標題:White House drops public health care option
新聞來源:http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/heal-a18.shtml
(須有正確連結)
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.
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※ 編輯: swallow73 來自: 114.46.203.160 (08/19 10:53)