By Tim Redmond
Here’s why:
Because the Senate is ready to kill the public option, because the deal is already done, and Obama has already decided that he doesn’t want to fight the insurance industry.
I keep wondering: How did the likes of Obama and Rahm Emmanuel get rolled by the insurers? How did a Democratic president with solid majorities in both houses let this get so screwed up? Why has the best chance for real reform in decades gone down the tubes?
Robert Reich thinks that the deal was cut a long time ago.
Last January, the White House made a Faustian bargain with Big Pharma and Big Insurance, essentially scuttling both of these profit-squeezing mechanisms in return for these industries’ agreement not to oppose healthcare legislation with platoons of lobbyists and millions of dollars of TV ads, and Pharma’s willingness to cut drug prices by some $80 billion over the next ten years. The White House promised these industries they’d come out way ahead — getting tens of millions of new customers who’d be buying private health insurance policies and thereby paying for an almost endless supply of new drugs. Healthcare reform would be, in short, a bonanza
.
I knew that, sorta. I know people who were watching last spring, and they told me that the Bad Guys were at the table from the first day. I just don’t see how Obama and his team figured they could get any meaningful reform done without insurance industry opposition — and I don’t see how they could actually believe that the industry wouldn’t do exactly what it’s done, which is to fuck with the president’s modest agenda and spend millions to be sure that nothing worthwhile happens.
Sometimes, you can’t negotiate with terrorists. It’s a hard lesson for Obama, and the country, to learn right now.