The system at work

Commentary By Ron Beasley

It's becoming obvious that we will not be getting any meaningful health care reform this year.  Matt Taibbi reminds us this should come as no surprise.

Who among us did not know this would happen? It�s been clear from the start that the Democrats would make a great show of doing something real, then they would fold prematurely, ram through some piece-of-shit bill with some incremental/worthless change in it, and then in the end blame everything on Max Baucus and Bill Nelson, saying, �By golly, we tried our best!�

But it didn't have to be this way:

If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (ie the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.

But it did happen this way because....

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn�t matter that it�s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

It won�t get done, because that�s not the way our government works. Our government doesn�t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters.

If you think your vote doesn't mean much your right.  It's a few oligarchs who decide what happens in Washington.  It really matters little if the Rs or the Ds are in charge.  Now there will probably be a health care bill but it fix little if anything because actually fixing it would be bad for those who actually call the shots.  And this won't change until there is major campaign finance reform  and that's not going to happen and in fact the Supreme Court is about to make the Oligarchs even more powerful.

Update

I've said it here before - no health care bill would be better than a bad one.  Scott Lemieux agrees:

There's no inherent value to passing a health care bill, per se. If it doesn't contain the elements that make it worthwhile, progressives shouldn't let it out of Congress, and Obama should make clear that a Blue Dog bill would be vetoed. A bad bill would be worse than no bill.