Obama Champions Your Right to Pay

Let President Obama be perfectly clear. In the richest country on earth, you don't have the same right to health and wellness and treatment for disease as they do in other advanced countries.  But you absolutely, positively have the right to shop for your own private health insurance (which if you are lucky, might pay some percentage of your actual care.) As your president, he will defend your purchasing power to the death, with all the weasel words at his disposal, against the machinations of the Republicans. Because it's not about him, altruistic fellow that he is. It's about you, the insurance company consumers of America. From today's weekly radio address:

Your health insurance isn’t something to play politics with.  Our economy isn’t something to play politics with.  This isn’t a game.  This is about the economic security of millions of families.

See, in the states where governors and legislatures and insurers are working together to implement this law properly – states like California, New York, Colorado and Maryland – competition and consumer choice are actually making insurance affordable. 

So I’m going to keep doing everything in my power to make sure this law works as it’s supposed to.  Because in the United States of America, health insurance isn’t a privilege – it is your right.  And we’re going to keep it that way. 

Got that? Instead of saying your actual health is nothing to play politics with, he downgrades it to your health insurance being nothing to play politics with. The ability to pay for your sickness trumps the horrible fact that you're sick to begin with and that in a humane world, would not have to pay a middleman the price of getting better or preventing disease.

We'll know in a couple of months how successful or unsuccessful the big rollout of Obamacare is going to be. My overall opinion of it remains unchanged -- that it's a huge giveaway to the private insurance predators, but that a few lucky duckies (rich people with pre-existing conditions, uninsured twenty-something spawn of insured rich people, near-poor people in a handful of blue states newly qualifying for Medicaid) will benefit. So I am not calling for its repeal, as are the Republican nihilists. Because we would replace it with exactly nothing.

 And, I still hold out some faint hope that Obamacare will turn out to be a sort of gateway drug. Just as the pot-deprived of America are now turning envious, un-bloodshot eyes to Washington State and Colorado and their public hemp fests, the health care-deprived will notice how much better things are in New York and California, and demand their own medical care fixes. The insurance predators and investment class will eventually realize the profits aren't worth the headaches and sink their cash into more lucrative enterprises, like endless war and domestic surveillance. And bit by bit, we will get Medicare for All. At least, that is my pipe dream.

But that doesn't make me any less disgusted with the way Obama persists in framing this issue in free market, rather than in humanistic terms. It doesn't make me any less disgusted that the needs of greedy capitalists always trump the needs of the citizens in this sham of a democracy.

The United States has the most expensive health care system in the world, with some of the worst results in terms of morbidity and mortality. Obamacare, in the first year, is estimated to "cover" only four million people out of an uninsured population of some 50 million. Predatory private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third  of every health care dollar. As Physicians for a National Health Program note, a single payer system would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.

But remember, people. Barack Obama is fighting for your right to enrich the profiteers, all the way to the post-presidency bank.