This is a revised and expanded entry combing two recent ones.
In a recent column by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, the winner of blogger of the year award in the magazine The Week’s annual opinion awards, Silver predicts the effect of insurance money on killing the chances for a "public option" for reforming the American health care.
Nate's column is probably the closest thing we have to an autopsy of the impending death of health care reform, one more time.
The health insurance industry has apparently isolated some among the 15 to 20 Democrats who still haven’t publicly endorsed the public option who have in the past been showered with campaign money from health insurers and the upshot is that roughly only 37 Democrats support real reform of the health care system.
Those among the 15 or 20 who are not receiving insurance largesse and so far are sitting it out are likely too terrified of taking a chance on fundamental change of anything and risking the wrath of Republican smears at election time.
We tend to forget how many among the Democrats in Congress are really the moderate Republican Party in exile, Democrats who will do anything to keep their seats in Congress and their generous health insurance benefits while trying to occasionally sound mostly sane.
Health care reform is the one issue that will secure the future for the Democrats and produce a new politics in our country; many Democrats are still too timid to go for the gold.
It is pusillanimous time once again for the Democrats and you can hear the knees knocking at a thousand yards.
This is appalling. I have seen way too much of this "death by Democrats" in my lifetime and, frankly, it's heartbreaking.
What is happening, in my opinion, is that the health care industry, and particularly the private insurers, is carefully spending a fortune on those senators---Democrats and Republicans---who still cling to the sectional politics of the past. That is to say that many Democrats and all Republicans run against government and secure electoral victory by mobilizing political fear and resentment instead of hope.
By sectional politics, I mean those members of the Senate and the House who are either from the South or from Border States and the upper mid-west where the South's influence and its politics of political resentment and division has spread.
I also mean those Democrats from blue states but where campaigns can produce an avalanche of right-wing accusation and thus make re-election actually hard work.
While these so-called Democrats argue that they want to solve the health care crisis, they consistently reject or water down that increase in public power absolutely essential to solving the problem.
These “moderate” Democrats say they do so because they say they trust the private sector or they don’t want to do much damage to the private sector. Of course, it is the private sector of health care that is the problem, as anyone with any insight into the health care crisis knows.
For example, Senator Blanche Lincoln (Dem., AR) says that she fears the public plan will undercut free enterprise in the health care field. But in Arkansas, Blue Cross controls over 75 percent of the insurance market, holding a virtual monopoly. Senator Lincoln is not defending competition; she is another Democrat defending a vested interest.
As a consequence this collapse of the Democrats give cover to senators from progressive states, like Senator Dianne Feinstein (Dem., CA) to quietly undercut the public option so that so-called progressive senators can take the money anyway and run from helping the American people, blaming it all on someone else.
Charles Schumer (Dem., NY) is busily working to dilute the meaning of the public option so that Obama can claim a legislative victory that is virtually meaningless.
I have this idea. Why doesn't Newsweek, not too long from now, prepare a cover listing the pictures of the 10 or 15 Senators who are wavering on supporting Obama's health care reform plan?
The point of the cover is that this group could kill meaningful health care reform, and they are all Democrats.
Many of them---but not all---are from small states in the South, the Midwest, and the upper South: the south and those parts of the U.S. that contain voters descended from Southerners moving away from a collapsing slave economy. Some are not. All are putting their political incumbency above any chance to change the biggest domestic problem we face.
Inside, Newsweek could run short profiles of the Senators, their financial supporters including health insurers, and information on how competitive health insurance is in each of their states.
Inside, you might also include the 2 or 3 Republicans who are not yet locked up in the insane asylum that is today's Republican Party.
These ten to 15 Democratic members of the Senate thrive on media indifference to the health care crisis because it is so boring, and difficult, and besides, we would just mess things up if we don’t try to build on the present system?
How long, of Lord?
Comments