Real Progressives Condemn Obamacare
By Bronwyn's Harbor on December 20, 2009 at 8:30 AM in Current Affairs
This disturbing analysis comes from the sharp liberal and civil libertarian blogger, Glenn Greenwald, in his Common Dreams essay, cynically titled “White House as Helpless Victim on Health Care“:
What remains [after cuts to the Obamacare bill] is a politically distastrous and highly coercive "mandate" gift to the health insurance industry, described perfectly by Digby:
Obama can say that you’re getting a lot, but also saying that it "covers everyone," as if there’s a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don’t get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn’t make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn’t even conservative, free market or otherwise. It’s some kind of weird corporatism that’s very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.
Nobody’s "getting covered" here.
After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write.
Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good — and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don’t miss the money as much when they never see it.
In essence, this re-inforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls. Progressive opinion-makers, as always, signaled that they can and should be ignored (don’t worry about us — we’re announcing in advance that we’ll support whatever you feed us no matter how little it contains of what we want and will never exercise raw political power to get what we want; make sure those other people are happy but ignore us). Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as "centrist," the noblest Beltway value.
Looked at from the narrow lens of health care policy, there is a reasonable debate to be had among reform advocates over whether this bill is a net benefit or a net harm. But the idea that the White House did what it could to ensure the inclusion of progressive provisions — or that they were powerless to do anything about it — is absurd on its face. Whatever else is true, the overwhelming evidence points to exactly what Sen. Feingold said yesterday: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place."
Of course. Glenn, with all respect to your brilliantly-described reasoning above, you’re ascribing motives to Obama that he doesn’t have. While he may be willing to be a corporatist because, after all, that’s where the most campaign money is to be found, Obama doesn’t believe in anything except going down in history as the most productive president since FDR. Digby, you’re a progressive blogger who can’t be had. Thank god there are free-thinking liberals like you who are willing to speak the truth on Obamacare.
by Ronald Scott
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