White House drops public health care option

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White House drops public health care option
By Kate Randall
18 August 2009

The Obama administration has indicated that it will not insist on a
“public option” as part of its overhaul of the US health care system.
The move signals the abandonment of the only fig leaf of “reform” in
the administration’s cost-cutting health care scheme. It represents a
complete capitulation to the insurance industry, which lobbied
intensively against any government-run insurance plan.

“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the
entirety of health care reform,” Obama stated at a town-hall meeting
Saturday in Grand Junction, Colorado. “This is just one sliver of it,
one aspect of it.”

A series of White House officials appeared on television interview
programs Sunday and broadly hinted at the administration’s abandonment
of the public option. Interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union”
program, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said
that a government-run plan is “not the essential element” of Obama’s
health care initiative.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, appearing on CBS News’ “Face
the Nation” program, indicated that Obama could be “satisfied” without
the public option.

In place of the public option, the White House is reportedly prepared
to accept a proposal from the Senate Finance Committee to create
“non-profit health insurance cooperatives.” The author of the measure,
Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, appearing on “Fox News
Sunday,” said, “The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in
the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been.”

He neglected to explain that there are not sufficient votes in the
Senate—which the Democrats control with a “veto-proof” 60 to 40
majority—because he and a sizable number of his fellow Democrats
staunchly oppose even the token public plan proposed by Obama. They
oppose it because it would cut into private insurers’ control of the
health insurance market and reduce the windfall profits they stand to
reap from the administration’s proposed overhaul.

The dropping of the public option only underscores the fact that the
terms of the health care overhaul are being dictated by the insurance
industry, the big hospital chains and the pharmaceutical companies.
Obama himself in earlier statements and press conferences declared
that a public insurance option was essential to rein in the insurance
companies and prevent them from gouging the public.

He now stands condemned by his own words of aiding and abetting a
corporate scheme to boost the profits of the health care industry—and
slash labor costs for the rest of big business--by forcing working
people to purchase bare-bones private insurance at inflated prices.

On the question of health care, as in every other aspect of public
policy, the major financial and corporate interests exercise veto power.

Speaking Monday on NBC’s “Today Show,” the former chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, criticized the dropping of
the public option, saying, “What’s going on in the health insurance
industry is very much like what was going on, in my view, on Wall
Street over the last eight years. People just basically taking money
out of your pockets and putting it in theirs. None of that money goes
to health care.”

The cave-in on the public option—which, in any event, was conceived of
as a dumping ground for people unable to afford private insurance—is a
continuation of the administration’s groveling before corporate
interests. The White House has been in continual discussions with the
pharmaceutical lobby. Recently, it publicly reassured the drug
companies that it would follow through on a secret pledge to block any
legislation that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices
or import cheaper drugs from Canada.

The Obama administration is pushing for the elimination of the
existing “fee-for-service” system, in which health care providers are
reimbursed for each patient visit or procedure. It advocates replacing
this with a “global payments” system, in which doctors and hospitals
would be compensated for services performed over a period of time,
thus imposing dollar limits on health care for working people.

This means rationing health care for most Americans, who would be
denied access to more expensive tests, drugs or procedures unless they
were able to pay high additional fees over and above their insurance
premiums.

In the name of cost-cutting “efficiencies,” Obama has also proposed
slashing $600 billion from the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

During the presidential campaign, Obama opposed the so-called
“individual mandate,” under which every individual is legally required
to have health insurance. This reactionary approach puts the onus on
the consumer, rather than the health care companies, imposing fines on
people who are not insured under an employer-provided plan and fail to
purchase private insurance.

Early on in his health care drive, President Obama changed his
position and adopted the individual mandate approach in order to
assure the insurance giants that they stood to reap large profits
under his scheme.

The health insurance co-ops proposed by the Senate Finance Committee
are in no way a public alternative. Membership in these groups, a
number of which already exist in states across the county, is not free
of charge and the co-ops often reject prospective members. Costs are
similar to premiums paid to private insurers.

The scrapping of the public option is one more indication of the
reactionary character of the entire health care overhaul. The
provision of quality health care as a basic human right is
incompatible with a system based on corporate profit and administered
by a political establishment beholden to a financial oligarchy.

The manifest failure of the present health care system in the US—which
leaves some 50 million people (one sixth of the population) without
any form of insurance—is precisely due to the subordination of health
care to private profit.

The fight for a health care system that corresponds to the needs of
the population requires a political struggle against the capitalist
profit system and the two parties of big business that defend it.
Socialist medicine—based on the nationalization of the hospital
chains, pharmaceutical companies and insurance giants and their
transformation into utilities democratically controlled by the working
class—is the only basis for providing high quality health care for all.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/heal-a18.shtml

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