The Incredible Shrinking Health Care Reform

The Incredible Shrinking Health Care Reform
Truthout Original

The Incredible Shrinking Health Care Reform
Wednesday 05 August 2009
Norman Solomon

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Notions of universal health care are fading in the power centers of politics - while more and more attention focuses on the care and feeding of the insurance industry.

Consider a new message that just went out from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, which inherited the Obama campaign's 13-million email list. The short letter includes the same phrase seven times: "health insurance reform."

The difference between the promise of health care for everyone and the new mantra of health insurance reform is akin to what Mark Twain once described as "the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

The "health insurance reform" now being spun as "a glide path towards universal coverage" is apt to reinforce the huge power of the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries in the United States.

President Obama says that he wants "things like preventing insurers from dropping people because of pre-existing conditions." Those are not fighting words for the present-day insurance industry. Behind the scenes, massive deals are taking shape.

The president of America's Health Insurance Plans, Karen Ignagni, "noted that the industry had endorsed many of the administration's proposed changes, including ending the practice of refusing coverage for pre-existing conditions," The New York Times reported on August 3. A couple of days later, in a profile of Ignagni, the newspaper added, "Rather than being cut out of the conversation, her strategy has been to push for changes her members can live with, in hopes of fending off too much government interference."

This year, no more significant news article on health care politics has appeared than the August 4 story in The Los Angeles Times under the headline "Obama Gives Powerful Drug Lobby a Seat at Healthcare Table."

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Meanwhile, with a "mandate" herd of cash cows on the national horizon, the health insurance industry is licking its chops. The corporate glee is ill disguised as the Obama administration pushes for legal mandates to require that Americans buy health insurance - no matter how dismal the quality of the coverage or how unaffordable the "affordable" premiums turn out to be for real people in the real world.

The mandates would involve "diverting additional billions to private insurers by requiring middle-class Americans to purchase defective policies from these firms - policies with so many gaps and loopholes that they currently leave millions of our insured patients vulnerable to financial ruin," says a letter signed by more than 3,500 doctors and released last week by Physicians for a National Health Program.

Days ago, a New York Times headline proclaimed an emerging "consensus" and "common ground" on Capitol Hill. In passing, the article mentioned that lawmakers "agree on the need to provide federal subsidies to help make insurance affordable for people with modest incomes. For poor people, Medicaid eligibility would be expanded."

It's a scenario that amounts to expansion of health care ghettos nationwide. Medicaid's reimbursement rates for medical providers are so paltry that "Medicaid patient" is often a synonym for someone who can't find a doctor willing to help.

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:dem:

-Laelth