Thought for the Day

From journalist Doug Henwood, liveblogging Obama's health care speech, via Dennis Perrin:

A friend pointed out to me earlier today that the market capitalization—the value of all the outstanding stock—of the publicly traded health insurers is about $150 billion. Add a little premium to sweeten the pot and you could nationalize the lot of them for about $200 billion. The total administrative costs of the U.S. healthcare system, which are greatly inflated by all the paperwork and second-guessing of docs’ decisions generated by the insurance industry, are about $400 billion a year. Those administrative costs are about three times what a Canadian-style single payer system would cost. So that means we’d save about $250 billion a year by eliminating the waste caused by our private insurance system.

In other words, the nationalization could pay for itself in well under a year.

Will Obama propose anything like that? Of course not. Instead, he’s going to propose that Americans be required to buy insurance, probably with some government subsidies. So instead of euthanizing the private insurance industry, Obama & the Dems are going to provide them with tens of millions of new customers—compelled to by their product by law, and with some degree of public subsidy. That’s lunacy.

Sweet. Spread it around.

Just a reminder, though: Suppose for the sake of fantasy that Obama and the Democrats were not corporate collaborators, and were willing to nationalize American health insurance in this way, just because it would be more efficient and affordable. There would still be a lot of opposition to such a move, the insurance companies and the corporate media would go berserk, and the Teabaggers would be foaming in the streets. Just as they are now. Much of the reason why most Democrats and Obama are worthless is that they don't want to confront opposition, or to be an opposition themselves. (To be fair, many Republicans are the same: stand up to them, call them a few choice names, and they run for the exits, screaming "Political correctness!" But the Democrats' refusal to be an opposition party is leagues beyond this.) If a measure can't be passed by consensus ("bipartisan" in Obama's terminology), it's just too scary, it's not viable, it can't be done. The Republicans generally know better. But since the Dems are so terrified of opposition and criticism, it is going to be necessary to put them under pressure from the other side: if Obama's unwilling to do the right thing because the Republicans will be mean to him, then liberal Democrats and independent progressives and liberals must be mean to him too. There must be no shelter for him or for any other Democratic politician who wants to collaborate with the corporatists and the Republicans.

The same would apply if, by a miracle, some sort of substantial health insurance and health care reform were passed. The Republicans, with lots of corporate funding, would promptly start trying to undermine the reform and ultimately to roll it back. (Look at the history of the Right's opposition to Social Security, for example: in principle, the Right wants to get rid of Social Security, and in practice they just try to chip away at it until it's not worth saving.) This should surprise no one, yet the Democrats and a good many independents are constantly surprised when they encounter opposition. There is never going to be an America, or a world, without conflict; we might as well recognize this, and decide how to deal with the conflicts we must face.

In his What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, Michael Berube quoted his fellow English professor, the conservative Mark Bauerlein (page 88): "Being the lone dissenter in a colloquy, one learns to acquire sure facts, crisp arguments, and a thick skin." I'd like to think that I've acquired sure facts and crisp arguments, but that's not for me to say. I have acquired a thick skin over the years, and if Democrats want to keep Congress and the White House, they should do the same. Some sure facts and crisp arguments would help too.

That being said, back to the real world. Obama and the Democrats are, as a party, corporate collaborators. It's fair to doubt that Obama wants meaningful health care reform, any more than he wants an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or peace in the Middle East, or ... If he did, he'd do more than the posturing he's been doing since before he took the oath of office.

And Another Thing!

Let me go back and quote again this bit I found on Facebook:

Republican ... Democrat ... Independent .... Liberal .... why don't our elected Congressmen and Senators listen to us and do what we voted them to do ...... we want structured, accountable change, backed by meaningful fiscal responsibility ...... do we have to have an American Revolution to get our point across.

So, who's "we"? It is not at all clear to me what We Americans want. I'd begin any such discussion, I hope, by acknowledging that different Americans want different things, and proceed to ask which Americans want what.

I don't believe that this writer was speaking for most Americans. In the most general terms, you could make a case: most of us probably feel that our elected officials don't do what we want them to, but different we's want them to do different things. Most American voters voted for Barack Hussein Obama last November, and he won the election decisively. It's not clear what Obama voters thought they were voting for, and again, I wouldn't assume that they all hoped for the same things. I think that many of them were voting against the Republican Party as much as they were voting for Obama, but that in itself would tell you a lot. If many people who voted for Obama are disappointed in him now, it's probably not because he's not acting enough like Bush, but rather because he's acting too much like him. As Avedon Carol wrote right after the election:

You know, we were told over and over that Obama was "the most liberal member of the Senate" (not true, but I'm sure lots of people believed he was really liberal), and the Republicans even insisted that Obama was a socialist - and yet the people elected him! So Obama has a mandate to be at least a screaming liberal, or even a socialist, right?

I've pointed this out to various nice, sensitive, well-educated Obama supporters I know, and it seems to make them uncomfortable. They're very concerned that Obama shouldn't appear to be an angry, screaming radical, because it would hurt him somehow. I wonder. It seems to me that his careful, cautious, moderate act -- almost certainly dictated by concern about how he'll look to the public -- is hurting him too, and is going to hurt him more as time goes on. Forthrightly accepting his socialist mandate would hurt him among the right-wing Democrats who run the Party, the corporate donors who funded his campaign and expect his deference, and that could be a problem. But it would make him look so much better to the mass of people who actually voted for him. The far right, the Teabaggers, the birthers, and so on, would continue to rave, but they're raving already; they were already raving during the campaign. They want him dead, frankly. They will never like him no matter what he does, just as they hated Bill Clinton no matter how many of their pet policies he enacted, so Obama should stop trying to appease them.

I use the word appease very deliberately. The people who are attacking Obama now most visibly -- and the corporate media are giving them a lot of visibility -- don't seem to be people who voted for him anyway. Obama, like other elected officials, is obliged to represent and serve those who voted against him as well as those who voted for him, but that doesn't mean he has to put his neck in a noose for them. It's clear from the Limbaugh Right's antics that they expect nothing less. They have no constructive proposals, and are only interested in smashing up as much as they can. (Yes, there's an echo there of complaints about the New Left in the 60s. To the extent that it has any validity, it's far more valid about the spectacles we're seeing now.)

We who aren't elected officials, of course, are under no such obligation. Back to the guy from Facebook, complaining that his elected representatives don't listen to them and do what they voted them do. This guy didn't vote for Obama to do anything, so he can't very well complain that Obama's not doing what he voted for him to do. "We want structured, accountable change, backed by meaningful fiscal responsibility." That's nice and vague, but this guy doesn't speak for the majority of Americans, or even for the majority of November 2008 voters: as far as I can tell, "we" in his complaint means the hard core of Republicans who cheered Bush on for eight years, through tax cuts for the rich, the tightening of control on civil liberties, and two crushingly expensive wars, heedless of the skyrocketing deficit and the horrific human costs of the Bush regime, roughly until last fall's bank bailout. That's the group that lost the election; they're not the ones who voted Obama and the Democrats into power. The majority of the voters didn't want any more of that, and we aren't obliged to respect those who did and do.

P.S. A friend suggested in e-mail that despite the propaganda from the Republicans and the corporate media, people voted for Obama not because they thought "they were voting for Eugene Debs, but rather because they were voting against obvious demagoguery." I see his point, but I still have the impression that most people who voted for Obama believed he was a lot more liberal than he actually is. Maybe not Eugene V. Debs, but I think most Americans would be vague about the difference anyhow. And Obama's poll numbers have taken a beating for his support for Bush's bailout, not for excessive concern about ordinary citizens.