Hightower Lowdown

Now is the time for boldness! Instead, we're getting Baucusness. Sen. Max Baucus, that is--Montana Democrat, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and frequent spear-carrier for the corporate agenda. He has now been tapped to handle Obama's promised rewrite of America's warped, ineffective, and exorbitantly expensive health-care system.

This should be a dream job for the Democratic leadership. Consumers despise today's corporatized medical structure. So do doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers. So do businesses that provide health-care coverage for their employees. The insurance-company-dominated system is so unpopular that swine flu enjoys a higher public-approval rating! A Pew Research Center poll taken in March 2009 shows that the American people don't merely want the current system fixed, they want it overhauled--76% say it must either be "fundamentally changed" or "completely rebuilt."

What an opportune moment this is for Obama to do something BIG for America--a rare, Rooseveltian moment in which the president and Congress have the chance (and duty) to rise above business as usual, to respond for once to the people's interest, to create a universal public service that would actually move our society a couple of strides closer to America's egalitarian ideals of fairness, justice, and opportunity for all.

Luckily, the "something big" is readily at hand. It's called a "single-payer" health-care system--a structural reform that has been successfully implemented in several countries, as well as in our own Medicare and veterans health programs. By expanding this system nationally, every person in our land would be assured good-quality care. No longer would profiteering insurance corporations control entry, dictating which doctors we can use (and what treatments they can provide), gouging us with ever-rising premiums and co-pays, and ripping off a third of our nation's health-care dollars for things that have nothing to do with either health or care--including ridiculous CEO pay packages, excess profits, massive billing bureaucracies, useless advertising hustles, posh headquarters, lobbying expenses, etc.

With the single-payer plan, we'd regain the right to go to the doctors and hospitals of our choosing, and doctors would regain authority over patient care. As the plan's name suggests, the difference is not in who delivers the care, but in how our health-care professionals get paid. Rather than the wasteful, autocratic middleman structure that now separates us patients from our providers (generating paperwork costs of some $350 billion a year), a no-frills, government-administered public fund would pay everyone's health-care bills directly--eliminating the interferences and overcharges of arrogant and avaricious insurance behemoths. Full coverage for all, less cost. Makes sense. [ read more ]