Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, September 07, 2009

Max Baucus Plan for Healthcare: Eat Shit And Die

NYT

No Public Option, no co-ops, not even a "trigger" that would never get pulled anyway (if not now, when?)... And because it imposes "fees" on insurance companies in certain circumstances to put some pressure on costs and provide relief for some of the most vulnerable (fees that would in reality be used to justify the usual denials and delays of care that illustrated the urgency for reform in the first place, fees that would surely eventually be cleverly circumvented anyway) the plan will result in no bipartisanship, except possibly the figleaf of Snowe's single vote.

Reform that reforms nothing is worse than nothing when it is expected to cost six hundred billion dollars we don't have. This is the difference between the institution of a popular new program that transforms the landscape of inequity in the United States through signature legislation that places more progressives in power for over a generation of good works, as against a complete failure of vision, nerve, and effort imposing a useless costly universally unpopular program on already overburdened already profoundly vulnerable Americans, a program shifting dwindling hope and treasure to the super-rich and at the same time more risk and cost to the vulnerable, pinning this catastrophe to the Democratic Party, and squandering this historic moment for change from which everybody can benefit and stopping the forces of the white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarist Christianist authoritarianism of "Movement Republicanism" decisively in their tracks.

Now that the waiting is over and Baucus has revealed his shit sandwich at last, it is to be hoped that the united forces of the Progressive Caucus, speaking for the citizen majority rather than for the minority of villains in the corporate insurance industry, will gently consign the thing to the compost bin where it belongs, and shift public attention to one of the incomparably better plans that came out of the House, this time with the White House's seal on it to give it legs, ignore the bad-faith Republican vandals in the Senate, and let the Blue Dogs know that either they get in line or won't get the money for re-elections they will lose anyway if they side with Big Insurance over the People.

No comments: