A level playing field for healthcare reform is a myth. A public option is a scam. Or, maybe it’s a sham. It’s probably both.
I was riding in the car, listening to an interview of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius on the local public radio station. Since I was not taking notes, my recitation of that interview isn’t composed of direct quotes – it is based solely on what remains of my memory.
The interviewer asked Ms. Sebelius if, in order to address the concerns of the opposition, she intended the reform to provide a level playing field. She answered in the affirmative. He then asked if the public option would be so constructed as to not be or ever become a single-payer system. Again, she said yes.
So, not only does the administration intend to put something on the table that is not single-payer, it intends that it never come to pass. That is news to the majority that wants a single-payer system. It is also a slap in the face to those willing to support a public option as a step to an eventual single-payer system.
The “reform” that the administration intends to accomplish is no reform. It is a scam. It is another gift to the insurance and drug corporations a la Medicare Part D. Why not let those industries write the bill the way al-PhARMA wrote Part D?
There is no such thing as a level playing field. This is not a game.
CMS is the agency that pays the bills for Medicare, Medicaid and the Chilren’s Health Insurance Program. It spends 1.8 cents of every dollar for administration. Private health insurance companies are in the 30-32% range.
To make private plans competitive would mean artificially increasing a public option’s premiums by 30% just to level the playing field for that single factor. That means that those with the public option would be subsidizing the private corporations by an amount greater than their already unconscionable profits.
Every Democratic president since FDR has tried to provide us with universal healthcare. We have an historic confluence of forces that now make it possible and this is what we get?
Just putting those presently uninsured, that iconic 47 million souls, on a public option plan would make it larger than any existing private plan. The economies of scale would put the private plans at a further disadvantage. The power of a plan of such size also would provide it with more bargaining power, even if not combined with the CMS. That means the private plans would be at an even greater disadvantage.
The public option would, supposedly, be available to many others besides those presently uninsured. Unless we further subsidize the private corporations, they stand far less of a chance than the proverbial snowball in Dante’s Inferno.
We would not be considering this subject at all had the private insurance and drug corporations not screwed up healthcare delivery so royally. Are these incompetent leeches worth trillions of dollars of premiums and tax subsidies? Are they worth saving? Does President Obama consider their continued obscene profits and deadly game playing more worthy of his support than those who pinned their hopes, even their lives and well-being on him during the campaign and the early months of his presidency?
What I have written to this point has focused primarily on dollars. What about the lives to be lost or destroyed by what would essentially be little more than a continuation of the present failed system? Is overwhelming bipartisan support from the public worth less than a possible handful of votes from Republican Senators?
Obama has the opportunity to accomplish what FDR, LBJ and WJC, with all of their political skills, could not. He has the opportunity to provide an historic service to the people of America. He also has the opportunity to fritter it all away.
There was no bipartisanship behind Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Those issues were more important than kow-towing to a small group of professional naysayers. So is a universal, single-payer healthcare system. It is the only real reform. Public options, co-ops and all of the other scams are nothing more than diversions.
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