Amy Goodman on Democracy Now stated “Republican lawmakers remained staunchly opposed to using the federal government to regulate health insurance.” Republicans want the current health care bill dumped in the trash and to start all over.
Goodman interviewed Trudy Lieberman (no relationship with Joe Lieberman that I know of) a contributing editor and blogger to Columbia Journalism Review. Lieberman noted, “as a country, we are still extremely divided….We have a deep cleavage in this country about how much government should do and how much government should not do.” She referred to the issue of how much regulation of insurance companies should government engage in.
Goodman quoted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on President Obama: “…a year ago…you (Obama) said ‘The public option is one way to keep the insurance companies honest and to increase competition.’”
Quoting Pelosi further, “the public option, which would save $120 billion, keep the insurance companies honest, and increase competition.” Pelosi continued, referring to Senator’s Enzi, Snowe and Durbin proposing exchanges “because the insurance companies opposed the public option. They couldn’t take the competition.”
So Goodman asked Lieberman “Why did President Obama drop the public option?”
Lieberman didn’t know but speculated that it was because, perhaps, campaign contributors to the Obama campaign, stakeholders such as insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, the business community led by the Chamber of Commerce, didn’t want the public option.
Goodman turned to her other guest, Dr. Margaret Flowers, a Baltimore pediatrician and congressional fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program, who is in favor of a single-payer public option.
Dr. Flowers responded “we’ve been excluded from this discussion….the special interests …have been involved in this process.”
“…the President and Congress are talking about—cost controls, increasing coverage, excluding pre-existing conditions—all of these would be met through a national Medicare-for-All system. But—so we win, you know, on the policy. But there is such a heavy influence from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that they, I guess, felt threatened by the presence of the single-payer advocates.”
Goodman fortified Dr. Flowers assessment of why the single payer public option has failed. “Just looking at a report from the National Journal by Ashlie Rodriguez, who writes, ‘Health care interests have given $46.6 million in campaign donations since 2005 to [the] 21 lawmakers’ at the bipartisan healthcare summit, including Senator Max Baucus, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, and to the summit’s host, President Obama, according to this new report.”
Goodman added, “Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that health professionals, political action committees, hospitals and nursing homes, pharmaceutical and health product companies, health services firms, SHMOs and accident insurers have given heavily to all summit attendees.”
Goodman then asked Dr. Flowers, “How dies that affect this discussion…?”
Dr. Flowers’s response was, “…pretty strongly….members of congress need to get reelected, and if they speak out against the interests who are funding their campaigns, they’re not going to get that funding.”
Flowers added,
Because we have this system of multiple private, for-profit—or profit-driven, really—insurance companies—their bottom line is not health; it’s profit—we’re wasting a third of our healthcare dollars, over $400 billion a year at this time.
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The foregoing focuses upon the impact of campaign fund money to members of Congress that precludes good legislation for the benefit of ordinary citizens. It is a major problem in government which has to be ended. The only way I know how to do that is to cease voting for members of congress that represent moneyed special interests rather than their constituents.
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