A Glide Path to Disaster: The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan [View All]

[Karmadillo]

http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon08052009.html

A Glide Path to Disaster
The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan
By NORMAN SOLOMON

Like soap in a rainstorm, “healthcare reform” is wasting away.

As this week began, a leading follower of conventional wisdom, journalist Cokie Roberts, told NPR listeners: “This is evolving legislation. And the administration is now talking about a glide path towards universal coverage, rather than immediate universal coverage.”

Notions of universal healthcare are fading in the power centers of politics -- while more and more attention focuses on the care and feeding of the insurance industry.

Consider a new message that just went out from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, which inherited the Obama campaign’s 13-million email list. The short letter includes the same phrase seven times: “health insurance reform.”

The difference between the promise of healthcare for everyone and the new mantra of health insurance reform is akin to what Mark Twain once described as “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

The “health insurance reform” now being spun as “a glide path towards universal coverage” is apt to reinforce the huge power of the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries in the United States.

President Obama says that he wants “things like preventing insurers from dropping people because of pre-existing conditions.” Those are not fighting words for the present-day insurance industry. Behind the scenes, massive deals are taking shape.

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