David Hoppe

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:: It's Dem!

Democrats are wrecking health care reform

By David Hoppe

Remember sitting up on election night last November? As the votes rolled in and it gradually became clear that Barack Obama was going to be our next president, analysts for the various news engines turned their puppyish attention to races in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Democrats were making significant numerical gains in both these legislative chambers. A lot of talk ensued about what it would mean to have a Democrat in the White House with Democratic majorities ensconced in Congress as well.

We were told that 60 was the magic number in the Senate. A majority that big could prevent the dreaded filibuster, the prolonged speechifying employed by a minority party to obstruct a bill's progress through Congress. Democrats didn't quite get there on election night. They won 58 seats out of 100, with one, Minnesota, left undecided.

Eventually, though, Democrat Al Franken won the Minnesota seat. Meanwhile, longtime Republican Arlen Spector pulled a switcheroo and changed parties. So Democrats got their super majority after all.

Health care for everybody!

Or so many of us thought.

It turns out we were chumps.

We were chumps because we thought there was such a thing as a Democratic Party. We were wrong. If the battle over providing everyone in this country with health care has revealed anything it is that the politics of our supposed two-party system are practically meaningless.

Democrats, in an effort to try and make us think otherwise, have blamed health care reform's apparent slide into purgatory on intransigent Republicans. But while it is true that Republicans have offered nothing in the way of creative thinking or alternatives to the status quo on this issue -- have, in fact, been the party of NO! -- that doesn't explain Democrats' unwillingness to rally behind their president and use their majorities in the House and Senate to make health care reform a reality.

Before going further, let's be clear by what is meant here by health care reform. Health care reform means a public option, that is, it means that government enters the marketplace and uses its ability to assemble large numbers of people as leverage in order to make the cost of insurance more competitive which, in turn, can bring the cost of health care down.

Government taking this role scares the daylights out of insurance companies because they have been able to operate with little or no real competition. They have pretty much had their way when it comes to setting rates, which has also skewed the health care cost structure. In Indiana, WellPoint controls over 60 percent of this business.

And lo and behold, look who serves on WellPoint's board of directors. It's Susan Bayh, wife of Indiana's Democratic Senator, Evan. Over the course of two years, 2006-2008, Susan Bayh was paid $976,000 to sit on WellPoint's board. Evan protests that his wife's service and its considerable financial benefit to the Bayh household income does not constitute a conflict of interest. That's probably because supporting public option health insurance, let alone a single payer plan, has never occurred to him.

Bayh is not alone in this. Many of his Democratic colleagues share his view that health care reform is fine so long as it doesn't disrupt the flow of profits to the country's largest insurers.

Republicans, who have played key roles in financing disinformation and orchestrating town hall turmoil in order to create a media-driven fog that people are becoming disenchanted with reform, are doubtless laughing up their sleeves as they watch Bayh and fellow Blue Dog Democrats damn a public option with faint praise.

But then Republicans trust in authority. They like a strong boss and they believe that it's everyone's duty to do what they're told, whether they agree or not. Just ask St. Richard Lugar, the master of looking thoughtful and deliberate - and then voting along party lines.

Democrats, on the other hand, are a grab bag. Many Democrats are only in office because their constituents could no longer deny the cronyism and corruption of the Republican in their district. This puts a check in the Democratic column on election day, but it means nothing in terms of predicting whether someone will vote to use the government as an instrument to negotiate affordable health insurance for everyone, or work to perpetuate high profits for insurance companies.

Blue Dog Democrats' efforts to derail health care reform came to a head last week when it appeared that Pres. Obama was backing away from requiring a public option. Fortunately, some true Democrats in the House said they would refuse to support a bill without a public option. Their reasoning? A real fear that such a bill would only create more profits for health insurers, while doing nothing to bring costs down. A bill, in other words, that any Republican would love.

Blue Dogs immediately accused these lawmakers of being inflexible and self-destructive. That's not true. They are sticking up for the principle of looking out for the people instead of the powerful. Like them or not, they are being Democrats.