Unraveling The Health Bill Lies in 8 Paragraphs

Ilargi's laser breakdown of Obama's health bill and the surrounding political complexities is the best I've read by anyone thus far. In eight paragraphs, Ilargi connects all the scattered dots and compresses them into one clean bull's eye.

From Ilargi's The Automatic Earth:

"Universal" health care plans have been running in many rich western countries for decades, and while there are no perfect systems, and cost pressures build up there as well, the satisfaction level to date is generally high, much higher than in the US. While at the same time the costs of these systems are way lower than anything the US has been able to come up with. So why the extensive talk, why does the US need to re-invent the wheel? Just look around and pick a tried and true system, like Norway, France, Germany. They're all cheaper and they all function better. And if you don't believe that, ask yourself why none of these countries is presently involved in exasperating talks about their systems.

So why does Washington try to invent the wheel? The answer is easy. The difference between US and Western European health care lies exclusively in the political power acquired by corporate industries, in this case -mainly- a combination of drug manufacturers (closely linked to the chemical industry) and insurance companies (which are in turn closely linked to Wall Street banks). The US needs to fabricate its own system because it needs to satisfy the perverted influence industry has on not just health care itself, but also on the political process.

US health care spending is over 15% of GDP, and within 10 years it will be 20% (there's your bubble). That means today’s dollar total is about $2.2 trillion (that's Britain's entire GDP), and we're on our way to $3 trillion. If the US would adopt a Western European system, it might save 50% of these costs. And a few very powerful corporations would lose $1 trillion per year in revenues. That's all you need to know about the reason why there will be no significant reform. Sick people are big business. And big business runs the nation.

The link between drug manufacturing and the chemical industry is obvious. The same chemical giants also have close ties to the military. What is less known are their connections to the food industry. Firms like DuPont, Dow, Syngenta and Monsanto have, under various names and guises, made enormous profits from fertilizers and pesticides ever since the Green Revolution started over half a century ago. In the past two decades, they have moved into the industry of food itself. Genetically modified seeds are taking agriculture by storm, and they're all property of the world's chemical giants, which are now routinely referred to as agribusinesses. A long cry, at first glance, from the Monsanto that for instance infamously supplied the US army with Agent Orange.

The companies have further solidified their control over all aspects of our food by linking up with traditional food conglomerates like Cargill, Tyson and ConAgra, essentially forming a closed circuit of control over world food, a circuit that tightens as time goes by and all seeds are contaminated with GM technologies.

Meanwhile, they are still also what they started out as: chemical giants. As such, they control much of US health care. And therefore have a huge influence in Washington, much like Goldman Sachs and General Electric (which, accidentally, has a large chemical division).

Now, if I were an innocent little simple child, I might conclude from this that all these companies really have to do is make Americans eat the food they control, make sure that food makes them sick, and cash in big again at the other end, in medical care. The corn syrup produced at one end of this "food chain" is in everything these days, and it's a main ingredient in the current obesity epidemic in the US, which brings along large additional medical costs, an estimated $147 billion per year in fact. Obesity habitually leads to diabetes, and you can guess who provides the insulin. A few years ago, the increase in childhood diabetes led one doctor to proclaim that we're raising a generation of blind amputees. The numbers keep on rising exponentially.

One columnist today claimed that obesity doesn't cost money, but it saves billions of dollars, because obese people live on average 7 years shorter than their non-obese neighbors. That sort of cynicism seems to be the leading policy guideline for both industry and government. And that's why there will be no health care reform.