Well, sort of. Blogging light next few days as I’m out of the office on work-related matters.
Read Taibbi’s piece on health care reform, “Sick and Wrong,” in the latest Rolling Stone if you can. Not online that I can tell, but well worth your five bucks - he says exactly what Bill Moyers said on Bill Maher last weekend:
MOYERS: I don’t think the problem is the Republicans . . . .The problem is the Democratic Party. This is a party that has told its progressives — who are the most outspoken champions of health care reform — to sit down and shut up. That’s what Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the White House, in effect told progressives who stood up as a unit in Congress and said: “no public insurance option, no health care reform.”
And I think the reason for that is — in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Party has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street. And so he’s a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . .
Disheartening for those who support health care reform on an idealistic level. Both Moyers and Taibbi say this isn’t about idealism. This is about making sure that insurance money, and pharmaceutical money, goes to Democrats and not Republicans. And sure, if that helps citizens in the meantime that might be fine and all - but it’s not the overriding goal of the legislation.
And Taibbi is quick to note that Republicans’ main concern is not that health care reform will distort “the market” or add to the federal deficit - their chief concern is that they’re being outmaneuvered for that insurance and pharmaceutical money, and the electoral advantages it conveys.
Health care reform as it stands, then, is not about fixing a broken system. It’s yet another symptom that the system is broken.
Back in the saddle, indeed.
