By Miles Mogulescu
It's truly depressing to watch how quickly so-called progressive leaders in Congress, and many of their supporters in the so-called progressive movement, are abandoning all of their key promises on health care reform in the name of a health care bill that will provide massive government subsidies to private insurance and drug companies and fine citizens who can't afford to buy crappy private insurance policies, without any effective competition from a robust public option.
As I wrote a few days ago, 60 members of the House Progressive Caucus signed a letter to Speaker Pelosi last July promising to vote against any health care "reform" bill without a "robust" public option which paid Medicare rates plus 5%.* Now they're breaking that promise. "Progressive leaders" like Rep. Anthony Weiner are now calling the neutered public option in the House bill a "once in a lifetime reform", despite the fact that it has eliminated the very provision thet the Progressive Caucus promised was essential in order to get its vote.
Even worse, Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic House leadership has stripped the House bill of a provision-- passed by a bipartisan 27-19 vote in The House Education and Labor Committee-- which would allow individual states to experiment with state-level single payer systems without being sued by the private insurance industry. If, as I believe likely if it becomes law, the Democratic health care bill fails to provide affordable health care to all Americans and instead mandates that they buy junk private insurance at unaffordable rates or be fined, this provision would allow states to experiment with other plans, just as Saskatchewan's success with provincial single payer eventually pursuaded the national Canadian government to adopt national health insurance. Pelosi's "justification" for dropping the provision and not allowing it to come to a vote in the House: It would somehow break President Obama's promise that people can keep the insurance they have if they like it.
What a crock of bullshit to justify a further cave-in by Democrats to the private insurance industry.
Nowhere during the campaign did Obama make a promise that he wouldn't let states experiment with their own single payer systems, if they so chose. In fact, Candidate Obama repeatedly said that if he were starting from scratch, single payer would be the best way to go.
But President Obama has broken numerous other campaign promises made by Candidate Obama on health care reform:
1. Candidate Obama promised to end backroom deals with "stakeholders" like insurance companies, drug companies and hospitals and instead broadcast all health care reform negotiations on CSPAN. President Obama has negotiated backroom sweatheart deals with insurance companies, drug companies and for-profit hospitals in exchange for campaign cash.
Read more at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/speaker-pelosi-please-sto_b_348690.html&cp
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