What is behind the opposition to the Obama healthcare plan?

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What is behind the opposition to the Obama healthcare plan?
12 August 2009

President Obama’s proposed restructuring of the US healthcare system
has come under ferocious attack over the past week. Right-wing
activists, in many cases organized by groups affiliated with the
Republican Party or financed by sections of the healthcare industry,
turned out at town hall meetings to shout down Democratic congressmen
or Obama aides. There have been death threats and some actual violence.

The right-wing attack combines hysterical distortion of the provisions
of the Obama plan (frequently, and falsely, branded as “socialized
medicine”) with an appeal to the concerns of wide layers of the
American population who sense, quite correctly, that the healthcare
restructuring being promoted in Washington will come at their expense
and will benefit only the big corporate interests.

Chief among the distortions has been the claim, fostered most notably
by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, that the
Obama plan promotes euthanasia and that millions of elderly people
will be hauled before a federal “death panel” to decide whether paying
for their healthcare was warranted based on their “level of
productivity in society.”

The actual provision, Section 1323 of one version of legislation that
has passed one committee in the House of Representatives, merely
states that Medicare will now reimburse doctors who hold end-of-life
counseling sessions for beneficiaries who want to know their options
on hospice care, living wills, and similar services.

Palin, who resigned as governor of Alaska July 26 in order to pursue a
national career as spokeswoman for the fascistic wing of the
Republican Party, is appealing to the same Christian fundamentalist
elements who mobilized around the case of Terri Schiavo in 2005.

The popular disaffection with the Obama healthcare plan goes much
further, however, than the fanatical right-to-life constituency. The
Obama administration has based its program for healthcare
restructuring entirely on the argument that healthcare costs are
bankrupting the US economy and that controlling and reducing these
costs is essential.

The logical conclusion of this policy—even if officially denied by the
White House—is that somebody’s healthcare is too expensive and must be
cut back or eliminated. Millions of people fear that that somebody is
likely to be them and their families. One opinion poll published last
week showed that 53 percent believed they would be worse off or no
better than before under the Obama plan.

Obama and the congressional Democrats have sought to use the frenzied
outpourings of his right-wing critics to discredit all opposition to
the measures that the administration is pursuing to cut social benefit
programs like Medicare and impose even greater burdens on American
working people.

The crudest effort along these lines came in a column published in
USAToday Monday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority
Leader Steny Hoyer, which branded the opposition to Obama’s healthcare
plan “un-American attacks.” They criticized the right-wing disruptions
as an effort to suppress discussion, then pledged that the healthcare
“reform” would mean higher-quality care, an end to insurance company
abuses and “stability and peace of mind for the middle class.”

In his radio speech Saturday and at a carefully controlled town hall
meeting in New Hampshire Tuesday, Obama sought to soothe popular
concerns over the implication of the healthcare cost-cutting and put a
“progressive” gloss on what is a fundamentally reactionary and
pro-corporate policy.

The president told his New Hampshire audience that charges that his
program will cut Medicare benefits for the elderly were false. “It’s a
myth that we’re going to be cutting your Medicare benefits,” he said.
“We’re not.” He claimed that the only cut in Medicare would be $177
billion in subsidies to insurance companies that operate private
Medicare Advantage plans. But all the plans moving through the House
and Senate—with full backing by the White House—call for substantial
reductions in Medicare reimbursement to hospitals and doctors, which
will inevitably be translated into cutbacks in care for the elderly
and disabled.

One of the first questions taken by Obama—no doubt prearranged by
White House political operatives—was from a woman denied coverage by
her insurance company because of a pre-existing condition. Expressing
sympathy for her plight, Obama sought to use the exchange to present
his program as a benefit for those whose healthcare benefits have been
cut back or eliminated by profit-driven insurers.

The real relationship of Obama and the Democrats to the insurance
industry was far more accurately described by BusinessWeek magazine in
its current cover story on healthcare “reform,” headlined, “The Health
Insurers Have Already Won.” The magazine details how
UnitedHealthGroup, the largest US health insurer, has used its
influence in Washington, particularly with conservative congressional
Democrats in the “Blue Dog” caucus and Obama advisers like former
senator Tom Daschle, to effectively dictate the parameters of the
healthcare legislation moving through Congress.

“The industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least
curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered
insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations
that dominate the business,” BusinessWeek wrote approvingly.
UnitedHealthCare, Aetna and Wellpoint have “also achieved a secondary
aim of constraining the new benefits that will become available to
tens of millions of people who are currently uninsured. That will make
the new customers more lucrative to the industry.”

In other words, the corporate profiteers have a tight grip over the
healthcare legislation. Their political servants in both the
Republican and Democratic parties can be relied on to guarantee their
financial interests are served by any healthcare restructuring, or to
torpedo the bill outright if that proves necessary.

Over the past several weeks, there has been detailed press coverage of
the enormous sums that the drug companies, the insurance companies,
the for-profit hospital chains and other corporate interests have
poured into “lobbying” and “campaign contributions”—the two Washington
euphemisms for outright bribery. (See “US health care lobby pumps
millions into Obama’s cost-cutting drive” and “The drug lobby demands,
and gets, Obama pledge to protect health care profits”)

According to press reports Tuesday, the drug industry lobby PhRMA will
launch a $150 million advertising blitz in support of Obama’s
healthcare reform drive, after the White House reaffirmed its promise
that it will limit the industry’s “contribution” to the cost of
healthcare restructuring to the $80 billion agreed on in closed-door
talks between Obama aides and PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin (a founding
member of the “Blue Dogs” before he left Congress to become an open
rather than concealed representative of the drug manufacturers).

Obama has repeatedly avowed his support for capitalist medicine, and
the “right” of drug companies, the insurance companies, the medical
equipment manufacturers, and a host of other parasites to profit from
the sick. His differences with his Republican opponents are purely
tactical, and largely concern which sections of corporate America will
benefit the most from the current legislative undertaking.

Nothing that emerges from the machinations of big business politicians
and corporate lobbyists in Washington can serve the needs of working
people. Medical care must be made available to every American citizen
and resident, provided for at state expense as a basic human right.
This requires the nationalization of the insurance companies, the drug
companies, and all the other healthcare profiteers, and the
establishment of a system of socialized medicine provided free to all
who need it.

Patrick Martin

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/pers-a12.shtml

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