Health care reform no great liberal achievement

Goat cheese, good wine and dark bread end up in my shopping cart when I’ve got a little extra cash.  I attend Modern Dance performances and listen to NPR every day.  I volunteered for Obama as he won the Iowa Caucus.  So I’m not the type of person who expected to end up agreeing with Tea Party activists.   Am I really alone?  54 percent of the country wants to repeal the so-called Health Care Bill according to a March 29 Rasmussen poll and only 42 percent think it’s worth keeping.

It pains me to see liberals gloating about this bill, calling it a victory and mocking conservative resistance.  Progressives are supposed to be “the reality-based community” and yet we can’t see through obvious lies when it comes from “our team.”

The day this legislation was signed, healthcare companies saw their stocks rise to a 52-year high, the most profitable day since the Eisenhower administration.  True, there are some good things in the bill like protecting the right of a mother to nurse her child at work or the establishment of nursing home insurance pools.  But these items could have been passed in 2007 when Democrats first took control of Congress.  There was no need for the muddy “compromises” made with conservatives like dropping the public option or offering millions of dollars in free Medicaid to Nebraska in exchange for one senator’s vote.  If passing health insurance reform on a strict party line vote is acceptable, then why couldn’t we write the most progressive bill that could get 50 votes in the Senate instead of the most conservative?

Republicans and I don’t usually agree about healthcare, education or war and peace.  But when they’re right, they’re right.  In less than four years you will be a criminal if you fail to cough up a monthly allowance to medical corporations.  But is 2013 a little too far away for us, since we seem to have the attention span of goldfish?  Obama is not much of a liberal or a particularly brave leader.  He is smart, that isn’t debatable.  With one hand the healthcare bill offers a nipple to suckle, waiting for us to be lulled into sleep before hitting us with the hickory rod it also holds. 

The Congress will cut a $250 dollar check to folks on Medicare, which will be received just before Election Day, a little taste of what the insurance companies will soon get.  Democrats will also point to sickly children and claim their pre-existing conditions will no longer keep them from their parents’ insurance.  If their parents have insurance, of course.  The smartest players in this game are the insurance companies who still have every right to raise rates on the sick as high as they want, preventing the less wealthy from buying in.  But mailing out a couple hundred bucks and taking a few photo-ops with kids in cancer wards might just be enough to neuter Americans’ outrage.   The federal government will make you think you’re gaining a lot with their ‘reforms.’  Then you’ll accept the sting of the mandate like an ox accepts the whip. 

Companies must either cover every single employee or face a thousand dollar fine for each employee.  A thousand bucks is cheaper than a year’s insurance, so companies will likely drop their employees and pay the federal government some money.  Now responsible for finding your own insurance, if you don’t pay whatever they ask you are a criminal who may not receive college loans or any other government program.  These much fabled ‘subsidies to help lower income Americans’ are going to be determined by whom else but the insurance companies and their playthings in Congress.  The working poor and the struggling middle-class will still be precariously insured at best, buying the cheapest plan with the highest deductible and unable to afford prescriptions.  32 million new customers to the insurance companies will also mean that much more demand of the medical system, with no money in the bill being spent to provide more nurses, doctors or hospitals. 

 Because they’re the type of Americans who eat white bread and prefer Hollywood flicks over art-house cinema, the media has dismissed the Tea Party activists as embittered idiots instead of citizens actually protesting something horrible.  This is unfair. Washington cleverly targets militias the very week the bill passes just to conflate the idea of protestors and terrorists. The American people have lost the first round. But it only counts who wins the end.