The Pelosi Predicament, cont'd.

SPOILER ALERT: Don't read this comment if you haven't decided how you'd vote and my own vote might influence yours--either affirmatively or negatively.

Recognizing that this might be tantamount to a vote for a single term for Obama, I would cast my own vote against the Senate bill. I would do so despite the arguments of people like Howard Dean and Bill Clinton who see the weaknesses in this reform package but see an additional 30,000 that would receive coverage if this is passed. My own vote is most heavily influenced by Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, whose views on the issue can be accessed via Bill Moyers' program's website:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2010/03/is_the_presidents_health_bill.html

Her argument is that sham reform is worse than real reform and that attempted to patch a system predicated on profit for the insurers is doomed to failure without fundamental structural reforms--of the sort carried out by the Swiss, the last for-profit insurance-based system to decide to remove the profit motive from the insurance industry, allowing private insurers to continue to exist, but not as for-profit entities with shareholders or regulations on pricing. The Swiss, like Americans, were skeptical that this would work. Now, by all indications, they'd never go back. Leaving only the US alone among the western democracies as a system that allows profit-seeking to trump universal health care as a human right. I am hopeful that Angell's view that we'd be better off by scrapping the faux reform and requiring politicians to face up to the truth: that sooner or later, a system of "Medicare for all" is the sanest, most efficient, most morally defensible and, in the end, politically profitable system. Of course, it means that we tell our current leaders -- at least those in the Senate that sold out to private insurance and, yes, the President, that this is not the change we need, that we'll bank on Democrats nominating a real advocate for real reform -- say, a Howard Dean -- to split the Democrats in a manner that in the end will serve the party and the country, though in the short term it will help the hapless Republicans. Barack Obama is a good man, a decent person, and a bright individual. He's just not what we need as president at this point in our history. I say this inspite of his personal approval ratings, which arent' great but are better than they should be for an economy that's still not hiring workers and has yet to deliver on a single campaign promise from the long march and lopsided victory in 2008. Can anyone honestly say that they know where Obama's core convictions lie? Can anyone honestly justify his ill-considered efforts at bipartisanship that produced a total of three votes for a stimulus package that was too modest given the depths to which the economy hand shrunk? Can anyone honestly justify the escalation of US troop commitments in Afghanistan when there are fewer than 100 members of al-Qaeda in the entire country? Can anyone honestly defend the president's budget: the so-called "freeze" on non-security related, domestic discretionary spending, which amounts to 14% of the budget? Likewise, for the increase in the defense budget to well over 700 billion annually, greater than one-half of the entire world's defense expenditures, when we operate 700 bases outside of the US in countries all over the world while running deficits of over a trillion and fearing to raise taxes on the very wealthy whose already obscene wealth saw huge, indefensible growth under Bush 43? Are these the actions of a Democratic reformer? I say they are not even close, and this is no time for a holding-pattern presidency that seems more concerned with maintaining a semblance of popularity by "embracing" nondescript centrist "solutions" to problems that cry out for fundamental, wholesale change. That's a mouthfull, to be sure, but you can no doubt get the point. Let's put the health care "debate" we've wasted a year and one-half on behind us, cut our losses, and demand the kind of courageous leadership that the times require by sending a message to both parties: business as usual, whether under the guise of a phony reform or under the guise of "principled" opposition to a reform measure that's a big give-away to the corporate culprits that are the enemies of justice on health care, taxes, deficits, campaign finance, student loan-reform, you name it. Enough is enough!!

When the dust has settled, I remain toptimistic that this course will end up benefitting more people to a greater degree than going forward now with a fake effort of reform that doesn't take effect for three years anyway. Now please don't confuse me with the tea-baggers who oppose the HCR plan so as to prevent a government takeover. My opposition to the current reform effort is intended to do the very opposite: i,e., speed up and deepen a government takeover so that Medicare for All becomes reality sooner rather than much later.

Cheers,
DT