Forty-seven million Americans are without health insurance. Why? Because they can’t afford it.
And what’s Washington’s solution? Require people to buy private insurance with the government providing a subsidy to the health insurance companies.
What a pathetic state of affairs that our national government cannot respond to the needs of the people and must first respond to the needs of Wall Street and the health insurance industry and their stock prices.
-Dennis Kucinich, 21 January 2010, e-mail to supporters
Ah, politicians I once believed in. I hardly knew ye. The last bastion, the last hope, he has abandoned me.
Bill Richardson? Long gone. Barbara Lee? Recently departed. Dennis Kucinich? Et tu?
In case you don’t like politics or the US or healthcare (and don’t subject yourself to them daily anyway as part of some scheme to at least keep a cartoon going, you should know before we go further that Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich flipped his stance on the healthcare bailout. He’s now voting for it.
Not only is this a big deal for Kucinich and his few fans like me, many of whom (not me) were pouring money into his 2010 reelection campaign for being the only spiny liberal left in the country, but it’s done something almost no other Kucinich headline has been able to do: grab the top billing on American news outlets. Not near the top or up there, but A#1. If only his resolution to end the War in Afghanistan could have done the same.
Despite the words that headline this post, Kucinich today sent an e-mail reversing his decision and noting that Obama and Pelosi helped convince him that moving in some direction, any direction, on healthcare was more important than standing up for ideals, progress, or the progress of ideals.
Of course he didn’t use those words. He waxed on about his past concerns and noted that he wasn’t totally assuaged. He discussed the need for further pushing, knowing full well that there will be no further pushing for anything if and when a healthcare bailout package actually passes. He talked about how torn he was, what a struggle this vote was. But yet, he had been convinced.
We may never know what actually tipped the scales for Mr. Kucinich. It may have been a threat, it may have been a promise. But the problem is that Kucinich, like every other person in government, has things they care about more than representing their constituents, more even than representing their ideals. Everyone has a price. Maybe Obama said he wouldn’t run anyone against Kucinich in the primary, eliminating his need for all those campaign contributions. Maybe he threatened to run ads blaming Kucinich for every person who doesn’t have healthcare in America in the future, because we all know that not supporting a busted broken solution makes you automatically responsible for every problem said solution wouldn’t solve anyway. Who knows? The point is that when you have fallible vulnerable individuals in positions of power, they are susceptible to pressure. And they cave.
Just as Bill Richardson, one-time peace negotiator, found ways to explain proliferation of militant US hegemony to the UN. Just as Barbara Lee found it in her heart to reverse her vote on the bank bailout, something even Kucinich wouldn’t stoop to. But now he’s found his selling point.
This vote isn’t even about healthcare, really. It is a little. But it’s frankly more about his Afghanistan resolution. The point is that selling out the left has to cost Obama something. If it doesn’t, he can continue to embrace Bush-administration policies with impunity. If Obama wins healthcare and every single far-left member of his own party supports it, then all is lost. It’s a blank check for Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe even for Iran when the time comes. It’s tacit approval of any direction he wants to take the party. No matter how centrist, how hawkish, how corporation-friendly, Obama will be able to count on the vote of the (actually!) Socialist Senator from Vermont and the pacifist vegan Representative from Ohio. At which point, there’s really no point.
I still have hope that the healthcare bailout will fail, despite even the most pseudo-radicals of the Democratic Party getting in line. It’s not because I want people to suffer or because I don’t think access to humane treatment and medicine is a basic human right. It’s because no corporate giveaway in human history compares to the mandate that people be legally required to purchase something so expensive as health insurance from a private profit-driven corporation. And nothing would impact price escalation so steeply as to offer such guaranteed demand with no corresponding checks on price. Yes, the private companies would no longer be able to resort to their nastiest tricks in conspiring to kill people. But they also would have nothing preventing them from doubling the cost of their legally necessary product every year either. Especially when their other avenues to profit (those nasty tricks) were being shut down and they could argue that the whole economy would fail if they didn’t raise rates.
Beyond any of these moral issues, it’s a Ponzi scheme. America’s been investing in healthcare stocks like crazy, boosting claims of a recovery, because profiting off of suffering is the only business left in America, via either healthcare or the military. So if we boost up the corporations with a fat deal for them, the stockholders make money. And then they make more money out of squeezing more money out of everyone, who’s mandated to pay, and the only way to offset it is to… invest in more healthcare stocks! Yay. Everybody wins.
I guess I shouldn’t have been so mad at Dennis after all. He’s going to make everybody rich.
