"Well, wouldn't it be unfair to charge them more, when they need it?
"It might seem that way Louise, but if the insurance company has to take a loss on them, they're going to make it up by charging us good folks who have insurance more.
"Oh my god, Harry! We're already paying $6,000 a year for our insurance. What will our premiums go up to?
"Says here they could go up by another $1000 a year!
Announcer: Don't let Congress make you pay for the uninsured. Call your Senators and Representatives and the White House, and tell them to demand that every American be required to buy insurance immediately! This announcement is brought to you by People for a Healthier America.
It's funny really, to see Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana), the biggest recipient in Congress of insurance industry money, who has spent the last few months working hand-in-glove with the insurance industry lobbyists to craft a bill to their liking, suddenly accusing his erstwhile financiers of doing a "hatchet job on his bill. Actually, his bill has been a hatchet job itself on the whole concept of health care reform.
All of this, of course, was entirely predictable. Like HillaryCare before it, ObamaCare has been doomed from the start by its unwillingness to address the basic issue behind America's twin crisis of health care: lack of access for those with lower incomes, and absurdly high cost for everyone.
What makes it all so pathetic is that America already has an excellent model for delivering quality health care: a single-payer system called Medicare. Everyone in America gets this program, just like in Canada, Germany, France, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere. The only difference is that in those other countries, people get it from the day they're born. In America, you have to wait until you are permanently disabled, or until you reach the age of 65.
Far from having to "start from scratch, as Obama duplicitously claimed in his last address to Congress in explaining why he was not proposing a single-payer solution despite its obvious success in other countries, solving America's health crisis by adopting a single-payer system would be a simply matter of taking a well proven system that works and is popular, and expanding it to cover everybody.
But of course that would have made the insurance industry furious. They'd have to go back to just selling life insurance and homeowners insurance and car insurance.
And so we can expect a new round of "Harry and Louise, and ObamaCare will go down in flames.
You have to laugh at these Democrats. Even when they brazenly try to sell out, they get screwed.________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of "Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains (Bantam Books, 1992) and most recently of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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