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Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Democratic Party Healthcare "Reform" Legacy: KICK ME!

America has by far the cruelest and the most stupid healthcare system in the industrialized world. That is why reform is so palpably necessary now, and indeed has been ever more and more urgently necessary for generations. Unfortunately, our healthcare system would still be the cruelest and most stupid healthcare system for a self-identified relatively democratic country in the world (even if possibly marginally better for some few for a short while) after Democrats enacted the "reform" represented by the current debased state of the process.

The fact that insane immoral monolithic Republican obstructionism has created the conditions under which this process has been so derailed and deranged (disproportionately empowering Conservadems within the Democratic caucus, among other things) is not going to be taken into consideration as it should by the American citizens in years to come whose healthcare costs will certainly keep rising while their coverage continues to fail them when it matters most.

The only thing that will change is that where Americans now rightly blame evil for-profit insurance companies for their misery they will now blame Democrats and this pathetic failed Democratic "reform" for their misery.

If stealth-repug and insurance-shill Joe Lieberman writes the Democratic healthcare bill, kill the bill. Else, the bill will kill the prospects for any abiding Democratic governing majority.

Leadership has to fix this -- eliminating mandates if there are no remaining mechanisms either for cost-containment or regulation enforcement (quietly re-introducing notorious "fraud" exception language to justify denial of coverage -- such as the "fraud" of forgetting to mention acne medication taken in adolescence to deny coverage in middle-age for unrelated life-saving treatment, for example? -- and all the sick cynical fun-'n-games around annual caps point clearly to the ongoing abuses endorsed by the "reform" we are now oozing our way toward).

Fix it, or kill it before it kills us.

Those who are raising the specter of insurance company CEOs and tragic Teabaggers popping champagne corks if reform fails are pretending that those champagne corks aren't already popping. Just take a gander at the stock prices for insurance providers, and you'll know the score.

Fix it, or kill it before it kills us.

Obama has been conjuring up the spectacle of generations of failed attempts, failed Presidential efforts to reform healthcare, as if pinning a KICK ME sign onto the backs of the Democratic party in exchange for another government pay-out to the worst villains of corporate America (first the banksters, now the for-profit insurers) represents some kind of proud legacy to fight for.

No option, no mandate. Fix this bill, or kill the thing before it kills us.

(It is important to grasp, by the way, that the bill doesn't actually exist to be killed right now, it really doesn't, and indeed won't really exist to be killed or supported until we get to the Conference Report... so I suppose this angry admonition is still in the "make them do it" genre, strictly speaking.)

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