By: libbyliberal
The Real Situation
Right now some of our senators are meeting and trying to hammer out a health care reform bill the President has promised will be completed by Christmas.
The probable bill will not seriously expand the health care benefits of American citizens as much as it will significantly enhance the profit-making of the corporations, mega-corporations, that have been contributing millions of dollars to our representatives in both the House and the Senate, and also to the President.
The President, Senate and House are struggling to come up with a bill which SEEMS to accommodate the needs of a desperate citizenry in these hard economic times, made harder thanks to the President, Senate and House forking over billions of dollars of taxpayer money to rescue the very banks that caused the economic collapse, which banks, by the way, are now issuing tremendous bonuses to their executives as unemployment and home foreclosures and bankruptcies paralyze more and more of the rest of us.
Indeed, the President, House and Senate have shown their priority is to take care of the needs of corporations, the banks and now the insurance and drug companies, their lobbying financial mentors. They do this by minimizing and sacrificing the needs of the citizenry. They can't serve both masters. They have had to choose between their legitimate constituents, us, the taxpayers, and their illegitimate ones, the corporations.
Their choice was made clear with the bank, Wall Street over Main Street, bailouts. I believe they are counting on a naïve citizenry and a cooperative corporate media to treat the upcoming toxic legislation for the citizenry as historic reform on behalf of citizens. This is a lie. They will try to make the legislation look and sound responsive to our needs. But the finagling they are doing now will be cutting benefits or shifting funding, as the old adage goes, "Stealing from Peter to pay Paul." (Don't think that uproar about breast cancer screenings being advanced to an older age has nothing to do with this earnest health care economizing). At the same time, the profit-making of the insurance and drug corporations, the senators and representatives will not just leave undisturbed, but grossly enhanced by their faux-reform (from the mandatory purchase rule and other careful corporate protections within the new bill).
Now, there does exist a fiscally sane and humane health care plan, the only one that would really seriously enhance the lives of all Americans. That would be Single Payer Medicare for All. It would be a secure and sustainable, universal — that is, everybody in, nobody out -– program (by the way, we are the ONLY industrial nation in the world that does not have coverage for EVERY citizen), but President Obama and our Congress, save for a few noble individuals such as Rep. Kucinich and Senator Sanders, refuse to consider it because this system is based on the structure of the very successful Medicare program which does not use investment-insurance company vendors.
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