by Roger Balson, 11/10/09

Well, it looks like the health care bill that was passed in the house Saturday night will eventually lead to a Massachusetts style health care plan across the nation if it passes the next few hurdles – just as many of us feared.

The mandate, enforced by fines and possibly even criminal penalties will force us to patronize the very enemies of real reform and a sound, sane system of health care. The public option is shrinking before our eyes. National single payer advocates recommend regrouping.

There are some of you reading this who might argue that this bill is but an incremental approach to reform — that over time it will provide universal and fiscally sound coverage and that through some process not readily apparent it will evolve into single payer, Medicare for All.

Perhaps some feel that the states will lead the way now — even though the Kucinich amendment that would have eliminated the restrictions of ERISA, which now hampers the development of universal publicly funded healthcare on the state level, has been brushed aside with little or no hope of it emerging as a bill, let alone being passed.

The truth is, though, we are witnessing one of the larger (not the largest — the bank bailout was probably the largest) rip-off of the taxpayers/consumers in this nation. Private industry, using Congress, has made the government the enforcer in this extortion scheme. I don’t see how anyone can put a happy face on this.

Should we believe that more people will actually be covered? Perhaps, but with what kind of coverage? And who will be regulating and overseeing these wonderful new laws which limit the insurance companies from rejecting customers and claims or imposing higher costs arbitrarily? Why, the same folks — Congress — who just handed the cartel the keys to the public treasury. Somehow that’s not going to help me sleep better at night.

It’s quite a scam, though. We have Democrats running around, patting themselves on the back, likening this to the passage of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare 30 years later. I even heard Ed Rendell on the news comparing the mandatory purchase of health insurance to paying Medicare taxes.

What Fast Eddy and his ilk fail to grasp is that paying taxes, whether we like it or not, is sending our money to a body (the government) which is controlled (or should be) by our duly elected representatives, while purchasing insurance from the cartel is handing our money over to a non-democratic, non-representative institution which has, since its inception, sought ways to avoid paying our medical bills to make a profit.

Pelosi, Rendell and the other sell-out Dems are so besotted by the prospect of holding control of the government thanks to the kickbacks they’ll receive from the insurance cartel that they are willing to say or do anything it seems.

So the question remains: what now? I have to sadly conclude that we must, as Conyers and Kucinich suggested, take some time to regroup. What we really need to do is to continue to point out to those who will listen that letting bribery and corruption determine the course of this nation is a recipe for disaster, to say the least.

We may have hit a lull in this struggle, but that doesn’t mean we should acquiesce and not speak out against this bill and its authors. We should also be willing to point out how the wars being waged, the energy policies relying on coal and nuclear, the lax regulation of banks etc are also the product of corruption run rampant.

There’s a lot of work to be done on several fronts — and even on the health care front we might still find a way to rally people against the mandate.

We may not get Medicare for All for now, but we need to make it clear that the mandate is absolutely wrong. If the mandate becomes law we should find ways to resist it and ultimately reverse it.