TheMillerCircle.org

By a 60-39 vote, strictly along party lines, the Senate will bring their version of the healthcare bill onto the floor for debate, discussion and probably many amendments, most of which will be designed to weaken the bill or even destroy it. It is already too weak to take very many more hits.  Every Senator if they so choose, will be given the opportunity to clear their laryngeal passages and attempt to make sweeping oratorical history. However, without Ted Kennedy waxing eloquently to make a stirring contribution to the debate, it is doubtful that we will hear any arguments that will sway other Senators to change their preconceived commitments, unless dramatic changes to the bill are made. But, to send the bill to a House/Senate conference, Reid can bypass the need for 60 votes and channel the bill in such a way that it can pass with only 50 votes. Although he would rather not use the filibuster-breaking procedure, he is committed, one way or another to passing a healthcare bill and all Democrats will be under immense pressure, to hold the course and generate a filibuster-proof vote. So, let’s give Harry Reid credit for lining up the votes, giving whatever promises were required to keep all 58 Democrat and two Independents  lined up, and getting the ceremonial voting done to get on to the real drama of the Senate floor debate. We know enough about the Senate and House bills to appreciate that, at best, they are a stepping stone to what the country really needs for a serious health insurance program, something that every other civilized country has in place. We can only hope this bill is a stepping stone and not a road block. If you want to read about the health care systems that exist in other countries, checkout T.R. Reid’s “The Healing of America”, but be forewarned: the comparisons between what other countries have and what we are likely to get with the new healthcare bill will make you question the nature of the political system we have today that prevents rational decision-making because we are so easily imprisoned by corporate headquarters through campaign finance and scurrilous juvenile behavior. The comparisons make you think that we are not a serious country.
We already know that the Republicans will be boring, unimaginative and repetitious in the coming Senate debate on healthcare. We have this low expectation of their rhetoric, not just because we have heard it all before, with a strangely reverberating, circular, non-sensible, irrational outburst of verbiage, but we have also been forearmed  because a junior senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, took to the Senate floor a while back and delivered a devastating critique of Frank Luntz, the Republican consultant who designed the talking points for Republicans to use in order to kill the healthcare bill. He is the same adviser who helped Newt Gingrich draft the “Contract with (on) America” in 1994. Senator Merkley, only in office a few months, read on the senate floor, a copy of the “talking points” that Frank Luntz had drawn up before the healthcare bill was even debated in committee, and it turns out these were exactly the same words that the Minority Leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell had been using since April and continues to use today to denounce the healthcare bill. In fact, more or less, most Republicans have been using Frank Luntz’s talking points ever since they came out this spring. For example, here is Luntz’s talking point #5 “Health care denial horror stories from Canada and other countries do resonate but you have to humanize them. We recommend the phrase “government takeover” rather than “government run” or “government control.” Why? Because government takeover sounds even scarier.” So, what do we hear from Senator Mitch McConnell? Over and over again, McConnell says “Americans are concerned about a government takeover of healthcare and for good reason.” Luntz’s talking points are the very words that are being used by Republicans to denounce healthcare reform bill and it’s proven to be irrelevant what the question is or what the healthcare topic is all about. McConnell does us a favor by clearly illustrating human behavior when only the brainstem is active and in control of the voice box. Time and time again, Mitch McConnell mouths the Frank Luntz talking points word for word. The purpose of these points is simply to scare people into mistrust of the healthcare bill that has now reached the Senate floor.

Neither the House nor the Senate Healthcare bill will be well suited for reducing healthcare costs and improving care. It will however, insure more Americans, though the nature of healthcare plans that the uninsured will be offered, will in effect provide a government subsidy to the health insurance industry. According to Steffie Woolhandler, professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, the insurance companies are fairly satisfied with this bill and the drug companies are elated: the Senate bill was written by Elizabelth Fowler. She is a former vice president of Wellpoint, the nation’s largest private insurance company. According to the bill, the for-profit insurance companies will gain about $500 billion in government subsidies for taking on uninsured citizens. What this will help create is a much more powerful private insurance lobby, something more difficult to defeat if we ever get to a single payer plan.  The hope that the public option component might serve as the Trojan Horse, to plant the seeds of growth and eventually achieve a “medicare for all” reform option has been greatly diminished by these bills. It looks like the public option plan will only insure a small minority of patients and its small start will make it that much harder for it to grow in future iterations. Massachusetts and Oregon have already tried to implement a plan similar to what the House and Senate healthcare bills will be offering and both of those systems have reached a point where they can’t financially meet their obligations. For Massachusetts to meet its current healthcare plan costing $1.3 billion this year, the state has opted to cover those costs by taking money away from safety net healthcare for immigrants, the mentally ill and people with substance abuse. Then of course there is the odious abortion ban bill that passed as a late amendment to the House bill. The language in the Senate bill is not as harsh as that of the House bill, which was a shocking retreat from the recognition that abortion in this country is a legal, approved medical procedure, so denying it as a healthcare benefit is unconstitutional!
We do not know what the final bill will look like as it works its way through the Senate and then through a House-Senate conference. Predictions are that it will not save us money on healthcare, but stimulate another round of huge corporate profits. The only thing we know with some certainty is that the Republicans will all be using the same talking points and quoting the same fictitious polls that they have been quoting since April. Why is there no reporter to ask McConnell the source of his polling data when he says “the American people don’t want this healthcare reform bill,” when every poll says otherwise? Reporters use to enjoy making a fool out of a politician who so errantly goes off course when he/she fabricates data.

RFM