstrung his own grassroots supporters. He made much of his vaunted email and phone list of 13 million volunteers useless by coming down hard against Medicare For All and any forms of single payer, which were among the prime motivations for their energy and devotion. So the people whose boundless enthusiasm swept Obama into the White House were not available to pack many of the town meetings or pressure the reluctant. Some Democrats, like Dick Durbin of Illinois canceled their public meetings for fear of left leaning hostile, and likely pro-single payer crowds which even corporate media would find it hard to ignore.
Running away from single payer and all its eminently rational supporting arguments deprived corporate funded Democrats of most of the best answers to Republican charges that real reform was "socialized medicine" that would result in "rationed care" at enormously increased cost. It robbed President Obama and Democrats of the most potent leadoff arguments against the present untenable system --- that health insurance companies who produce no care at all account for one third of every health care dollar in the US, and that two thirds of all family bankruptcies are from unpayable medical bills. Democrats now can't make that argument because the Obama bill is a taxpayer-funded bailout for those same vampire insurance companies.
It made Democrats unable to present a health care reform package as a job creating economic stimulus more real than anything the president has yet proposed. Adopting a single payer system, as the National Nurses Organization pointed out at the beginning of the year, would create 3.3 million new jobs. Subtracting out the 550,000 in the insurance industry who would have to find other livelihoods, a single payer health care plan would create a net surplus of 2.6 million new jobs, as many as the economy lost in all of 2007, and provide tens of billions in taxes that support the budgets of local governments. So with millions unemployed and underemployed Democrats cannot argue that their health care bill will put Americans back to work, or help fund local and state governments.
Progressives in the House, many of whom supported single payer when Bush was president, have switched to a shadowy something they call the public option. But although many of them know by now that the White House has gutted the public option from an original 120 million strong, large enough to actually force health care prices downward, to a mere 10 million, not nearly enough to compete with private insurance, congressional democrats continue to cling to this scrap of a fig leaf. It's not single payer, it's not even universal health care of any kind, they admit, but it's a big first step. They are contradicted by Obama's own HHS Secretary who declares that absolutely nothing in the public option or in the president's health insurance reform package will ever, under any circumstances lead to single payer.
Even Maryland's Rep. Donna Edwards could be seen on C-SPAN last weekend before a substantially pro-single payer crowd in her own district, claiming that although she preferred single payer, the public option would be the best they could get through the Congress this year. It was, "a uniquely American solution," she said, implicitly echoing the right wing canard that HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All which she professed to support a few breaths before, was somehow "un-American."
If progressives like Donna Edwards can be blamed for blocking health care reform, it's only because they are choosing to follow the White House lead and settle for "health insurance reform" instead. The White House itself, and our First Black President are the biggest political obstacles to achieving health care for every American, along with the corporate media which controls the public debate.
The fact that Lyndon Johnson fired up Medicare, enrolling and providing care to millions of seniors in only eleven months back in 1965-66 when small computers were the size of cargo vans should be a immeasurably potent pro-reform argument against those who argue against "socialized medicine" or for a go-slow approach to health care reform. In face, the barrier to delivering health care to additional millions has never been technical. It's always been political. But this too is an argument the White House and Congressional Democrats cannot throw against their opponents. The Obama plan's health insurance exchanges won't begin gearing up to cover the uninsured till 2013, three and a half years away. Oh, well.
It's not Republicans, it's not blocking blue dogs, or die-hard progressives who form the biggest political obstacle to enacting universal health care this year. It's Democrats, following the lead of the chief Democrat in the White House. In less than a year, the Democrats have gone from the party of Change to the party of Excuses.
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75 Comments so far
Show AllBad timing. Healthcare reform was never on the table; it is all blue smoke and BS. With the global economy so dependent on the American consumer, how can we reform healthcare when the largest consuming group, the boomers, will primarily be consuming healthcare in the near future? How can we create wealth under a reform scenario? We need to insure that the boomers have expensive healthcare and get every dime they have, before the ingrates die and pass the money to a younger generation.
Gee, I wouldn't say we are ingrates......but should anyone take less than they paid for with no option to opt out?
Hey now. Wait right there. There is still a tiny portion of the wealth that has not been accumulated/ concentrated in the hands of the few for use against the many. There is a hint as to the next step in this process: Food shortages. Look what is going on in agricultural counties in California.
As for getting any money from the banksters to replenish the treasury? Gone. Overseas, converted to another currency. These scumbags will announce the country is bankrupt, order us to bend over again, and they will insert the 'Amero' or some such or another fiat system.
Yes, Obama's nebulous concept of "health care reform" will cost all of us a bundle, however, single payer, the only real reform, will reduce the amount each American pays for health care.
As the author pointed out, single payer will also solve the unemployment problem. An added bonus: In addition to the new jobs mentioned, single-payer will allow millions of boomers (who are staying in their jobs solely for the employer-provided medical insurance) to retire 5, 10 or 15 years earlier, making those jobs available to unemployed young Americans who desperately need those jobs.
Very simple....contact all your rips and sinators and demand a national referendum on single payer healthcare. Those numbers will show what WE THE PEOPLE really want. And they cannot be denied. We have the numbers . Do we have the courage? Just do it.
nevergiveup -
Unlike many state governments, who have provisions for initiative and referendum that can lead to a popular, general election up or down vote on proposed new legislation, there is nothing in the US Constitution I am aware of that creates the sort of "national referendum" remedy on health care you envision. Please educate me otherwise if I'm wrong. Had such a populist law-making mechanism existed regarding federal policies, it certainly would have been utilized in the past, particularly on such intractable issues as ending the Vietnam war or perhaps even outlawing Jim Crow racial segregation.
We're stuck with electoral representative democracy (or Constitutional amendment) when it comes to creating a genuine universal health care delivery mechanism. If that existing political system fails, then the only remedy (as I see it) is to vote the rascals out, and replace them with a different set elected officials who will do what their constituents demand be done.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill from Saginaw September 3rd, 2009 2:28 pm............As long as we continue to think "inside the box" they have created, we will always get the same results. This has been well planned from day one in this country.
How about doing it state by state?
There are ways. If we choose to never take the risk, nothing will change. We will continue to do the same thing over and over and expect different results...just as in the last election. This makes us insane...and they know that too.
Seems like Americans want change, but no risk or inconvenience. This is basically an impossibility.
Who's blocking heath care reform? Pretty much everybody whose political life in the "greatest democracy on earth" depends on corporate campaign contributions.
The intrusion of so-called "socialism" into ANY area of the entire U.S. system represents an intolerable threat to the whole system, not just to the particular corporate members who are directly involved in this instance. It's the domestic version of the old "domino theory" that has always been applied to external threats to The American Way(TM); nor are the demonization responses dissimilar.
Despite the ever-diminishing subtlety, Americans generally have yet to accept the fact that they themselves have become the priority targets of the same old "anti-communist" fears and suppression strategies that were formerly directed mainly against foreign influences. You're making the "masters of the universe" quite nervous.
That Obama is in fact the barrier has been obvious for some time. Shame on you Obama. For shame.
Because "health care" in the US isn't real health care at all. It's just another extractive industry enriching Wall Street. Ever since deregulation, the insurance companies are the same guys as the financial institutions. It's not as obvious and dramatic as a bailout check to AIG, but the money gets there anyway.
And since Obama is working hard to keep the money-changers happy, he is abandoning the folks who hoped he'd bring change.
Spare change, mister?
The Green party is still there.
The fact is that Health Care is not a top priority right now, not even close. The attempt to change the whole system to cover 15-20 million people was ill timed and ill advised.
If they had gone for Single Payer which would work, its quite possible to have sold it even now. But Congress and this President choose dishonesty and profits over citizens.
Of course, the potential salability of a single payer system is precisely why it could not even be put forward or discussed as a possibility. It had to be taken "off the table" at the outset lest comparisons make the absurdity of all the other ludicrous "options" transparently obvious, even for the most naive Amercian electorate.
Sometimes the trials and tribulations of "corporate citizenship" make for a really tough life when you have to sustain those silly illusions of democracy amongst the peasantry.
Re Henry8 September 3rd, 2009 11:59 am
I'm confused. Didn't you just claim on another thread today that "there is no Constitutional right to health care?"
Oh Henry8 does this all the time. On this issue though, he's a straight supporter on single payer. :)
By saying "Health Care is not a top priority right now," I assume you mean that you don't consider it so. I disagree.
I think most Americans would put the economy at the top of their list, but of all the politically viable things we could do as a country, establishing a single payer system would have the greatest positive economic impact. It's not just the millions who are uninsured or underinsured. It's that our current "system" is massively inefficient, costing 15% of our GDP. Establishing a single payer system would cut those costs by a third -- saving close to a trillion dollars a year. That's huge. As this excellent article points out, it would also result in a net increase of something like 2 million jobs.
If the Democrats had the commitment to their country that they do to their campaign contributors, I believe they could have convinced a majority of Americans to support the change to single payer.
The question is, how schizophrenic do you have to be to run on healthcare reform as your leading campaign issue, tout it all over the country and the media as the hallmark legislation that defines your presidency, only to work diligently day and night to bury it alive, making sure the results are 100% failure? How insane are these Democrats, and how deeply stupid, finally, is Obama? It boggles the mind seeing the panoramic picture of all this. It's as if they're literally in league with the Republicans to insure Obama's presidency is a total failure, so the Cheneyites can take power in 2012, with commanding majorities once again in both houses and of course the executive. Because the way this thing is playing out, Obama is a lame duck one-termer for sure and the Dims will be routed in 2010 and '12. Then the full frontal fascist takeover will be complete. Thanks for playing along, Barack!
Somebody's gotta fill the Republican interregnum voids, and who better than the same corporatist party under a different name.
-"How insane are these Democrats"
Insane? Hardly, have you any idea how much they get paid?
-"how deeply stupid, finally, is Obama?"
How stupid? He fooled most Americans, didn't he? I wouldn't worry about his employment prospects from now on.
-"It's as if they're literally in league with the Republicans "
"as if"? I think you can leave those two words out. Most Democrats voted for the worst of Bush's legislation.
So let the Dems sink, you can't save them. If you really want change, change starts with you.
The trouble with the "change starts with you" bumpersticker is that it never goes any farther than "you." It's a typical American way of individualizing, and thus trivializing, every single issue. So far, no one who personally "changes" has done a damn thing to change anything else. I changed a long time ago, and here we are in the present mess despite that miraculous event.
Sioux Rose
EPHRAIM: I can't recall which thread (a few days ago) featured the point I'd like to make but it comes down to party "packaging" and the power of slogan, or what Lakoff might define as the framing of a given issue. What I'm speaking about is this idea that many think Obama is doing a satisfactory job, and completely miss the obvious: that ALL of his policies remain a continuation of that moral, fiscal, and global trainwreck formerly known as the Bush Administration. So when you ask how "schizophrenic" a population has to be to miss the disconnect between Obama's campaign rhetoric and the "state of the art" presidential dealmaking, let's go back to the idea that for many, the mere change in leading letters (i.e. D or R) is enough to complete the illusion that a "better" change has come. Perhaps this is a mental disease, the natural result of decades of advertising where product packaging has come to prove so seductive a marketing device, the veritable Venus Flytrap of economics.
Sioux Rose
I'm always interested to read what you have to say. I have been thinking about this issue a lot. I call the phenomenom "tribalism". It is a mental paradigm that can be described in three steps:
1) in which the victim sees himself first and foremost as part of a tribe or group. A victim can belong to more than one tribe. One might be that person's religious tribe while another might be their political tribe and still another the football team they suport.
2) every person or idea considered by the victim must first be allocated as "in" or "out" of the tribe or tribal dogma
3) and on the basis of that allocation everything about that thing or person is either wholeheartedly accepted or rejected irrespective of any of its possible merits e.g. its verity or plausibility or morality.
This knee-jerk tribal bonding casts everything in a Manichean light. This is why Bush was so successful amongst tribalists when he said things like "You're either for us or against us" and when he attacked opponents with the accusation of being un-American. This is why my born-again siblings fervently believe that global warming is a hoax, that evolution is just plain wrong (just a theory!) and that the sworn duty of every Muslim is to kill as many Christians as possible. Believe me when I say that there is no amount of scientific evidence nor brilliant argumentation that can dissuade them from their beliefs because evidence and rational argument was always irrelevant to them. They believe things for no reason other than these things are the dogma of their "tribe". Period. Very similar to what Lakoff is always saying.
Oh - and of course Obama True Believers are typical tribalists. Glenn Greenwald describes this much better than I do.
Sioux Rose
CROSSMAN: Very astute analysis, and one I can totally agree with. The only thing I might atempt to add would involve scrutinizing the astrological birth charts of the persons most disposed towards gravitating towards this "tribalism" to seek out markers, or planetary common denominators. I wonder if the tribalists would fall into the same camp as those designated as born authoritarians as per the revelations of John Dean's book, "Conservatives without Conscience."
When I consider the sum of human life, I look to the 12 original "tribes," where about one-twelfth of mankind is born (or intended) to march to a different drummer. From this element come many of the radical thinkers who have done much to turn the tide of history. Generally anyone who lives (and believes) outside the parameters of their ethnic group is stigmatized, so there is often a price paid for being the one who elects to fly over the cuckoo's nest (and by that I mean any society that expects members to conform to rules and behaviors that are obviously flawed, but win persons certain strokes, particularly the comfortable status of "belonging").
When Shirley Jackson penned her acid-satire, "The Lottery," she defined everyday people whose basis for bonding in part consisted of an annual ritual in which together, they would destroy one person from their community. How different is this really from earlier behaviors of human or animal sacrifice? How different when that modality becomes a national practice. Our nation follows this sick norm in that it constantly seeks new sacrificial lambs, who better to test weapons systems upon? Darkly ironic when so many who support these policies/wars enter into churches and do their Sunday hosannahs. It is wicked, among other things!
While I appreciate your feelings, the point should be obvious by now: Obama is no more "deeply stupid" than George W. Bush. Like Bush, he's just a liar who is in it for power and greed.
Obama lied about the Iraq War, torture, green energy (it means nuclear to Obama), illegal spying on Americans, organic agriculture (factory farming is the ultimate cause of the health-care crisis), NAFTA, Employee Free Choice Act, government transparency, appointing lobbyists to his administration, tax reform . . . and now single-payer, universal (public) health insurance.
But, we are not yet defeated. We can beat Obama and the Republicans by demanding single-payer from Congress. CALL (don't write or email) your Senators and Congresspersons. Tell them, single-payer or nothing. NOT a "public option," and NOT mandatory insurance purchases from the criminal insurance companies who have been ripping us off for decades. Tell them if they don't vote for and actively support public-health-insurance-for-all, you won't vote for them again. You'll support a challenger in the primary who is NOT in the pocket of Big Insurance.
It appears that Obama is the Manchurian Candidate. For the Republicans. Let's see: 1. bailouts for the fatcat bankers - nothing for the "average working person" 2. continuation of outsourcing to Blackwater etc 3. Support for the coup in Honduras - hey that was quicker than Bushes first coup in Haiti 4. Letting Goldman Sachs basically run the executive branch at the expense of WE THE PEOPLE. 5. selling out to Pharma and basically guaranteeing no reform in health care 6. continuation of allowing the Fed Reserve to rob us blind and riddle us w/ debt for as far as the eye can see. 7. destroying the democratic party - Why bother voting for democrats when they act EXACTLY like republicans. I won't! 7. There goes the democratic majority. Republicans WILL win the next election and beat Obama because all the 1st time voters who actually beleived in CHANGE will not go back and vote for Obama again when it's obvious that he's a big sellout to the corporate monied interests and could CARE LESS ABOUT THE average working american. And on and on it goes.....Green Party here we come! Obama is a smart guy - he knows he'll probably be a 1 term president - and then make 20 million dollar speeches. He is basically Bush's 3rd term. We on the left complained about Bush loudly and with good reason - we lose our arguement to hypocrisy if we turn around and allow Obama to do the exaact same thing as Bush.
Superb article. Nail on the head.
to my mind, the question to be asked of the powers to be---is Health Care a commodity or a Human Right! We know how every other country in the world has answered this. How does one justifying making profits off of HR violations hardship & misery of others---& it's ok----
re; funding a single-payer program. We have some 49m folk w/out coverage, 29m plus under-insured---close to 80m folk---paying what, between $35-$50-$60 a month is a lot of green-backs into the treasury coffers.
to my mind, the question to be asked of the powers to be---is Health Care a commodity or a Human Right! We know how every other country in the world has answered this. How does one justifying making profits off of HR violations hardship & misery of others---& it's ok----
re; funding a single-payer program. We have some 49m folk w/out coverage, 29m plus under-insured---close to 80m folk---paying what, between $35-$50-$60 a month is a lot of green-backs into the treasury coffers.
Let's review the short, tragic life of the public option.
It'll bring down costs through competition.
It must not compete too much or it will be cost insurance companies money and customers.
Hundreds of million will sign up, so limit it to just about 10 million.
Don't let it do anything competitive.
Don't even let it in the bill. Put in an imaginary device that some day it might be in a bill. Call it a "trigger" because it sounds macho.
All of this before it even reaches a committee where stuff gets added at the last minute so that congress can say to their outraged constituents, "I didn't know that was in the bill."
The public option has been useful, but it is dead. It's time to support single payer and nothing less.
The dozens of Democrats who have declared they will vote against any health care --- or health insurance --- bill that does not contain what they call a "public option," are only trying to insulate themselves and protect President Obama from the worst consequences of his own treachery in selling out the vision of universal health care to big pharma and the insurance companies.
Many thanks for this succinct summation of that political short eyes who goes under the name Barack Obama.
This is an excellent explanation of why we're not going to get "change we can believe in."
Our next step should be to organize and get what we want. In "Which Side Are You On?" (link is below), Dave Lindorff makes a good argument for starting a Labor party.
http://counterpunch.org/lindorff09032009.html
As the article points out so nicely there is no one but the white house to blame. But wait it must be Nader's fault.
Come 2012 the demos are going to hit a bridge abutment going 70 mph. They have nothing to run on.
The economy will be just as bad. All our money will be going out to pay the banksters.
We'll still be at war.
We'll have no good healthcare in place.
We'll still be spied on.
We won't have Habeus corpus.
We will still have secrecy in government.
Still have torture.
Still have a broken New Orleans.
Still have huge amounts of co2.
We will have time, as we are losing our jobs, to visit Pittsburgh and then Washington.
We will have time to grow an alternative to the corporate parties that strangle us.
It's really getting hard to play stupid and NOT see who runs the show from behind the curtain.
"It's really getting hard to play stupid and NOT see who runs the show from behind the curtain."
Reminds me of Dorothy & Toto--not to mention Chris Hedges's book "Empire of Delusion" which starts off with the quote:
"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."
-James Baldwin
Time to bail on the D's no more cashola or work for these pricks. They're obviously only interested in our help and votes when they need power. Once secured they sell this power to the powerful Corps. All we've done is switched the payola on K st. to the Dem. side. Change isn't going to happen from these klowns.
This is an outstanding piece of insightful analysis by Bruce Dixon, focusing accountability for the current self-induced legislative impasse on creating a national health care system exactly where it belongs.
Small wonder the opinion polls show fewer and fewer members of the general public support whatever is being passed off as the current version of the "President's plan" or the "Democrats' plan" for health care reform. The growing percentage of grassroots Americans voicing outright opposition consist of the disillusioned Democratic grassroots base, statistically mushed alongside the usual hardcore suspects from the all-government-is-the-problem GOP.
Well, sometimes this is the public opinion configuration you get, when you reflexively triangulate everything towards the bipartisan middle and your tactical cleverness gets exposed.
Keep trying always to cut the baby in half, and sometimes you succeed in actually killing the baby.
Bill from Saginaw
"Anyone who can add knows Republicans are not blocking universal health care. The performances of Republican teabaggers at a few town halls notwithstanding, there are just not enough Republicans in the House and Senate to block anything. The president and his party can roll over Republican opposition any time they want to."
While I do not take issue with the general thrust of this article, I am compelled to object to another repetition of what has to be the most naive political observation of this era.
True, the Dems have a sufficient majority in the House to control legislation from that body. However, as I've noted too many times to imagine, the Dems do not have a sufficient majority in the senate (60 votes) to be able to ignore the republicans. As long as they're counting Joe Lieberman among those 60 votes, they don't have 60 votes.
Not that it would matter if they did.
q
health care, or, rather, death postponement, will cease to exist as we know it, along with the economic fallacies we have been forcefed...either employers, or employees, or the government would pay under any plan...somebody has to pay...therein lies the rub...as the planet sickens and dies, business and employment will also, which hampers both the employer-pay and the employee-pay notions...hand-in-hand with employment, income tax revenues will dwindle and disappear, which hampers the government-pay plan...
eventually, we will either return to the natural processes of life and death within a sustainable world, or perish without one...institutionalized health care, or death postponement, has been but one of the temporary facets of our slow corruption of the natural order...somewhere await common sense, moderate physical exercise, and humble acceptance of one's momentary gift...
Of course somebody has to pay for actual health care services. The question is whether we should have to pay enormous profits to the corporate insurance industry for handling the transfers and payouts of our funds and denying us needed services in the process.
Even the most dedicated capitalist theoreticians would be hard pressed to justify huge profits for value-negative business activities. Not that that stops them from trying, of course.
I understand...I guess I have this vision of more and more unemployed and, therefore, unmonied, people trying to secure services being paid for by progressively fewer and fewer employed persons...it doesn't add up...especially if everyone is getting sicker due to environmental toxins...maybe everything will turn out great, but...
certainly, single payer is the most cost-effective of the scenarios presented...
Thank you Bruce Dixon.
It's time we declare Obama the enemy and fight him like we did any GOPer. The guy's just a fraud and a shill for the big money, in "liberal" wrapping. No more waiting around, we know who and what Obama is. Let's send a strong clear message to Obama's big donors that we're not going to be fooled anymore. LET'S BRING OBAMA DOWN IN FLAMES.
bgcd September 3rd, 2009 4:49 pm.........Great idea....now we just have to convince
69,456,895 voters to do the same.
I agree with you till your last statement. Better to fight Obama to the verge of defeat, and then watch him change his tune in order to preserve his power. He's for sale. Just be sure that we are the ones buying him, by letting our Congress people know that if they don't vote for single-payer we won't vote for them in coming elections. Single-payer or you're out!
Bruce Dixon pens another brilliant analysis ...
I'm just sorry he didn't mention Obama's back room deals with the likes of Billy Tauzin ...
I am not really following this silly debate about something as basic as health insurance in the US for everyone in depth any more, being European.
Anyone of us Europeans would be able to shut up the morons who are battling universal health care within 5 minutes, and that's a conservative guess, but it would neither be nice nor polite nor bipartisan, the way we'd deal with them. We'd rip them a new asshole, so to say.
A pity that the American Left still prefers to give the Right so much tolerance but blog and post with great enthusiasm instead of staging massive demos, and it's a pity that it's only the American Right that puts on these phony spectacles of being "angry". Used to be the Left's home turf, also in America.
But what I'd like to share with you is Garrison Keillor's take on it, since I think that he's got a good idea, as crazy as America is nowadays: One of the best articles about the health insurance quagmire over there to date IMHO:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03iht-edkeillor.html
In this crazy country of yours, his solution might just be the right one.
I'm not so sure about that. I have a horrible feeling that certain American opponents of universal health care would be quite willing to throw Mr. Mittens out the car window if neccessary to ensure that certain "undesirable" folks wouldn't get "undeserved" medical attention.
The U.S., it must be remembered, does prosecute their tragically misguided citizens who leave free emergency water supplies for people who might be dying of thirst in the desert.
Araquin, in support of your statement regarding Europe and its predeposition to critical issues, there isn't much the politicians would not do to prevent their constituents to become unhappy about something as fundamental as healthcare for all. I have seen protest marches and been part of some of them and it wasn't for any thing that earthmoving as is our predicament at present. Our problem is that the situation was allowed to happen and that from the Whitehouse on down. Too much money exchanged hands from the med. pharma/insurance complex and we have very little to overcome that. The problem has less to do with Republicans and their "mouthpieces" than cash at hand and spending it prolifically, especially by the health insurance companies, which is all they do: collect money from all of us who have insurance without corresponding insurance that when we are ill that they will cover our medical expenses, also no risk on their part and Wall Street is happy. Profit is their product and a lot of paper work. You know, in Europe greasing politician's palms is not considered as part of "Freedom of Speech", in other words, freedom to speek is always there but without money changing hands. Things could be so splendit if it wasn't all so screwed up. Oh well, and that's how it is...
Hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. If more people had voted for Nader we would have Single Payer. The debate would have ended when he was elected.
Amen!
If more people had voted for Nader and for a Congress which thinks like Nader we would have single payer.
Dream on.
If ten percent, let's say, had voted for Nader then McCain would have won.
If Nader had miraculously pulled off a majority we would not be who we are. Unfortunately, Nader only represents a small progressive minority. The House of Representatives more accurately reflects local and regional politics than any one national leader. The House, even with a Democratic majority, remains basically conservative. The Blue Dogs were a local means of "kicking the scoundrels out." Of showing disgust for the ruling Republican party. The Blue Dogs reflect the conservative point of view of their constituencies. And in the Congress there is no where near the majority to pull off Naderlike reforms.
With Reaganite Capitalist orthodoxies still reigning over much public thought there is little hope for real progressive reform. The country is closely divided, and because the Bush administration miserably failed does not mean the opposite side, progressives, will succeed. The Republicans know that. That's why they hope healthcare reform will be Obama's "Waterloo."
Will the ignorance never cease?
If 10% had voted for Nader, Obama would still have won BY THE SAME MARGIN. Why? Because the votes that count are Electoral College votes. The big liberal states of New York, Illinois and California all went for Obama by huge margins. Those are the states where most of Nader's 10% would have come from. Other liberal states like Washington, Oregon, and pretty much all of New England also went for Obama by big margins.
EVEN IF Nader's vote had tipped a close state -- Indiana, North Carolina, or Florida -- to McCain, it wouldn't have dented Obama's lead. Even if ALL the close states had flipped to Obama due to Nader's vote (nearly impossible) Obama would still be president.
Therefor, if 10% would have voted for Nader we would still have Obama as president, AND we would also have Nader leading a progressive voting block. That would give progressives a voice on Capital Hill and the Sunday talk shows. We would not be marginalized as "far-left crazies" by corporate media pundits as we are now. Corporate media could not get away with the American's-don't-want-public-health-insurance PR that they are feeding us today. Single-payer would be ON the table.
Those are the simple facts. People like you -- who don't know what they are talking about -- need to get a clue!