Universal health care? We keep the candy, You can have the wrapper. Wait. Give us the wrapper, too.

[Karmadillo]

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/universal-health-care-we-keep-candy-you-can-have-wrapper-no-wait-give-us-wrapper-too

Universal Health Care?
We Keep the Candy, But You Can Have the Wrapper.
No. Wait.
Give Us the Wrapper Too.
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

It's half past December, and the White House is hell-bent on passing its version of “health insurance reform” out of Congress before the holiday recess. It's not universal. It's not even about delivering health care, it's about bailing out health insurance companies. The legislation will force millions of Americans to buy skimpy private insurance, often with hundreds of dollars a month of their own money under penalty of law. Billions more in government subsidies will be added to the giveaway to help purchase health insurance policies for the bottom half or more of the insurance market.

Like the Obama campaign itself, the public option was never more than a brand. It was a container designed to fit our hopes and dreams just well enough and just long enough to close the deal, an empty wrapper, with little or no candy inside. Our so-called “progressives” in Congress knew all along it was a fraud, but they played along. When "progressive” Democrats were drawing lines in the sand and “fighting for the public option” all spring and summer and fall, they told us it was this humungous public entity that would be open to hundreds of millions, to anybody wanting an alternative to private insurance, and that it would compete with and force the price of private insurance downward. Howard Dean said we should think of the public option as Medicare, only for everybody.

This kind of “public option” was a transparent hoax, as the wonderful blog of PNHP, Physicians for a National Health Plan pointed out last spring. A great candy wrapper.

When the House bill finally passed, and when the outlines of the Senate bill began to emerge, the same progressive congresspeople and commentators told us the public option they had lost was such an itty bitty thing that it didn't matter much, and anyhow they were going to expand Medicare, so wasn't that a “public option,” only better? Of course their version of expanding Medicare was not free medical care with dignity. It would allow only those with very low incomes, no other insurance and no other choices to “buy into” a means-tested, ghettoized version of Medicare. Essentially, since they had cheapened their own brand, the “public option,” beyond redemption they sought to confuse it in the public mind with Medicare, which had more credibility.

<edit>

The version of “health insurance reform” in play now has no relation to the promises candidate Obama made all during his long campaign for the White House, which he began in 2003 still declaring himself an advocate of single payer. Forcing Americans to buy private insurance, Congressman Dennis Kucinich pointed out, is simply a massive upward transfer of wealth to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, just as the financial bailouts were a massive upward transfer of wealth to speculators and the financial sector.

<edit>

Our own best guess is that the reconciliation process will be the chance for progressives to urge the prez to ride to the rescue and restore their candy wrapper, something they can claim is both “public” and “optional”. Obama may oblige them, or maybe not. But a candy wrapper is only a wrapper. It's not the candy.

more...

[FrenchieCat]

1. Hard to trust an Opinion piece on the HCR and how it is terrible it will be,

when it determines that Obama campaigned for the presidency starting in 2003.

Makes them less credible,
and since they don't provide real numbers or
any type of objective analysis of the actual bills,
it kind of makes them appear shaky, at best.
Considering the importance of the issue,
you'd think they would have skipped the Hyperbole.

[Nikki Stone1]

3. There was a reason Obama was made the keynote speaker in 2004 at the DNC

A final decision might not have been made at that time, but the speech was definitely a trial balloon. Certainly the planning went on before that. Donna Brazile is no fool and things take time to test.

[FrenchieCat]

4. right!

and I should believe this because you said it? :tinfoilhat:

[Nikki Stone1]

6. No, you should believe it because the keynote speaker is usually not something

given to an unimportant person. Obama was an Illinois state senator at that point, not a national figure. I know that you are somewhat involved in politics in your real life and you know that certain events and positions have meaning: you don't give an important national pulpit to an unknown state senator unless you have plans for him.

Like I said, Donna Brazile is a master strategist. There is no "i" left undotted or "t" left uncrossed.

[FrenchieCat]

10. Obama was an up and coming young Black articulate and charismatic speaker

running for National office.
You must have forgotten he was running for the senate?
First African-American to do so in a while,
and his name was ironically Barack Obama, a name similar to Osama....
and there was a debate at the time about terror.....
what better way to show inclusion to go against a party
of fear, terror and exclusion?

You don't think that had a hook to it for a Democratic audience?

You don't think that 1/2 of the battle in general elections is firing up your base?
Who do you think is the Democratic base?
You don't think that strategically speaking getting your large proportion of
Black delegates fired up wouldn't be a good thing to happen at a convention?

No, you don't.

So let's just keep on the Tin foil hat and discard any remnant of political good
old common sense and let's just figure the guy was groomed to be President since the
day he was born in Kenya why dont we? Just as plausible.


and I correspond with Donna Brazile quite a bit....
and she always responds....
and she didn't necessarily believe that he could pull it off.

[Nikki Stone1]

11. Why didn't Jesse Jackson Jr get that speech?

He was a young, up and coming African American congressman, already in national office, and with a famous name to boot. Why pick an unknown, which is what Obama was (except to very inside insiders) until that speech?

[FrenchieCat]

12. Was Jesse Jackson jr. running for the Senate?

No, I don't think so. :crazy:

[Nikki Stone1]

14. No, he was already in the House, and if he had been given that speech, it would have been a sign

that his career was going to be expanding into the presidential realm.

No one gets a national speech so they can win a statewide election. It sounds to me like you pretend a lot of closeness to politics but don't really know how it works.

[FrenchieCat]

16. Well I can tell you now that Black folks don't mind a little fresh meat......

that doesn't have a controversial family connection,
every now and then.

We are probably harder to please than you thought,
after all, we're the hardest audience there is....
as was shown via the Apollo Theater! :)

But let's see if I've got it:

You think that the rep of a single district
is more high profile than the Democratic candidate for a senate seat?
Although the senate at the time was, I believe, 50-50

Must be that we are all easily interchangeable...
and one is just as good as another? No distinction needed.
Why have that Black guy and increase his profile so he can win his seat...
let's just get that other one who has a famous father and is already serving.
Brilliant fucking Strategy!

that would be you and your BFF Donna Brazile
crossing them T and dotting those Is, I bet. :rofl:

[Nikki Stone1]

19. I'd say the political party apparatus operates the same way in terms of signaling

regardless of color, gender, or religion. There are certain positions, speeches, and situations that are reserved for those that are moving up in the political world. The keynote at the DNC is one such speech that is usually used in this way.

Jesse Jackson Jr. was a known quantity in 2004 and if the party was just looking for an attractive, gifted orator, they could have gone with Jackson, or any other Congressperson they thought would do well. That's not what they did. They chose a relatively unknown, fairly new, state politician who was running for his very first national office. At the time, he was unknown to the general public outside of his state, though he was known (and being groomed) by political insiders like Donna Brazile at that time. It was the DNC speech that catapulted Obama into the national arena.

I do not understand why all this bothers you so much. What is wrong with Donna Brazile planning this out four or five years in advance? She would have been a fool not to. And she's nobody's fool. I am sorry that you have so little respect for her.

[FrenchieCat]

20. Well, we've gone round, and I'll just repeat my original response to you

and I should believe this because you said it? :tinfoilhat:

[Nikki Stone1]

25. No, you should believe it because that's how the party does business.

Nice talking to you.

[FrenchieCat]

26. You too!

and may we all have a better next year!

:hi:

[Nikki Stone1]

27. I'll drink to that.

:toast:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. Just as Bill Clinton was a highly touted speaker in 1988

I see a pattern.

[FrenchieCat]

17. are there any other patterns that you have detected?

[TheWraith]

5. You're almost as crazy sounding as the OP is.

I can't imagine they made him the keynote speaker because he was a vibrant, charismatic orator. It was clearly all a conspiracy to kill healthcare reform 5 years later! :sarcasm:

[Nikki Stone1]

7. Crazy like a fox, sweetheart. :)

:)

[newtothegame]

8. I agree with you Nikki; when you're voting present in the Senate on anything contreversial,

and refusing to represent your constituents with an actual stand on anything that might come back to haunt you, you're clearly protecting your voting record for something other than the next Senate election.

[FLAprogressive]

22. Triangulation baby.

[leftstreet]

2. Let's just bail out the industry now, and get on with the inevitable Single Payer

K&R

[Edweird]

9. If single payer was any kind of real posibility, they wouldn't be defunding Medicare

by a half a billion. There is no "inevitable single payer".

[Nikki Stone1]

13. Good point.

.

[SammyWinstonJack]

18. Defunding Medicare just when millions of baby boomers are about

to access it and we're too believe that 'HCR' is anything more than health insurance industry bailouts? :shrug:

[FrenchieCat]

21. DO you have the details on .....

this "defunding" of Medicare?

[inna]

29. Google is your (and mine, and everyone's) friend, but you can start here, for example:

Report: Bill would reduce senior care http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/14/AR2009111402597.html

A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending -- one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system -- would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.

[inna]

30. needs a kick

:kick:

[inna]

28. uh, very good point, but a major typo - half a TRILLION, not half a billion.

[David Zephyr]

23. Thanks for the article and the link, Karmadillo!

Well written and the perspective is spot on. K&R.

[varelse]

24. Thank you for sharing a well-written op ed on the health insurance "reform" bill

K&R