Obama, Health Care Reform, and Corporate Chicanery: Capitulating the Battle and Losing the War

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So health care reform is virtually over, the chance for progressives to win out and to really cut costs and inject competition into the health insurance market has passed, and the corporations won out again. As noted below, I was despairing earlier today, but after reading Bob Cesca's latest piece at Huffington Post, I feel slightly better. His main point is that, despite being truly, utterly pissed off about how things have transpired in the health care debate, there is too much still at stake to actually "kill the bill." To wit:

Yet I can't help but to believe that killing reform will only heap an even larger failure on top of losing the public option, the Medicare buy-in and so forth. Only this time, it won't be a failure limited to an ideological or political routing. The failure of health care reform will invariably mean at least another decade (if not two decades) of a desperate health care system in crisis. Another decade or two of medical bankruptcies and deaths due to a lack of insurance -- exponential premium hikes and rescissions. You know the list.

If I stop being pissed off long enough to take a good look at what remains in both the Senate and House bills, there aren't necessarily fool-proof solutions to these problems, but there are regulations, subsidies and reforms that will ameliorate a significant chunk of the present crisis. For example, the Senate bill will reduce the cost of insurance for a family of four earning $54,000 from around $19,000 per year to around $9,000 per year.

[snip]

Do progressives really want to tell working-and-middle class families of that they're not allowed to get a $10,000 annual break on their insurance payments? If you're okay with that, I admire and respect your integrity, but I just can't be a part of it. Objective reality dictates that there's no other path at this point but to support the bill and to subsequently endeavor to fix it.

So incremental reforms it is, but at least 30+ million additional Americans will have insurance coverage, despite having to pony up the cash to buy that insurance themselves. Let's hope those subsidies come through, and that they're generous...

But the larger issue here is a sense that our President is selling us out. He could have drawn a line in the sand and fought harder for the public option, rather than pay lip service to it to appease the liberal base. He could have fought for pharmaceutical reimportation from Canada to help save the US taxpayer over $100 billion over the next 10 years, as he had when he was a Senator, however he brought his considerable political weight down on the side of killing that reform effort in order to preserve his backroom deal with the pharmaceutical companies to preserve their profits as long as they did not work to destroy reform. Beyond health care reform, the sense that Barack Obama is not living up to be the President we voted for is also apparent in the "financial reform" efforts I wrote about earlier today, and Cenk Uygur writes passionately about that sense, laying out a concise summary of all that is disappointing about our President thus far. In brief:

But I don't put the civil liberties and the wars in the same equation as the other issues I mentioned. Why? Because it's one thing if I disagree with your policies and principles, if they are genuinely held. Ok, that's a sad day for me but doesn't necessarily indicate that you're wrong or unprincipled (no matter how much I might disagree with you). What I mind is the give-aways to corporate lobbyists that have nothing to do with your principles and have everything to do with politics and money. What I mind is when you sell out the American people to protect corporate America. I hate it when the Republicans do it and pretend to be for the little guy. And I hate it when this administration does it and pretends to be for change.

There was always going to be buyer's remorse when a huge portion of the voting public places their hopes and dreams in one man who must work within the system that is presented to him, however I don't think anyone expected the remorse to be quite this sharp, on so many issues of such great importance to our country. I hold out hope for a change from Obama, but hope is fading fast these days.