Obama’s Health Care Bill Is Enough to Make You Sick
15 July 2010By Chris Hedges
A close reading of the new health care legislation,
which will conveniently take effect in 2014 after the
next presidential election, is deeply depressing. The
legislation not only mocks the lofty promises made by
President Barack Obama, exposing most as lies, but
sadly reconfirms that our nation is hostage to
unchecked corporate greed and abuse. The simple truth,
that single-payer nonprofit health care for all
Americans would dramatically reduce costs and save
lives, that the for-profit health care system is the
problem and must be destroyed, is censored out of the
public debate by a media that relies on these
corporations as major advertisers and sponsors, as
well as a morally bankrupt Democratic Party that is as
bought off by corporations as the Republicans.
The 2,000-page piece of legislation, according to
figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health
Plan (PNHP), will leave at least 23 million people
without insurance, a figure that translates into an
estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths a year among
people who cannot afford care. It will permit prices
to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close
to 10 percent of our annual income to buy commercial
health insurance, although this coverage will only pay
for about 70 percent of our medical expenses. Those
who become seriously ill, lose their incomes and
cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied
coverage. And at least $447 billion in taxpayer
subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms. We
will be forced by law to buy their defective products.
There is no check in the new legislation to halt
rising health care costs. The elderly can be charged
three times the rates provided to the young. Companies
with predominantly female work forces can be charged
higher gender-based rates. The dizzying array of
technical loopholes in the bill—written in by armies
of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists—means that
these companies, which profit off human sickness,
suffering and death, can continue their grim game of
trading away human life for money.
“They named this legislation the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act, and as the tradition of this
nation goes, any words they put into the name of a
piece of legislation means the opposite,” said
single-payer activist Dr. Margaret Flowers when I
heard her and Helen Redmond dissect the legislation in
Chicago at the Socialism 2010 Conference last month.
“It neither protects patients nor leads to affordable
care.”
“This legislation moves us further in the direction of
the commodification of health care,” Flowers went on.
“It requires people to purchase health insurance. It
takes public dollars to subsidize the purchase of that
private insurance. It not only forces people to
purchase this private product, but uses public dollars
and gives them directly to these corporations. In
return, there are no caps on premiums. Insurance
companies can continue to raise premiums. We estimate
that because they are required to cover people with
pre-existing conditions, although we will see if this
happens, they will argue that they will have to raise
premiums.”
The legislation included a few tiny improvements that
have been used as bait to sell it to the public. The
bill promises, for example, to expand community health
centers and increase access to primary-care doctors.
It allows children to stay on their parent’s plan
until they turn 26. It will include those with
pre-existing conditions in insurance plans, although
Flowers warns that many technicalities and loopholes
make it easy for insurance companies to drop patients.
Most of the more than 30 million people currently
without insurance, and the 45,000 who die each year
because they lack medical care, essentially remain
left out in the cold, and things will not get better
for the rest of us.
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“We are still a nation full of health care hostages,”
Redmond said. “We live in fear of losing our health
care. Millions of people have lost their health care.
We fear bankruptcy. The inability to pay medical bills
is the No. 1 cause of bankruptcy. We fear not being
able to afford medications. Millions of people skip
medications. They skip these medications to the
detriment of their health. We are not free. And we
won’t be free until health care is a human right,
until health care is not tied to a job, because we
still have an employment-based system, and until
health care has nothing to do with immigration status.
We don’t care if you are documented or undocumented.
It should not matter what your health care status is,
if you have a disease or you don’t. It should not
matter how much money you have or don’t, because many
of our programs are based on income eligibility rules.
Until we abolish the private, for-profit health
insurance industry in this county we are not free.
Until we take the profit motive out of health care we
cannot live in the way we want to live. This
legislation doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t change
those basic facts of our health care system.”
Redmond held up a syringe.
“I take a medication that costs $1,700 every single
month,” she said. “I inject this medication. It costs
$425 a week for 50 milligrams of medication. I would
do almost anything to get this medication because
without it I don’t have much of a life. The
pharmaceutical industry knows this. They price these
drugs accordingly to the level of desperation that
people feel. Billy Tauzin, the former CEO of [the
trade organization of] Big Pharma, negotiated a secret
deal with President Obama to extend the patents of
biologics, this new revolutionary class of drugs, for
12 years. And Obama also promised in this deal that he
would not negotiate drug prices for Medicare.”
Obama’s numerous betrayals—from his failure to
implement serious environmental reform at Copenhagen,
to his expansion of the current wars, to his refusal
to create jobs for our desperate class of unemployed
and underemployed, to his gutting of public education,
to his callous disregard for the rights of workers and
funneling of trillions in taxpayer money to banks—is a
shameful list. Passing universal, single-payer
nonprofit health care for all Americans might have
delivered to Obama, who may well be a one-term
president, at least one worthwhile achievement.
Single-payer nonprofit health care has widespread
popular support, with nearly two-thirds of the public
behind it. It is backed by 59 percent of doctors. And
it would have helped roll back, at least a bit, the
corporate assault on the citizenry.
Medical bills lead to 62 percent of personal
bankruptcies, and nearly 80 percent of these people
had insurance. The U.S. spends twice as much as other
industrialized nations on health care, $8,160 per
capita. Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork
consume 31 percent of every health care dollar.
Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer
would save more than $400 billion per year—enough,
PNHP estimates, to provide comprehensive, high-quality
coverage for all Americans.
Candidate Obama promised to protect women’s rights
under Roe. v. Wade, something this legislation does
not do. He told voters he would create a public option
and then refused to consider it. The health care
reform bill, to quote a statement released by PNHP,
has instead “saddled Americans with an expensive
package of onerous individual mandates, new taxes on
workers’ health plans, countless sweetheart deals with
the insurers and Big Pharma, and a perpetuation of the
fragmented, dysfunctional, and unsustainable system
that is taking such a heavy toll on our health and
economy today.”
“Obama said he was going to have everybody at the
table,” Redmond said, “but that was a lie. Our voice
was not allowed to be there. There was a blackout on
our movement. We did not get media attention. We did
actions all over the country but we could not get
coverage. We had the ‘Mad as Hell Doctors’ go across
the country in a caravan, and they had rallies and
meetings. If that had been a bunch of AMA Republican
doctors, Anderson Cooper would have been on the
caravan reporting live. NPR would have done a series.
Instead, they did not get much coverage. And neither
did the sit-ins and arrests at insurance companies,
although we have never seen that level of activity.
They turned us into a fringe movement, although poll
after poll shows that the majority of people want some
kind of single-payer system.”
Our for-profit health system is driven by insurance
companies whose goal is to avoid covering the elderly
and the sick. These groups, most in need of medical
care, diminish profits. Medicare, paid for by the
government, removes responsibility for many of the
old. Medicaid, also paid for by the government,
removes the poor people, who have a greater tendency
to have chronic health problems. Hefty premiums, which
those who are seriously ill and lose their jobs often
cannot pay, remove the very sick. If you are healthy
and employed, which means you are less likely to need
expensive or complex treatment, the insurance
companies swoop down like birds of prey. These
corporations need to control our perceptions of health
care. Patients must be viewed as consumers. Doctors,
identified as “health care providers,” must be seen as
salespeople.
Insurance companies, which will soon be able to use
billions in taxpayer dollars to bolster their lobbying
efforts and campaign contributions, know that
single-payer nonprofit insurance means their
extinction. And they will employ considerable
resources to make sure single-payer nonprofit coverage
is denied to the public. They correctly see this as a
battle for their lives. And if human beings have to
die so they can survive, they are willing to make us
pay this price.
The for-profit health care industry, along with the
Democratic Party, consciously set out to confuse the
public debate. It created Health Care for America NOW!
in 2008 and provided it with tens of millions of
dollars to supposedly build a public campaign for a
public option. But the organization had no intention
of permitting a public option. The organization was,
as Dr. Flowers said, “a very clever way to distract
members of the single-payer movement and co-op some of
them. They told them that the public option would
become single payer, that it was a back door to single
payer, although there was no evidence that was true.”
Physicians for a National Health Plan attempted to
fight back. It worked with a number of organizations
under a coalition called the Leadership Conference for
Guaranteed Health Care. The group, which included the
National Nurse’s Union and Health Care Now, sought
meetings with members of Congress. Flowers and other
advocates asked Congress members to include them in
committee debates about the health care bill. But when
the first debate on the health care reform took place
in the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Sen. Max
Baucus, a politician who gets over 80 percent of his
campaign contributions from outside his home state of
Montana, they were locked out. Baucus invited 41
people to testify. None backed single payer.
The Leadership Conference, which represents more than
20 million people, again requested that one of their
members testify. Baucus again refused. When the second
committee meeting took place, Flowers and seven other
activists stood one by one in the room and asked why
the voices of the patients and the health care
providers were not being heard. The eight were
arrested and removed from the committee hearing.
Single-payer advocates were eventually heard on a few
of the House and Senate committees. But the hearings
were a charade, part of Washington’s cynical political
theater. It was the insurance and pharmaceutical
lobbyists who were in charge. They dominated the
public debate. They wrote the legislation. They
determined who received lavish campaign contributions
and who did not. And they won.
“We are talking about life and death, about the
difference between living your life and dying,”
Redmond said. “And once again it came down to the
Democratic Party trumping the needs of the people.”
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