Public health insurance: Obama isn't the "change" guy

President Obama has proven himself to be a tool for both the private health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Obama essentially went behind the backs of congressional Democrats and sold out reform, by cutting a deal with the pharmaceutical industry behind closed doors in the White House. He apparently cut the deal with Billy Tauzin and the deal all but looks to be a betrayal of promises made by Obama on the campaign trail, including that he would via the government curb drug costs to Medicare and negotiations would be open and transparent. For $80 billion in cuts and $150 million in supportive television commercials, the Obama Administration will protect the pharmaceutical industry from congressional efforts to utilize its bargaining powers to curb or lower drug costs.

Glenn Greenwald was spot on in his critique of Obama's health insurance industry and corporate leanings.

This is really sad because not only are Americans not likely to receive genuine health insurance reform, but America's two major parties are both tools for Wall Street and big industry/private health insurance lobbyists.



On December 18, Robert Kuttner and Matt Taibbi discussed the current state of the health care reform legilsation on Bill Moyers Journal, and Kuttner provided a perfect example of the difference between public health insurance and mandated private insurance:

Think about it, the difference between social insurance and an individual mandate is this. Social insurance everybody pays for it through their taxes, so you don't think of Social Security as a compulsory individual mandate. You think of it as a benefit, as a protection that your government provides. But an individual mandate is an order to you to go out and buy some product from some private profit-making company, that in the case of a lot of moderate income people, you can't afford to buy. And the shell game here is that the affordable policies are either very high deductibles and co-pays, so you can afford the monthly premiums but then when you get sick, you have to pay a small fortune out of pocket before the coverage kicks in. Or if the coverage is decent, the premiums are unaffordable. And so here's the government doing the bidding of the private industry coercing people to buy profit-making products that maybe they can't afford and they call it health reform.