Mr. Pig, hold still! Mr. Obama has some lipstick for you. Mr. Citizen, hold still! Mr. Obama has some Vaseline™ for you.

I listened to a discussion yesterday on NPR, Brian Lehrer, I think. Who really cares? (Contrary to popular belief, NPR is not “liberal”, but rather “mainstream”, i.e., “corporate.”) In this discussion, a representative of either the health insurance industry or the Obama Administration (a distinction without a difference) launched into a common-sense discussion about the coming mandate that we all carry insurance.

The mandate is misunderstood, we were told, because we don’t really understand insurance. It only really works as intended when there is full participation. When we have full participation, costs will go down.

I suppose in a perfect world, that would be true. But it is not a perfect world, and this is the United States of America, where only one set of opinions gets an airing on “mainstream” media. So I did an on-the-spot translation: The health insurance industry wants the government to mandate that we all buy their crappy products.

In return for the mandate, they will take the clients they currently reject, who are the poor and working class, by subsidizing the insurance industry to offer them crappy coverage. They will also agree to stop refusing coverage to potentially unprofitable clients (preexisting conditions), and will allow them to go to insurance exchanges to buy extremely expensive crappy coverage. If they can’t afford it, again, the government will subsidize the insurance companies. (Many state exchanges currently offer such coverage to insurance industry castoffs – it hardly qualifies as a Band-aid.)

There will be no cost controls. It’s win-win. For them.

The encirclement is almost complete now. Single payer is long gone, as is a public option. “Cadillac” policies, known in other countries as “basic coverage”, will be taxed out of existence. We will all be faced with higher premiums and lower coverage. (We citizens are, I am told, tempted by a “moral hazard” of demanding too much care, while insurance companies, who profit by exactly $1.00 by denying exactly $1.00 in coverage, suffer no such hazards. We are tempted towards immorality, and so they are protected from us. We are offered no such protection from them.)

In a final insult, I presume that Obama will “compromise”, and allow the Republicans two of their cherished “solutions” to the problem. One, he will allow tort reform, thereby curbing an important disciplinary tool often used against insurance companies. He will also knock down state barriers, allowing insurers to gravitate towards the states with the lowest thresholds for coverage.

Obama yesterday did his professorial thing, lecturing recalcitrant Republicans and knocking down some of their more lame talking points. But let’s not be fooled here. Obama is now an insurance salesman, and appears to be trying to put lipstick on a pig. He’s also a Republican. Or a Democrat. One or the other. I’m not sure. And it doesn’t seem to matter. Buy one, get one free.