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Health care's enigma in chief
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy May 15, 2009 11:39am |
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| Category | Commentary |
| Media | Newspaper - San Francisco Chronicle |
| News Date | Friday, May 15, 2009 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The most stunning and least reported news about President Obama's press conference with health industry executives this week wasn't those executives' willingness to negotiate with a Democrat. It was that Democrat's eagerness to involve those executives in a discussion about health care reform even as they revealed their previous plans to pilfer $2 trillion from Americans.
That was the little-noticed message from the made-for-TV spectacle administration officials called a health care "game changer": In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year from the country's medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, health care companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers, and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry's business is based not on respectable returns but on grotesque profiteering and waste - the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins.
Chief among the profiteers at the White House event were insurance companies, which have raised premiums by 119 percent since 1999, and one obvious question is why - why would Obama engage those particular thieves?
It's a difficult query to answer, because Obama is a health care mystery, struggling to muster consistent positions on the issue.
Listening to a 2003 Obama speech, it's hard to believe he has become such an enigma. Back then, he declared himself "a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program" - i.e., one eliminating private insurers and their overhead costs by having government finance health care. Obama's position was as controversial then as today - which is to say, controversial among political elites, but not among the public. ABC's 2003 poll showed almost two-thirds of Americans desiring a single-payer system "run by the government and financed by taxpayers," just as CBS' 2009 poll shows roughly the same percentage today. |
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