Health care reform impossible before campaign finance and lobbyist reform
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) knew that his amendment to the Senate leadership's health bill didn’t have a chance. Amendment 2837, introduced Wednesday, was to delete the bulk of the bill’s language and substitute it with the wording of his single-payer, Medicare-for-All bill (S. 703), introduced in March.
Under Senate rules, his amendment went straight to the floor for debate.
But rather than having a debate, Republicans, led by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., demanded Senate clerks read all 700-plus pages of the amendment. After three hours and 139 pages into the reading, Sanders withdrew the amendment and used his allotted 30 minutes to defend single-payer.
See Sanders’s speech on single-payer and lack of reform on C-Span.
Sanders said a single-payer proposal will eventually prevail when people realize that health care is a “basic human right” and that private insurance and drug companies that profit from human sickness are responsible for “billions of dollars of waste and profiteering.”
He echoed the late Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone who introduced his single-payer health care bill in 1993. Wellstone said single-payer legislation could not happen before campaign finance reform.
“While Paul Wellstone submitted single-payer, Medicare for all legislation in the Senate, he regularly advised supporters that it did not stand a chance until we accomplish campaign finance reform,” commented long-time single-payer advocate Joel Clemmer who is working for passage of a Minnesota single-payer plan. “That is the poignant background to Bernie Sanders' gesture toward the gallery and admission that his amendment did not stand a chance because the opposing lobbies are too strong.
“So the withdrawal of the Sanders amendment signifies both the short-term effectiveness of the Republicans' obstructionist tactics and the long term power of those who supply funds for the election campaigns of those at the head of our government. The first problem is frustrating but the second is a threat not just to acceptable health care but to democracy itself.
“Our country is not helpless in this regard," says Clemmer. "Sanders points out that, when the Taiwan government evaluated national health care systems, they chose our Medicare system as their preferred model. The question is what happened to our governmental decision-making between the creation of Medicare in 1964 and now and what can we do about it?”
Senators have compromised away -- or are poised to compromise away – the major reform aspects of the Democrats’ bill – the public option, extension of Medicare to people ages 55 to 65, and reversal of the insurance industry’s exemption from federal anti-trust laws.
President Obama and Senate leaders still hope to pass a health care bill before Christmas. Then a conference committee of House and Senate leaders will compromise some more.
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What we get is more of the same if not worse - since now Americans will be forced to pay for insurance at essentially whatever private industry deems reasonable.
I'm with Howard Dean on this one - this bill should not be voted for.
It is tragic that we have come so close to a major reform, only to have it watered down so much at the eleventh hour to make it worthless.
I am ashamed that Obama is pushing this bill forward - now obviously for political motivations alone. There is no heart to it - and Obama succeeds at nothing once the heart is gone.
Dean is right - Democrats need to toughen up. There is no compromising with a Republican party that has not budged an inch for months. Obama is like a wife who is trying to please an abusing husband who beats her every week.
Insurance companies are beating up the American people and making so many go bankrupt, and Obama and others - all they can think about is how we should compromise with the abusers.
As an American I refuse to give up my freedoms to corporate insurance companies - and this bill will force me to pay insurance to blood sucking private industry without any choice - unlike other western industrial countries like France or England.
I hope Dean succeeds in derailing this bill and I hope it goes down in flames, and I'll even help him pour more oil on the flames if that's what it takes to end what is pretty much just a collosal scam.
It contends, as do I, that this fiasco goes much deeper than the for/against, dem/rep debate.
This is a telltale sign that American democracy is reaching stretching point, and it's all due to money.
The complicated relationship between money and politics change all the time, in the USA just as elsewhere.
And, in America, just as elsewhere, political systems have to adapt a little to new realities from time to time.
That time has come in America.
That a fine country like the United States is no longer able to opt for, or against, an extremely important piece of legislation without diluting it down to nothing, and all because of money, which is changing greedy hands as this saga goes on, is an absolute disgrace, a saddening spectacle, and the image of US politics is taking a well-deserved hammering over here right now.
To be honest, I would have never believed this could happen in the USA.
I love the United States and have many friends there, so, if I was talking to them I'd say "It's time for you guys to get off your butts and start insisting loud that this abuse of the people has to stop!"
So true, Michael. But we have so much work to do it's staggering. I was very disheartened to read in an AP story last night that one of my senators was working on changing the draft bill so it would add further tax savings for insurance companies and medical device manufacturers. And she's a Democrat.
it also supply much needed strategic thinking on health care reform or other major issues.But in so far as successful campaign fiance reform makes congress people more accountable to John Doe, and less accountable to John Deere and other special interests,
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