No, We Can’t
By Radha Surya
19 October, 2009
Countercurrents.org
The epidemic in home foreclosures, factory closings, serial collapse of financial institutions and other symptoms of economic crisis have caused healthcare reform to become the most important domestic priority of the Obama Administration. Mounting economic distress has made it impossible for the administration to ignore the plight of the uninsured and the underinsured. President Obama has personally staked his reputation on implementing effective healthcare reform. Over the summer, the President championed the issue via town hall meetings and other public forums as Congressional procedures for passing healthcare legislation gained momentum.
The prominence given in Washington to healthcare reform has increased the visibility of grass roots and citizen groups which have worked for years to bring about the institution of a comprehensive national healthcare system. These groups have stepped up their activities to make their voices heard above the clamor surrounding the impending healthcare legislation. The existing system consisting of a patchwork of employer provided insurance plans, federal programs for older Americans and veterans, and state programs for the indigent is recognized as being particularly deficient with respect to employees of small businesses, the self-employed and part-time or unemployed workers. Public opinion polls issued by reputed agencies have consistently shown that the majority of Americans recognize the need for healthcare reform. Amid the American public there is rising anger at the profit driven health insurance giants whose record earnings are accumulated by charging bloated premiums and implementing ruthless cost-containment by the simple device of refusing coverage to those suffering from chronic conditions—and therefore most in need of medical treatment. Close to 50 million uninsured Americans, millions more who are underinsured—as they find out to their cost when they become prey to illnesses requiring costly treatment, as many as 62% of personal bankruptcies in America caused by medical expenses, 45,000 Americans dying every year due to lack of medical treatment—such are the grim figures that have galvanized grass roots activism on behalf of healthcare reform. The activists view the unavailability of adequate and affordable medical treatment for the citizenry of the wealthiest country in the world as an unacceptable moral obscenity and have taken up arms (figuratively speaking) against the inequities perpetrated by the existing healthcare system.
Despite the bustle in the White House and on Capitol Hill, many progressive activists are far from hopeful that meaningful healthcare legislation will be passed. A number of formidable, possibly insurmountable, forces have converged to propel the healthcare reform process toward what could be an inevitable debacle. Chief among these is the stranglehold exercised by the for-profit healthcare industry on the executive and legislative branches of government. The healthcare industry has vanquished past efforts at achieving healthcare reform and is determined to defeat the latest challenge to its hegemony. The corporations are known to be spending 1.4 million dollars a day on lobbying efforts that seek to ensure that the industry’s profits will not be endangered by the legislation that emerges from Congress. The industry is bent on fleecing the public and will not brook any legislative checks on the license it enjoys to make obscene profits. The proposed changes are also opposed by the American Medical Association (AMA), the powerful professional organization which is known to have thwarted past efforts to reform the healthcare system. In a statement that was conveyed to the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the AMA has said that it does not believe that creating a public health insurance option is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs (New York Times, 10 June, 2009). Above all there is the influence of Reagan era conservatism to reckon with. Reaganism has remained a potent force in American politics and culture. It finds expression in knee-jerk hostility among both elected and armchair politicians to an expanded government role in providing health insurance or any other public service for that matter. The conservative world-view refuses to concede that the state performs a legitimate role in providing goods and services that must remain apart from and beyond the range of the profit motive. Among its loyalists, Reaganism engenders an outlook wherein big government (the infantile term of choice) is equated with bureaucratic waste, excessive taxation and profligate spending. Ideologues of this stripe may hit upon the most absurd demonstrations of their distrust of the state. For instance they may refuse to obey safety regulations which require the occupants of a motor vehicle to wear seat belts. The rationale for such non-compliance is that the government is making illegitimate use of its power or in other words “telling people what to do.”
Naturally socialism is anathema to the right-wing American. Conservative groups regard the healthcare reform proposals which are currently making the rounds as government takeover of the healthcare sector or—horror of horrors—socialized medicine. From their perspective, no healthcare at all is better than that which political writer William Blum, critic of US foreign policy, sarcastically calls “godless-atheist commie health care.” Blum writes as follows in a commentary that lashes out at the patent idiocy of conservative extremism: Better to see your child die than have her saved by a Marxist-Stalinist-collective doctor who works for the government (http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3976). The political atmosphere surrounding healthcare reform has been vitiated by misinformation and lies concerning the forced euthanasia that the impending legislation would institute by way of state-sponsored death panels. The rumor-mongers have claimed that the bill contains a provision requiring elderly Americans to undergo counseling on ending their lives. Signs proclaiming “Hands-off my Medicare” and “No Public Option” have been brandished at right-wing rallies opposing healthcare reform. This startling display of ignorance obviously stems from not knowing that the highly successful Medicare program for the elderly is run by the state. A potent orchestra of high-decibel, right-wing talk radio and TV hosts, conservative columnists and activist groups has swung into action to denigrate and defeat the healthcare reform efforts. Over the summer, the latter constituted a disruptive and even threatening presence at the town-hall meetings held by the President for the purpose of seeking the input of the American public.
In a clear case of adding insult to injury, the current drive for healthcare reform is being battled—alongside other issues--in the name of choice. Government managed insurance is represented by anti-reform ideologues as an infringement on the American people’s freedom to make choices from a range of healthcare options. This assertion is made ad nauseum despite its patent irrelevance in a context characterized by widespread economic distress and deepening inequalities that turn exercise of choice in health-related matters into a luxury that is only available to the fortunate few. Despite the promising momentum that was present at the start of the Obama Presidency and concomitant launch of the reform effort, it now looks increasingly as if America’s uninsured and underinsured will be the losers in a campaign that seeks purportedly to defend their freedom to make choices. Unlike their counterparts in the rest of the industrialized, developed world the economically vulnerable sections of society in the wealthiest country in the world will not be allowed to choose to have access to adequate and affordable healthcare.
