This is a teaser. Read the whole thing here.
Sick and Wrong
How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it
By Matt Taibbi
Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.
The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.
Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.
It’s a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that’s what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players – from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus – found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.
We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.
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thanks for the link.
Everything is so fucking obvious now, at least to those that know how to think and reason. The government, at least the political part, didn’t lose me, it never had me. I’ve known in my heart since the sixties and what I’ve learned since makes it clear in my mind. How to stop the biggest menace the human race has ever encountered?
it is pure Taibbi gold. Scahill is another guy who isn’t afraid to put himself on the life.
Most of the politicians making the monstrosity that the new health care bill will be are multi-millionaires. The US Senate and Congress use to not be that way.
We have a plutocracy where the great mass of the population is just fodder for the designs of the Real People.
gets to the heart of quite a bit of America. I still have a subscription to RS partially because of him.
…boils things down so succinctly. My favorite (on lack of leadership):
I would add though, that the US has a government very good at starting actual crisis — one after another.
The synthesis is what they had in mind all along. Put this in the context of the teabaggers, the Gang of 6, the wingers, and all the other “noisemakers”. Maybe it’ll make more sense. Its Hegelian drama designed to fully corporatize America, which in the end, if they play this successfully, “mainstream” America will beg for (given the production of stress from all of the drama). Corallary: Human nature wants stress relieved ASAP, even if the relief comes at a greater price than the stress itself.
They think we’re too stupid to understand what they’re doing. Hence, Pelosi’s laughter that progressives wouldn’t dare take down universal care (that isn’t really universal care). That’s hegelian dialectic right there. It’s why it seems like every honest thing we say or ask for, ends up blowing up in our faces.
Caution, this quote may cause mental trauma (LOL):
Basically, it takes the name people know it as and glooms that onto a monstrosity that will harm the very people who end up wanting it, to make the stress go away, hence, it becomes another, but includes itself. So when you attack the monstrosity, they shield themselves behind the name. Game, set, match.
Good management begins with honesty. Until this double speak is flushed, we will never have proper management. Honesty is the counter to the dialectic. Somehow, we always attack the first negation, the antithesis (e.g. the teabaggers), which then initiates the synthesis. How much energy have we wasted on Glen Beck this summer? He is locked into a media market that represents 1% of the American population. Attacking the antithesis (Beck, 1% pop), initiates the synthesis (Van Jones resigns, 54% pop). Not a good trade was it? Beck is still there, Van isn’t, and they are already moving on to new targets.
To fight it: Anticipate the synthesis, diffuse the stress immediately, reveal the process, and expose the dishonesty by attacking the HEAD. And know, they will ALWAYS approach things this way. Because of the deception, think the thing through backwards. Start with the synthesis, and think back toward the thesis. Practise on past bogeymen that were well documented. I like to play around with the Y2K boondoogle for this (the emotion is long gone now).
And always remember this: to increase knowledge is to increase misery. (I know I’m worse off for knowing what utterly deceptive people our leaders are. Pay attention to the utterances of the staffers in the report…that is beyond frustation…it is the early signs of misery as they sense the deception).
Figuring it out though is: “like shoveling smoke with a pitchfork in the wind”, John Lennon