David Caploe PhD, Chief Political Economist, EconomyWatch.com
America continues to be a sad sad place, with a lot of great people and qualities that are nevertheless increasingly overcome by the very worst elements of a society that doesn’t see itself as such but, rather, as a random collection of individuals somehow thrown together.
This goes against, I realize, the whole notion of American exceptionalism, the idea the US is a “universal” nation, open to people of all other countries, brought together in search of both ideal and material satisfactions unavailable elsewhere in the world, and transformed in the process into a new kind of being.
But as we witness the bizarre spectacle of President Obama’s health care “reform” “victory,” it’s hard not to be reminded of Shakespeare’s phrase, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” or, at least in this case, signifying not too much, despite a hell of a lot of noise.
Yes, it’s true that if the legislation had failed, it would have been a disaster for Obama personally, his presidency, and probably made a bad situation, both generally and re health “care,” even worse – so in that sense, I guess this is a “victory” of sorts.
But it’s really hard to feel excited / positive / full of hope / all teary-eyed etc, the way I see some of my FaceBook friends getting.
And I’m not just saying this because a lot of them felt that way about Obama initially, and have been so disappointed they simply WANTED to “feel good again” about him – or they were just so scared by the not-unreasonable idea a legislative defeat would, somehow, portend a return to the awful days of Cheney / Bush.
If this sounds cynical, my apologies. But after the spectacle we’ve witnessed – whose sordid details really DON’T need to be re-hashed here for the thousandth time – the only emotion I can feel is slight relief the unabashedly obstructionist Republicans didn’t succeed in this initial phase, although they seem bound and determined, as they keep reminding us, to “keep on fighting” this battle, most of which is in their heads, until the November elections at least.
That sort of effort is all too pathetically predictable. But so too is what we identified last year as the fundamental difficulty with Obama’s approach to just about EVERY important problem: playing ball with the middlemen, in this case, the health insurance companies, as if they were the only game in town.
Once that decision was taken – and it obviously happened early on, when Obama made clear that not only was single-payer off the table, but he also wasn’t going to push very hard for the “public option” that, its exponents claimed, would impose some “market discipline” on the insurance companies – the outcome was basically foreordained: either the whole thing would go down in flames, or the insurance companies would definitely be taken care of in whatever emerged.
And that’s exactly what happened.
To be sure, the ability of insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions is SUPPOSED to be eliminated within three months of Obama’s signing of the law, albeit in a very indirect way as they would become “eligible for subsidized coverage through a new high-risk insurance program,” the details of which I still haven’t been able to discern, despite reading every article in the New York Times and a raft of other websites on the subject.
And that’s one big part of the problem: no one really has any idea of what the hell is going on here EXCEPT, of course, the insurance companies and the drug companies and the hospitals – who know because it was THEIR K Street lobbyists who put in the specific sections of the law that “insure” they make plenty of money from all the new changes.
To see just how ludicrous the situation is – and how dominated it is by middlewo/men who control the process – check out this passage from the Q & A the Times set up to try to shed some light into this incredibly UN-transparent “brave new world”: more...
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