Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Health Care Reform

I guess we have now entered the stage of health care reform where everyone expresses concern for the health care of Americans broadly (see 1993). Democrats express their concerns about the 40-50 million people who are currently uninsured.
Republicans insist that Americans have the finest health care system in the world and we wouldn’t want to trade that marvel for a system in which government bureaucrats dictate when and how you can get health care. Wouldn’t want those mindless bureaucrats telling us that we can’t have a hip replacement, now would we?
Oh, and then there’s the third group, arguably larger than the other two and way more heavily endowed with money—the health insurance industry and its lobbyists. They are busy creating the language by which health care reform will be defeated. After all, any system with a “public option” is inherently threatening to them, their profits, and especially their bonuses and stock options. This group crafted the Harry and Louise advertisements that helped to kill Clinton’s reform initiative. They are now designing the statements to be read ritually by Republican senators and Congressmen who receive large payments from them, in exchange for acting as their lackeys. They also, of course, work closely with those super patriots, the Fox News readers and their radio patriots—you know them as Rush, the fat dopehead, and his buddies.
So, as the insurance industry execs continue to fatten their bank accounts, from charging ever higher fees for less and less health care, our American electorate continues to cheer them on, and to exhort their representatives to never, ever consider that nasty old “public option.” That would be socialism, and we wouldn’t want that now, would we?

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