Who’s the Boss? The Obamacare Deception
"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman."
attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Is it not painfully obvious to everyone now that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a complicated failure of a contraption, from a healthcare and a political point of view? Answer: Yes! Even Michael Moore now admits that “Obamacare is awful.”
Indeed, I contend that:
Obamacare is not a public program, but a government-assisted private boondoggle. Its main purpose is not to ensure public health, but to insure the profitability of private health insurance companies and the private pharmaceutical and hospital industries.
It is the product of a now thoroughly corrupt political culture in which capital openly buys politicians, elections, and laws.
It is failing politically at every level, and is even likely to fail in its actual socio-economic goal of perpetuating the profitability of the private health insurance industry.
It cannot be “tweaked” into becoming a real public healthcare program, and every syllable of every argument for fine-tuning it does nothing but waste time and stand in the way of ever getting the single-payer, universal coverage, Medicare-for-all that we need.
Unfortunately, it was Democratic Obama cheerleaders like Moore – who refused four years ago to oppose the program and insist, as they should have (and promised they would!), on a public system – who helped to create the terrible situation we now have. (And Moore still seems to think Obamacare is “a godsend” that can be tweaked into perfection. See Shamus Cooke’s wonderful takedown of Moore’s weaseling.)
As Norman Solomon put it, with their “disingenuous sales pitches four years ago, President Obama and his Democratic acolytes did a lot to create the current political mess engulfing Obamacare — exaggerating its virtues while pulling out the stops to normalize denial about its real drawbacks. That was a bad approach in 2009. It remains a bad approach today.”
The result has been a situation in which healthcare has become more thoroughly privatized, and the possibility of a single-payer Medicare-for-all system – the cheaper, more effective, already-proven and undeniably popular (favored by two-thirds of the public in 2009) solution – has become deferred even further, and made harder even to see or discuss.