Friday, August 14, 2009

What Part Of "Sold Down The Fucking River" Eludes Your Fine Discernment, Friendz?

Last week, Obama made behind-the-scenes deals with the epitome of all greasy slimeballs, (former Rep.) Sleazy Billy Tauzin, the capo of Big PHRmAbig, one of the biggest corpoRat players in the so-called 'health insurance reform' debate, ensuring that, whatever else happened, the BEEG MONEY wouldn't lose anything.

Whew. That's a relief. That Obama can shake hands with Tauzin tells me all I need to know about Obama's tolerance/sympathy for any smelly patch of reeking cat puke.

Obama is desperate to have something he can sign and trumpet as 'health insurance reform', with attendant photo ops, dancing girls, wild beasts, marching bands, and animal sacrifices, on prime-time, right AFTER the Super-Bowl, around the first anniversary of his inauguration. That is to say, he is not desperate to reform the health insurance morass. No. He is desperate to have a SHOW of reforming health insurance, in which he gleams with a righteousness.

Ralph Nader was on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now today. The headline is a nice precis of what the 'official' plans entail:
“You Do Not Cut Deals with the System that Has to Be Replaced”:
Ralph Nader on Secret White House Agreements with the Drug Industry

What is emerging here is what was being planned by the Obama White House all along, which is they would only—they would only demand legislation that was accepted by the big drug companies and the big health insurance companies.

You can see this emerging over the last few months. President Obama has met with the heads of the drug companies and the health insurance companies. Some executives have met with President Obama four to five times in the White House in the last few months. He has never met with the longtime leaders of the “Full Medicare for Everybody” movement, including Dr. Quentin Young, who is a close friend of his in Chicago; Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the head of the Health Research Group of Public Citizen; Rose Ann DeMoro, the leader of the fast-growing California Nurses Association—not once in the White House.

That’s all you need to know to realize that the deal that’s being cut here is from Obama to Senator Baucus, the Blue Dog senator from Montana, who is cutting a deal, largely in private, with right-wing Republican senators and getting it through the Senate and presenting Henry Waxman and John Dingle and others in the House with a fait accompli.

So whatever they pass in the House will be watered down in the Senate-House conference. And what we’ll end up with is another patchwork piece of legislation, allowing huge and expanded profits for the health insurance companies and the drug companies, and continuing this pay-or-die system that has plagued this country for decades, a system that takes 20,000 lives a year, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s about fifty to sixty people who die every day.
I don't know. Fifty or 60 people per day seems a small price to pay to ensure the profits and perqs of this vital industry, one so adept at separating its clients from their financial resources. Fifty or 60 people per day die in incidents involving automobiles, too, and nobody says they're bad people...As for a solution (you know, people are always asking the powerlesshow WE'D run the zoo), Nader makes a cogent and eminently sensible suggestion: if the Obama regime REAALLY wanted to implement a more general program, here's what they should do:
I would go for full Medicare for everyone, because people understand Medicare. Forty-five million people get it. They have free choice of doctor and hospital. It’s a three percent administrative burden, compared to 20 to 25 percent for the Aetnas and the private health insurance bureaucracies. It’s something that people understand. It’s something we should have had in 1964; instead of just for the elderly, it should have been across the board. That’s what I would go for. It’s supported by a majority of the people, majority of the doctors, majority of the nurses. It’s clear. It’s understandable. It doesn’t deal with unenforceable deals like the so-called drug industry—

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