Friends are surprised at my response when they ask me what I think of the debate over health care reform — okay, it was one friend. I’m not paying any attention to it.
The vast, grotesque Kabuki dance being performed on the political stage currently has nothing to do with health care, nothing to do with reform, and very little, in reality, with being a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or conservative. It is, rather, an elaborate series of shams and alarms devised to distract us from the sight of the Money shutting down our government in plain view. (I describe in detail how they do it in Chapter Seven of BRACE for IMPACT, “The Failed State.”)
The current discussion of health care and health-care insurance was over before it started. Barack Obama is the first president in modern history to be elected without owing his election to the Money, and thus it was heartening to hear him promise to seek reform. But before he knew he was going to win, back in the primary season, in all probabaility as an effort to placate the Money (which cannot be placated), he ended the discussion of true health-care reform by taking off the table any possibility of a single payer system.
(Spare me, please the horror stories about socialized medicine. I have been hearing the bogus arguments against it for more than 40 years, since I covered its inception in Saskatchewan, the province that led Canada into health care reform. My parents lived and died under that system, and not once did they fear, on the sudden appearance of some symptom, that they would lose their home because they could not pay for their care, which is the first thought of every person I know in this country, insured or not, when illness threatens. Not once did my parents experience treatment denied or delayed. So spare me.)
President Obama is going through the motions of making good on a campaign promise, and in so doing he has turned the matter over to the tender mercies of a Congress that did not get elected without the help of the Money. Most of them could not get elected as a crossing guard without the millions lavished on them by companies who make millions off the sickness and desperation of their fellow human beings. Whatever comes of their deliberations — however packaged, however pleased Mr. Obama pretends to be, whatever practiced rantings ensue from the left and right — will not hurt the Money.
