Big Money Vs. the Health of the American People. You Can Only Buy Them Off to Get It.

A BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

By Mark Karlin

As BuzzFlash has written before, the battle in America -- and what is the crux of the Democratic divisions over the Senate Healthcare Reform Bill -- is who controls America: the American people or corporations and Wall Street?

In fact, the real question is who controls the destiny of the world's nations: global corporations without individual loyalty to any particular national government or sovereign nations supposedly representing the will of their electorates?

The healthcare reform bill represents the epicenter of this battle because it pits a phalanx of corporate profit interests against the idea of expanding healthcare coverage for Americans who don't have it or who are paying an arm and a leg for it. A key progressive goal championed by BuzzFlash and by Americans who believe healthcare is a right not a privilege (a concept President Obama asserted in response to a question while debating John McCain during the election) has been single-payer universal coverage (once championed by Obama before he entered the race for president).

When it became clear that universal coverage was not going to be backed by the White House, progressives championed a public option, in large part because it would create a mechanism for forcing insurance companies to compete in a relatively fixed market for health insurance that adds to healthcare costs by about 30%. Those profits add nothing whatsoever to the quality of healthcare; all they do is increase the price of healthcare by 30%, which adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars.

When the public option collapsed in the Senate during negotiations with conservative Dem senators, Harry Reid inserted the Medicare expansion buy-in option (only open to those without health insurance) for those 55-64. Then Joe Lieberman more or less represented the White House position (because Obama and Emanuel were concerned that the AMA and AHA would fight and sink the bill if the limited Medicare expansion were in it) and the Medicare expansion was deleted from the Senate HCR bill. (After its deletion, the AMA supported the Senate Bill with a lot of White House fanfare.)

So progressives were ironically divided into impassioned camps: let us call them the "pragmatists" and the "we won't pay ransom to the corporate profiteers and leeches" groups. For political reasons relating to the 2010 elections, the Republicans remained adamantly opposed to any healthcare reform, even though the Senate bill actually benefits corporations and wealthy professionals (physicians) who normally financially back Republicans.

Emanuel believes he has the Republicans in a political box in terms of fundraising (and that is his specialty), because now the healthcare interests who normally back the Republicans will contribute more to the Democrats, because they are going to profit from the HCR bill.

Meanwhile, the White House reasons that they are expanding the number of Americans covered by healthcare insurance by around 30 million, thus accomplishing part of the "right not a privilege" goal.

But civil war has broken out among the Democrats over whether the coverage comes at the cost of paying too high a ransom and increased healthcare costs (via profits).

Senator Bernie Sanders (a BuzzFlash reader and Independent Senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Dems) will support the Senate Bill on Thursday, but with a heavy sigh.

Sanders recently echoed what Assistant Minority Leader Dick Durbin, one of BuzzFlash's Illinois Senators and a mentor of Obama, said awhile back: Big Money controls Congress.

Sanders recently told MSNBC:

The truth is -- let me break the bad news to the American people -- big money interests control the United States Congress. That's the reality. Some of us, for years -- I'm an independent -- have been trying to give the working class, middle class, low-income people some power. But the reality is, campaign contributions -- What do you think? We bailed out Wall Street; we're giving insurance companies, drug companies breaks here. But the choice that I have is whether you kill this bill and you allow 46 million people to continue without health insurance. I think that's the worst option.

"The insurance companies are going to make out like bandits. The drug companies are going to make out like bandits," Sanders said. "No question about that. This is not a strong bill."

So for progressives such as Bernie and for us at BuzzFlash, the Healthcare Reform Bill does expand coverage, but at a price to what Republicans and conservative Dems say they oppose; it inflates and increases healthcare costs because approximately 30% of every dollar that will be spent on premiums goes to profit and expensive administrative salaries. And Americans will pay for that profit through government subsidies, not through decreased healthcare company and insurer profits (that's why healthcare insurance company and healthcare stocks in general went up on Monday.)

The question that is so vexing and frustrating to progressives such as Sanders and BuzzFlash is that once again non-wealthy Americans are paying ransom -- as we did to Wall Street -- to achieve goals that should be decided on their merits, not by paying off corporations that control Congress through the revolving door between high level government staffers, elected officials, regulators and corporate lobbying.

Essentially, we have paid off the corporations who wield the real power in D.C. at least four major times this year: Wall Street, the military industrial complex (defense budget), Copenhagen (no binding agreement), and the Healthcare Reform Bill.

Perhaps some progressives who oppose the corporate control of governments might have been less harsh on the White House if HCR didn't represent one corporate pay off too many.

Or perhaps, we are just awakening to the nightmare that no President can effectively put the genie of corporate governance back into the bottle.

A BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG