When Barack Obama assumed the presidency, there was talk that former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean might be his Secretary of Health and Human Services. That would have made Dean the administration’s point-person in the fight for health care reform. It also would have increased the likelihood that reform would be real.But Dean was rejected. And, now, the prospect of real reform is fading fast. Dean said last week that the only thing that made health-reform legislation proposed by House committees worth doing was the public option. In that legislation, the physician and former Vermont governor argued that “the last shred of reform is the public option.” In fact, without the public option, the Obama approach — and that of compromise-prone Democrats in Congress — looks increasingly like a step in the wrong direction.
That’s because the “reforms” currently under consideration threaten to undermine Medicare and Medicaid — with radical cost-cutting schemes — while steering hundreds of billions in federal dollars into the accounts of for-profit insurers and the pharmaceutical industry.
This is not “change we can believe in.” This is change that serious reformers will find “very difficult” to support, as Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, said Sunday on CNN. Johnson explained that progressives would have a tough time backing legislation that did not include a public option.
“The only way we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don’t offer insurance have access to it, is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition,” explained Johnson, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Congresswoman Johnson is exactly right. Without a robust public option, what the Obama administration and compromised Democrats in the House and Senate are talking about is not “health care reform.”
It is “health care deform” that does not begin to address the crisis created by insurance industry profiteering — and that could well make the “cure” worse than the disease.
John Nichols is a Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine.
published Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Metro Newspaper - Philadelphia
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This Is Reform?
It’s never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest. So if we manage to get health care “reform” this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary.
Forget about a crackdown on price-gouging drug companies and predatory insurance firms. That’s not happening. With the public pretty well confused about what is going on, we’re headed — at best — toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’ve hit the jackpot.
Click here for complete Op-Ed by Bob Herbert, published August 17, 2009, The New York Times
Healthcare Cont:
After his brilliant beginning, the president suddenly looks weak and unreliable. That will be the common interpretation around Washington of the president's abrupt retreat on substantive heathcare reform. Give Barack Obama a hard shove, they will say, rough him up a bit and he folds. A few weeks back, the president was touting a "public option" health plan as an essential element in reform. Now he says, take it or leave it. Whatever Congress does, he's okay with that...
Click here for complete editorial By William Greider published in The Nation