A bailout under a blue cross

Upon hearing of the passage of H.R. 3962, the so-called “reform” bill, the voice I wanted to hear above all others was that of Rep. Dennis Kucinich. He has been the one true reformer among the Democrats.

It was Kucinich who offered up an amendment to the bill that would have allowed individual states to enact their own single-payer plans if they so desired. That amendment passed committee with bipartisan support, but was stripped from the final bill by the Democratic leadership under pressure from the White House.

In Canada, single-payer first passed in the Saskatchewan Province, and proved so successful that the private insurance system eventually collapsed. American insurance companies, working through the Obama Administration, stripped us of that weapon.

Here’s Kucinich on the overall thrust of the bill:

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. … When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

This is why it was futile, from the beginning, to fight for anything other than single payer. It’s like trying to fight a cancer by applying a salve to some unaffected region of the body.

[Insurance companies] are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care.

That 31% is an outrageous number, and it is the height of corruption to allow it to go on. It is imposed on us by sheer force of power – the power of private finance over politicians, the power of insurance companies over doctors and hospitals and other providers. The fact that the Democrats have done nothing about it speaks to their ineptitude and corruption.

In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies—a bailout under a blue cross.

This is how Democrats work. They took all of the good energy for real reform, and turned it against us, and into another subsidy for business. This is what Bush and Baucus did with “Medicare D” – prescription coverage for seniors … isn’t it interesting that Medicare still cannot negotiate prices with Pharma even after Democrats took power?

Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that “money will start flowing in again” to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation.

This is anecdotal, but I was watching several health care stocks yesterday in the wake of passage of 3962 on Friday. They were all up, not dramatically, but the interesting thing was that they all spiked early in the day – that is, there was an influx of money into those stocks as the session opened. Someone or some institution saw some reason to stake out a position. If 3962 was any kind of threat at all to private insurance, the flow would have gone the other way.

The “robust public option” which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million….This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America’s manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care….Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America’s businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.

The key words there are, of course, “not-for-profit”. It is the profit motive that undermines our health care system, and makes it the most expensive and inefficient among the world’s industrial democracies.