Health Care Bill Does Not Fix Health Care System

[IndianaGreen]

Health Care Bill Does Not Fix Health Care System

By Peter Shapiro

4/12/2010

Passage of President Obama's health care reform in late March made for great political theater. Here was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, skillfully maneuvering the bill through Congress after many had given it up for lost. Here was House minority leader and Republican point man John Boehner, reduced to ranting about 'Armageddon' and predicting the end of civilization as we know it if the bill passed. Here were Republican legislators egging on the mob of teabaggers who massed outside the Capitol, hurling racist and homophobic slurs at Representatives John Lewis and Barney Frank as they went inside.

I'll admit the scene worked on my emotions. The Republicans' tactics were ugly and cynical and I was happy to see them fail.

Now that the dust has settled, however, a hard look at the legislation that prompted all the fuss suggests that, far from 'fixing our broken health care system,' it merely reproduces some of its worst features.

The bill does nothing to lessen the grip of the private insurance industry on our health care system. It won't bring exploding health care costs under control. It does little to change the shameful disparities in access to treatment in a society that treats medical care as a commodity to be bought and sold, rather than as something all of us need and deserve.

What it will do is require everybody to buy health insurance, with federal subsidies for those who can't afford the premiums on their own. The price tag of these subsidies is $447 billion over the next ten years. That's money that could have gone to pay directly for medical treatment but which will, instead, wind up in the pockets of the insurance industry - one more corporate bailout at taxpayers' expense.

To help pay for it, public hospitals that treat the uninsured will have their federal funding slashed by $36 billion. Eight years down the road, union health plans and other job-based health insurance will be slapped with a 40% 'excise tax.' Protests from organized labor succeeded in getting this tax modified somewhat, but not eliminated from the bill.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/april/health-care-bill-does-not-fix-health-care-system