Travesty: Healthcare "Reform"

For over a year now we've been subjected to this witless farce called healthcare "reform," which is no reform at all, just a refurbished giveaway to Big Insurance, same as George W. Bush's "Medicare prescription benefit" was.

The only serious healthcare reform is Medicare for all, or single-payer. But since that wasn't "possible," wasn't "in the cards," labor and "progressives" were ready to jettison it from the first. So, even now, as the AFL-CIO resoudingly came out in favor of single-payer at its summer 2009 convention, it was too little, too late--labor had already compromised, already caved in, because single-payer was supposedly "unrealistic," and therefore not worth fighting for. (But remember Eugene Deb's lasting words, "It's better to vote for what you want, and not to get it, than to vote for what you don't want, and to get it.") So labor joined with the "progressives" to form HCAN, which fudged from the start on single-payer. (See Jane Slaughter's excellent article in the January 2010 Z Magazine, "Labor Bargains for Too Little on Health Care and Gets Even Less," originally published in Labor Notes.)

Labor and "progressives" then said they would be happy to settle for a "public option" big enough to compete with private insurance on the market, but that soon got whittled away in Congress for a "public option" too little to compete. But soon "public option" was dropped in favor of "mandates" to force compulsory buying of private health insurance, with subsidies for those defined as "too poor" to pay the market price; and even biger subsidies to Big Insurance to make health insurance available to people with previously-existing conditions, so that nobody would theoretically be turned away. But Big Insurance liked the status quo too much, and lobbied even against this paltry "reform."

So healthcare "reform" now looks like the Massachusetts plan gone nationwide. But the Massachusetts plan has turned out to be a failure, and even though "public option" is back under considerarion, the Obama Administration isn't supporting it. And strongarm as he may, Obama can't get even paltry healthcare "reform" of the Massachusettts type past the Republicans and the Blues Dogs of the Democratic Party.

Healthcare reform was a much more attractive issue a year ago, when there was much greater expectation of the U.S.'s recession economy turning around. But such expectation is now dashed, and any kind of Massachusetts-style "mandate" at the national level to buy private health insurance would be devastating in an economy faced with unemployment that officially hovers around 10%, where the actual unemployment rate is more like 17-18%, and with long-term joblessness to persist. How are such workers to be able to afford health insurance, especially with adequate health insurance coverage (misnamed "Cadillac benefits" or "gold-plated benefits") subject to taxation?

The right is already planning to attack "mandates" on constitutional grounds, as "infringements on personal freedom." But the greater argument against "mandates" is that they only line the already well-lined pockets of Big Insurance. No! Either real healthcare reform, Medicare-for-all single-payer, or at least a strong and viable "public option," or no such "reform" as presently planned at all! Don't let healthcare legislation become the No Child Left Behind Act of the second decade of the 21st Century.