The Only Campaign Promise I Cared About [Updated]

Just watch this. It’s only 48 seconds long. He says he didn’t say these things, but how much more explicit can you get?

I get people knocking me all the time because I went so sappy over Obama last year. You know, telling me I was a fool to believe anything he said, because they already knew he was just another politician, no savior, etc. etc. This is especially evident in the comments sections of certain blogs where people pride themselves on their realism and pragmatism. And yet whenever someone rants against the administration, the same people say, “DUH! He’s only been in office a year!” and so on. It’s a weird business.

All I know is that whatever bill gets passed, it will have been dictated, essentially, by insurance company lobbyists. It won’t be what we need or what most people want, and nobody is going to “fix it later.” They’ll all be sick of the uproar and glad to have this behind them — basic human nature. Also, the president doesn’t appear to want to fix it, saying that the Senate bill is 95% of what he wanted. Instead of a simple national single-payer system like Medicare for all, we’ll have byzantine complexity and state-by-state differences. Abortions will be restricted more than they are today. Every good thing in the bill is offset by language and provisions to preserve (and expand) health insurance industry profits. The companies will be far better off under this bill than if we did nothing, and I think that’s a crime. Expanding Medicaid is a good thing, but that could be done separately. The way things are set up, it’s like we’re being told to eat the dead skunk because there’s a vitamin pill inside. It’s been managed that way to sell the bill.

It will also be years (2014) before any “reforms” go into effect. In the meantime, everyone’s premiums will go up even faster than they already have because the industry will lock in profits in advance of any supposed restrictions. They’ve been quite blunt about that. One of these limitations will require companies to spend 80-85% of all premiums on actual health care. Oh, we’re so tough… in the Netherlands, where there’s a mandate and everyone buys insurance, the companies are all basically non-profit, heavily regulated, and have to spend 95% of all premiums on delivering care. The government determines what benefits the plans must have. Everyone pays the same, too, young and old. In the Senate bill, insurance companies can charge older customers 300% of what they charge younger ones. I don’t think that’s right.

I’m not a politician or a health insurance expert. I just know that it’s been hell living without proper health insurance these last five years or so, and that nothing I’ve seen leads me to think things will improve as a result of passing this bill. I’ll be on Medicare shortly, thank God, and I wish all Americans could do the same. That’s what we should be fighting for, not to bail out an industry whose CEOs earn more on average than any other. I never intended FarrFeed to be a political blog, either. I’m a writer. But some things need to be said at critical moments, and this is one of them. Fans of my work needn’t be turned off by this temporary preoccupation, and I hope you aren’t.

Mostly what I feel now is an overwhelming sadness. The richest country in the world, supposedly, and we can’t have what everybody else does. I’ll never accept that, and I wish to God my president hadn’t.

Related posts:

1. Kill the Bill! [Updated]
2. Dysfunctional Government, at the Very Least…
3. Who???
4. “Frozen Promise of the Corn”
5. BlogFast II [Updated]