Health Care: Is that all there is?

“We are on the verge of taking a decisive step to providing access to all Americans, to affordable quality health care. If we do nothing, the system will go bankrupt, premiums will keep skyrocketing and benefits will keep getting slashed.” -- California Democratic Rep. Henry A. Waxman, a steward of the leadership's version health care reform in the House.

While this is true as far as it goes, if the Congress doesn't do enough, the system also will go bankrupt, premiums will keep skyrocketing and benefits will keep getting slashed. Although Obamacare delivers improvements over the current system, it doesn't do nearly enough to cut costs. The irony is that instead of shutting down the rapacious, corrupt and inefficient private insurance industry, the current plan expands it and cements it in place. The industry already has undo influence on policy; after the "reform" delivers 35 million more policy holders and $500 billion in public money into its pockets over the next decade, real reform will become impossible. The Democrats are about to force people to buy health insurance products no matter how substandard they are or how much they cost. This is not what people think they're going to get when they vote for Democrats. In addition, some of the public funds that will go to subsidize the private insurance industry will be taken from Medicare. The most popular, effective and necessary social welfare program in American history will be weakened to strengthen the private insurance giants. This is not what people think they're going to get when they vote for Democrats. As Harvard Department of Social Medicine professor Marcia Angell MD told Bill Moyers, "we have chosen, alone among all advanced countries, to leave health care to for-profit industries, to leave health care to businesses that then distribute health care as a market commodity according to the ability to pay and not according to medical need." Nor is this what people thought they were getting when they gave Democrats control of the legislature and the White House.

The rest of the story: Bill Moyers' Journal (2010-03-05)