The embrace of conservative ideas also helps explain why real cost containment didn’t make it into the final product. Curbs on prices are anathema to American business, and perhaps that’s why the president made a deal with the drug companies early on not to fight for negotiated prices in the Medicare program, a pledge he had made during his campaign.
All this explains why the usual right-wing think tanks weren’t especially vocal during the final stretches of the bill’s path to enactment. Their ideas were going to become law—which makes it all the more puzzling that the Republicans have fought so hard against the legislation.
“The significance of Obama’s health legislation is more political than substantive,” Reich wrote in his TMP column. “For the first time since Ronald Reagan told America government is the problem, Obama’s health bill reasserts that government can provide a major solution”—albeit a solution that relies on the private market to deliver the goods. The question is whether health care is a commodity that the marketplace can manage with government help. Or will something else be needed in the distant future?
Getting away with hiding the affordability implications to Americans of their irreversible endorsement of privatization - buried in the WTO implications of the Senate bill, may be a Rubicon of sorts for the American center right and the Obama administration beyond which they wil never be able to be honest with the American public again.
I am sure many would want to know that public option was never on the table, and that without single payer, clearly prohibited by GATS- affordability will be impossible. With that knowledge, they could choose an activist candidate to actually enact real change, or they could make other arrangements for the future if they have a chronic illness, moving elsewhere, perhaps. (Before the rush.)
But- because of our decade of denial about GATS, a WTO agreement of long standing, the politicians of both parties have been given a free pass to take shameless advantage of the nation's WTO-ignorance, to get votes. So, they are not about to tell us. Democrats will be portrayed as making back room deals (true, unfortunately) and Republicans will portray themselves as both blameless (not true) and psychic (also not true) Everybody realizes that affordability is not in the cards, and nobody is taking steps to tell us the real reasons why.
The rights to us have already been sold. And, there is no easy to steal profit in unprivatized public healthcare - an expected windfall profit the nation's powerful have already spent by amassing huge debts that they expect the taxpayer to pay.
And of course, few want to know that they are lying to us shamelessly about what they can and can't do, to get our votes, based on our desperate, EMPTY hopes.
When will we have real reasons to hope? Will we ever?
#1 Posted by Flipper, CJR on Fri 26 Mar 2010 at 01:33 PM