The Democrats' Authoritarian Health "Reform" Bill: "represents an historic defeat for liberalism"

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The Democrats' Authoritarian Health "Reform" Bill: "represents an historic defeat for liberalism"

The Democrats' Authoritarian Health "Reform" Bill and the Ascendency of Corporatism in the Democratic Party
By Miles Mogulescu
The Huffington Post
December 23, 2009

(This is the first of a series of blogs/articles that will try to put the growing disappointment of many progressives at President Obama's policies into a wider political and theoretical perspective about the divide in the Democratic Party between progressives and corporatists.)

If Barack Obama and today's Congressional Democrats were passing Social Security for the first time, instead of a creating a public program, they would likely be mandating that every American buy an annuity from a private, profit-driven Wall Street firm like Goldman Sachs (who could keep 15%-20% of their payments for overhead, profits and executive salaries) with the IRS serving as Wall Street's collection agency. If they were passing Medicare today, they would be mandating that every American buy a health insurance policy from profit-driven companies like Aetna, Humana and Wellpoint that would start paying benefits with 40% co-pays and $10,000 a year deductibles when they turn 65.

Therefore, when Senate "liberals" argue that their health "reform" bill, while compromised, is like the first iterations of Social Security and Medicare and provides a "starter home" that can be added to later, many progressives respond that its foundation is built on quicksand and that it's not incremental reform but a step in the fundamentally wrong direction.

Democrats and liberals once stood for providing a social safety net through government programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, which were administered by government employees for the benefit of the American people and not by private companies for the benefit of their shareholders and executives who receive multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses. For over 60 years, they stood for the principal that health care should be a right and not a privilege and that Medicare should be extended to all Americans.

Democrats in Congress, under the leadership of Barack Obama, have now turned that principal on its head and made health care neither a right, nor a privilege, but an obligation for individual citizens and a government-mandated profit center for private corporations. For the first time in American history, Democrats are about to pass a bill that uses the coercive power of the federal government to force every American -- simply by virtue of being an American -- to purchase the products of a private company. At heart, the Democrats' solution to 48 million uninsured is to force the them to buy inadequate private insurance -- with potentially high deductibles and co-pays and no price controls -- or be fined by the federal government.
In effect, this represents an historic defeat for the type of liberalism represented by the New Deal and the Great Society and the ascendancy of a new type of corporatist liberalism.

Or as David Brooks wrote in The New York Times earlier this summer, " Democrats learned never to go to war against the combined forces of corporate America. Today, whether it is on the stimulus, on health care, or any other issue, the Obama administration and the Congressional leadership go out of their way to court corporate interests, to win corporate support and to at least divide corporate opposition."

And as they have seen the end result of the Democratic Senate's health care bill, progressives have started to get angry. Stripped of the public option, progressives could now look through the Democratic health care bill to its essence: the permanent entrenchment of the corrupt private health insurance corporation as the nexus of the American health care system; the authoritarian liberal solution of solving the problem of the uninsured by using the coercive power of the federal government to force citizens to buy inadequate private insurance sold by oligopolies with their profits subsidized by taxpayer dollars; and the increased political power of the of the private health care industry into the indefinite future, fueled by government money that can then be used to lobby the government for more private benefits.

Please read the full article at:

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/january/the-democrats-authoritarian-health-reform-bill-and-the-ascendency-of-corporatism-i