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Zero Public Option + One Mandate = Disaster
Zero Public Option + One Mandate = Disaster
Progressive critics of the new healthcare law have been demonized
By Norman Solomon | Washington Free Press
Not long ago, the most prominent supporters of the public option were touting it as essential for healthcare reform. Now, suddenly, it’s incidental.
In fact, many who were lauding a public option as the key to a better healthcare future are now condemning just about anyone who insists that the absence of a public option makes the new law unworthy of support.
Consider this statement: “If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current healthcare bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over healthcare and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real healthcare reform.”
That statement is as true today as it was when Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made it three months ago in a Washington Post op-ed. But now, a concerted political blitz is depicting anyone who takes such a position as a menace to “real healthcare reform.”
After devoting vast amounts of time, money, energy and political capital to banging the drum for the public option as absolutely vital during 2009 and through this winter, countless liberal organizations and prominent Democrats in Congress have made a short-order shift.
You are now to understand that the public option isn’t essential—it’s expendable. And all of the sudden, people who assert that a public option is a minimal requirement for meaningful healthcare reform are no longer principled—they’re pernicious. Read more.
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He closes with, "Many well-informed and insightful people are now hoping that the current healthcare bill will become law and then lead to something better. But few backers want to dwell on its requirement that everyone get health coverage from the private insurance industry — a stunning, deeply structural transfer of humongous power and wealth that would greatly boost the leverage of an already autocratic corporate state".
That unfortunately, but nevertheless is what to be expected, indeed; not welcomed, but condemned, instead. What else is an awake population to expect when a gov't is as extremely corporatist as the gov't of the USA is; whatever USA was historically supposed to stand for?
Mike Corbeil
The problems is not short term "insight", which without long term principles, strategies, and ideology can slide off course, anchored by another long term structure, obstacle, namely a class hierarchy and class ideology, to subordinate, morality, insight.
Unless we anchor social reform demands in long term strategies, social alliances, social parties, social ideology, with the backbone of unions and political strikes, national strikes, even international strikes, social demands will always be resisted, only temporary, within class regimes, as temporary strategic retreats, which can be taken back as when Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and now Obama have done with their Neo Liberal plutocratic Late Capitalism, dismantling FDR's social reforms for Oligarchy and Empire.
Social reforms must be anchored in permanent social structures, social alliances, and that means that we must dismantle their class hierarchies, servile, deformed middle class elites tied to oligarchy, by challanging their class power with our social power, until, class history, and oligarchies no longer can rely on these appeasing class whores, or fascist shock troops, tea baggers to maintain class tyranny.