Did Obama Sandbag His Own Health Care Bill?

NorthCarolina

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Sun Apr-04-10 06:49 PM
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Did Obama Sandbag His Own Health Care Bill?

Edited on Sun Apr-04-10 07:35 PM by proud patriot

(edited for copyright purposes-proud patriot Moderator Democratic Underground)

By David Michael Green

So Barack Obama got his change. Other people can even believe in it if they want. I regret to say I remain unimpressed. And that's about the nicest way I know how to put it.

In fairness, I will say two things about this bill that redound well for him. First, passing major health care legislation in America is hard. In fact, governing this country in any real respect is hard, just as the Founders intended it to be. For a century, presidents have tried and mostly failed bring some sense to health care in America. Give Obama credit for succeeding at a very tough task, where others have imploded. (Except, of course, you can call anything "health care reform", and then take credit when it passes, which is kinda what happened here. Putting a ham sandwich through Congress is not such a big thing, no matter what it's labeled.)

The other positive note about the bill concerns a good deal of its content. If you take it at face value which may constitute a serious mistake by the time the industry vampires manage to twist and shred the restrictions supposedly imposed on them by the bill it does seems to have some laudatory and much needed features. Even progressive critics of the legislation, if they're being fair, have to admit that adding tens of millions of people to the ranks for the insured is no small thing. Nor is blocking the disease profiteers from their most egregious practices, like refusing care to people for pre-existing conditions, or dumping those who've paid premiums for decades at precisely the moment they start making claims. These changes if they are real and they stick will literally improve people's lives massively, sometimes saving them altogether, and we should not hesitate to say so.

All that said, there are two problems with Obama's signature piece of legislation: What is, and what could have been.

What this bill is, at its core, is a giant gift to massive predatory corporations who are as far removed from pursuing the public interest as regressive politicians are from the human genome. That's really bad news, for at least two reasons. The first is that we as a society find ourselves, yet once again, crafting legislation to service the greedy few rather than the hundreds of millions of ordinary folk just trying to get by. You can see that pretty readily in this bill, which ties itself in knots of absurdity in order to avoid grappling with the obvious problem at the core of the world's richest country spending twice what anyone else does, only to produce one of the crappiest health care systems among developed countries. The obvious, glaring, 800 pound gorilla in the room is that we do health care as an industry in America, for the purpose of profiting investors and corporate managers, not for purposes of making people well.

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Link to entire article: http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/Did-Obama-Sandbag-His-Own-by-David-Michael-Gree-100404-924.html