TheMillerCircle.org

It was always a tight vote. Keeping 60 Senators in line to avoid a filibuster, with some very conservative Democrats needed to keep the coalition viable, meant that anyone wondering off the reservation of consensus could ruin the fragile alignment for passing healthcare reform. Now the Senate bill is without a public option and its replacement–allowing citizens to buy into Medicare at age 55-64 has also been tossed into the trash can. In the process, the deal breaker, Senator Joe Lieberman, has become the pariah of the failed legislation because, after months of supporting the idea of age 55 buy-in for Medicare, he turned against it just over the last weekend and killed the compromised healthcare bill in the Senate, at least that version of it. We still have the delicate issue of abortion coverage and the restrictive language that Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska wants to put into the bill, despite the fact that abortion is a legal, sanctioned medical procedure in this country.

It is hard to know the motives of Lieberman’s sudden departure from what appeared to be a  60 vote majority for the revised bill that included the age 55 buy-in for Medicare. It is especially hard to understand Lieberman’s decision on that aspect of the bill. He comes from a state that has a large health insurance industry and he has received significant  campaign contributions and support from the healthcare companies of Connecticut. Furthermore, his sudden concerns about the age 55 Medicare buy-in don’t make sense because this is the very group that for-profit health insurance companies try to eliminate from their roles because they are the group most in need of medical attention–they’re expensive. So getting that age group onto the government’s roles would seem to be a desirable outcome for health insurance companies. Why then would Lieberman be opposed to it?

Robert Parry has suggested that Lieberman’s opposition to the healthcare reform bill that Harry Reid carefully stitched together, is not related to healthcare per se, but instead relates to what has always been Lieberman’s main passion and the primary reason for his breathing apparatus–Israel. According to Parry, Lieberman’s sudden turnabout was designed to weaken the healthcare bill, possibly cause a train wreck and thus weaken Obama’s ability to apply leverage to Israel to generate a peace agreement with the Palestinians. If any part of this is true, Lieberman should be tried for treason! He does however, seem to have been given some sort of reassurance in order to keep him on board for what is left of the Senate bill, but we don’t know what it is that keeps him from wondering off again. The neocons of course, idolize Israel and would like nothing more than for Israel to take off and bomb the suspected facilities they claim are being used by Iran to enrich Uranium enough to make an atomic bomb, despite the fact that there is no proof whatsoever that Iran is violating the International agreements that regulate the use of nuclear enrichment for energy and medical purposes. Claims otherwise are mostly hype from American and Israeli propaganda. While I have little sympathy with the repressive regime that Iran now has in place, it exists in large part because our hard line attitudes evoked hard-line successes in Iran. Iran is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, while Israel is not and Iran has never blocked inspections by the international commission that monitors the development of nuclear technology, while Israel doesn’t even admit to having a nuclear arsenal.
While we are a little confused about Lieberman’s motivations for killing a more promising version of the healthcare bill in the Senate, we can appreciate that there are many previous supporters of healthcare reform, such as Howard Dean, who now think that the bill should be killed and we should all start over. It is a little ironic that the Obama administration is criticizing Howard Dean, but not Joe Lieberman. It is unclear whether the final Senate bill can be appropriately modified through the House-Senate conference to re-establish some form of a public option. Right now, there are many progressives in the House that will not agree to a bill without a public option component. However, for me, the healthcare bill has changed: it is no longer a healthcare reform bill, but appears to be more aptly described as a health insurance reform bill and as such, the bill will eliminate some of the odious insurance practices that have been going on for far too long, like the denials and policy rescinding practices. This bill however, is unlikely to reduce insurance costs because very little competition is being introduced. It will be a windfall for the insurance companies because millions more Americans will come into their insurance pools. In principle at least, the bill will add millions to the enrollments of health insurance companies, but without cost containment mechanisms. Furthermore, the bill will not, as claimed by supporters, reduce the uninsured pool of Americans by 30 million, because it only fines them if they don’t get insurance and if they can’t afford the premiums, maybe they would rather pay a fine, assuming there is some way of identifying them. Perhaps the health insurance companies will build up a police force for detecting the uninsured. To a liberal, the only way this bill makes any sense is that of serving as a Trojan Horse, where we might revisit the anticipated failure of this bill to contain the runaway costs of health insurance and force a more serious debate on a single payer option. As long as our health insurance is related to our jobs, we will not have an effective health insurance program. Medicare for all is the only way to separate health care from our jobs and when that is accomplished, businesses are likely to boom through relief from the escalating costs of health care for their employees. There are however,  aspects to the bill that will make it more attractive for small businesses to get insurance for their employees through the health insurance exchange system. I am not in favor of dumping this version of the health insurance reform bill, or whatever version seem likely to emerge. We need what we can get now,  to keep the momentum going and continue to focus on the disastrous healthcare problems that are created for all Americans. Rush Limbaugh has declared that poor people don’t deserve healthcare and maybe we can use his remarks to run against the conservative Republicans in the 2010 election and use it against conservative Democrats in the 2010 primaries. We are shy only a few liberal votes in the Senate and House to get single payer health insurance passed into law. We defeated Lieberman in the Democratic primary two years ago, but he came back as an independent to haunt us today on healthcare. You might also remember that he campaigned against Obama in favor of McCain in the 2008 election and at one time called Obama a traitor! He needs to go, but he will not be up for re-election for another five years. Anyone up for recall for his failure to support public interests?
How different do you imagine Obama’s public image would be today, had he taken on the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and campaigned with his powerful election campaign vigor for the objective of a single payer healthcare system, something he believed in as a Senatorial candidate? To be sure, he would have put his Presidential future on the line, but if he had achieved that kind of victory, we would probably be chiseling his likeness into Mount Rushmore right now. I have a little hammer and chisel and would gladly cooperatively chip away a few inches of stone as a gratifying gesture to the lofy enterprise of an inspiring President. But, in his first year of office, all thoughts about Mount Rushmore have faded into a forgotten dream.
RFM