Cheerleaders for Obama or Serious Advocates for Health Care Reform?
Why won't some major unions, like Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and liberal advocacy groups like Families USA, support Single-Payer? (SEIU president Andy Stern and Families USA executive director Ron Pollack participated in the Senate Finance Committee hearing described above.) It could be their long alliance with Democratic Party leaders. The behavior of such groups during the Clinton Administration illustrates my point. Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992 on a promise of universal health care, but after taking office he introduced a reform plan that would have herded Americans into coverage under the top five or six insurance firms. The latter were well represented at the Jackson Hole summit hosted by Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner in early 1993, while consumer advocates weren't invited.
The Clinton 'managed care' plan that emerged from the summit was a bureaucratic monstrosity filling over a thousand pages, a gift on a silver platter to those very insurance companies. Medium and small size insurance companies, which were behind those Harry and Louise ads critical of the Clinton plan, would not have been able to compete. President Clinton eventually acknowledged that the plan didn’t even cover all Americans.
Instead of supporting Single-Payer plans offered by Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) and Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) in 1993, many unions and liberal organizations that had previously favored national health care endorsed the Clinton proposal. They wanted to show support for a new Democratic administration that had replaced twelve years of Republican rule. They didn't want to jeopardize their newly won access to the White House, so they ready to set aside their own agenda.
Rather than winning influence when they invested their support in the Democratic ticket, these unions and liberal groups had purchased their own acquiescence to a president more responsive to major corporate lobbies. (Such acquiescence, combined with an expert public relations strategy, also explains why Hillary Clinton still wins praise as a champion of health care reform, and why the Clinton plan still gets labeled, erroneously, 'universal health care.') Under Bill Clinton, the Democratic pledge of national health insurance, a plank in the party's national platform since 1948, was canceled.
Current enthusiasm for the Obama Administration and the new Democratic majority in Congress poses a similar danger. The Democratic goal is to make health care affordable -- within the context of the market. If publicly financed health care is to be considered at all, it must only be an option in competition with other, private heatlh insurance options, inevitably balanced with public subsidies to ensure continuing profits for the private insurance providers. Thus on April 28, several congressional caucuses (Progressive, Black, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific American) declared their support for the "public health insurance option" that would be "part of comprehensive health care reform legislation", but shied away from endorsing the Conyers-Sanders Single-Payer bills ( http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/04/28-25 ). MoveOn has created a video ad ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms2b57MLqZs ) promoting the Obama plan and critical of insurance lobbies, ignoring the participation of insurance companies in the crafting of the plan.
The goal of Single-Payer is to make high-quality health care a right for all Americans, replacing for-profit health coverage and rendering the market as irrelevant as it is to fire departments.
For those of us who understand that health care access, like fire department service, must never be based on corporate profit margins, there are lessons to be learned. We can't rely on the Democratic Party. We can't trust major liberal organizations or unions that have been compromised by politics allegiances. Groups like AMA and AARP that rely on insurance company contributions and ads in their publications will always oppose Single-Payer.
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