Jul 30 2009

Obama feeds the beast

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

The extended sausage making saga that is the American health care “reform” process is teaching us valuable things about how our government works. Perhaps the most important lesson is that the predatory corporations that control our government feed on the complexity of government legislation. Simple laws provide little room for evasion and deceit, but bills that run to a thousand pages invite cheating, chiseling, ducking, dodging, and all manner of lawyer-enabled avoidance of the spirit of the law.

Although we do not know what form the final health care bill will take, we can be absolutely sure that it will be grotesquely complicated, because it has effectively been written by lobbyists. After the bill is passed, month after month we will see revelations of “legal” methods by which hospitals and insurance companies evade the intent of the health care reform by exploiting fine print and ambiguities in the legislation and administrative guidelines.

It didn’t have to be this way. But by electing a politician owned by the corporate establishment, we assured ourselves that Obama would generate a bumper crop of legislative complexity to fatten the profits of predatory corporations and the salaries of their lobbyists. This is the reason single payer was killed off immediately at the start of the health reform negotiations: it is too simple a system.

The proposed health care system will be a four-ring circus of private insurance, a government-run insurance plan, non-profit cooperatives, and Medicare/Medicaid. If anyone believes that this can be implemented efficiently and that the insurance companies will be any more responsible, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. Obama is giving the corporate predators exactly what they want, and he is packaging it as reform. This is a cruel deception, and it remains to see how many of the American people will be deceived.

11 comments

Skip to comment form

    • Edger on July 30, 2009 at 05:09
    • #

    Give him more time. He’s only been in office for two months.

    Sorry, I mean he’s only been in office for four months.

    Argghh, I mean six months.

    It’s complicated… you know?

  2. well, this guy nails it.

    The link between drug manufacturing and the chemical industry is obvious. The same chemical giants also have close ties to the military. What is less known are their connections to the food industry. Firms like DuPont, Dow, Syngenta and Monsanto have, under various names and guises, made enormous profits from fertilizers and pesticides ever since the Green Revolution started over half a century ago. In the past two decades, they have moved into the industry of food itself. Genetically modified seeds are taking agriculture by storm, and they’re all property of the world’s chemical giants, which are now routinely referred to as agribusinesses. A long cry, at first glance, from the Monsanto that for instance infamously supplied the US army with Agent Orange.

    snip

    Now, if I were an innocent little simple child, I might conclude from this that all these companies really have to do is make Americans eat the food they control, make sure that food makes them sick, and cash in big again at the other end, in medical care. The corn syrup produced at one end of this “food chain” is in everything these days, and it’s a main ingredient in the current obesity epidemic in the US, which brings along large additional medical costs, an estimated $147 billion per year in fact. Obesity habitually leads to diabetes, and you can guess who provides the insulin. A few years ago, the increase in childhood diabetes led one doctor to proclaim that we’re raising a generation of blind amputees. The numbers keep on rising exponentially.

  3. when my family and I finally have some kind of healthcare plan, because for the last 3 years and 11 months we have been uninsured. If any kind of life threatening condition were to arise right now, we would be FUCKED.

    • Joy B. on July 30, 2009 at 16:02
    • #

    Also very true.

  5. about direct action here —

    • ANKOSS on July 30, 2009 at 16:48
      Author
    • #

    Over and over, Obama tells us that the old way of Washington is the only way. FDR boldly transformed the role of government to save America from the Great Depression, but Obama is simply reinforcing all of the failed methods of the past.

    The painful truth is that Obama is giving us the OPPOSITE of what he promised. We are not getting change, we are getting the reinforcement and strengthening of all of the destructive forces in US society:

    * Predatory corporations

    * The military-industrial complex

    * Whoring lobbyists

    * A sellout Congress

    Every day, Obama tells us to trust him, and that this is the only way America can be governed. How much longer will his cult of personality obscure the fact that he is fronting for a permanent government that is steadily worsening the lives of a majority of our citizens to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a ruthless oligarchy?

    It is a bitter betrayal indeed for the nation’s first black president to be a servant of predatory elites.  

Comments have been disabled.