Whose Country Is It Anyway?
Too many times during the eight years of the Cheney/Bush administration, I found myself wondering, What the hell happened to our country?
Last week, watching doctors and nurses being arrested in the US Senate for trying to have their voices heard by the Senate Finance Committee during its hearings on health care reform, I wondered the same thing.
The arrests happened twice over a week's time. And they happened for one reason only — the chairman of the Committee, Senator Max Baucus, refuses to allow an advocate for single-payer health insurance reform to participate in the hearings.
Polls show that roughly "60 percent or more of the American people favor a national health program based on single payer," according to Dr. Margaret Flowers, one of those arrested. Why isn't this huge block of American voters represented at Senate meetings on health care reform? Why are doctors and nurses so frustrated by being left on the sidelines of the debate that they are willing to risk arrest in order to have their voices heard at the hearings — if only for just the few seconds it takes for police to forcibly remove them from the committee room, one by one? What's going on here?
The spectacle of doctors and nurses being arrested for trying to get their professional opinions — opinions shared by a majority of Americans — heard by a government panel on health care reform should shake us to our roots. But while the media noted the event, it quickly moved on to more urgent matters, like whether a California beauty queen should keep her crown.
Sixteen years ago, when the Clintons were still cobbling together their grand Rube Goldberg scheme for health care reform in the back rooms of Washington, I wrote:
It's been said that by the time Clinton finishes compromising on this issue, the health plan will be reduced to about a dozen kindly grandmothers traveling around the country kissing boo-boos.
It turns out that we didn't even get that. And now I'm starting to have the same sickening feeling about Obama's plan: that he's going to compromise the public option — a reasonable first-step towards single-payer — right out of existence.
Why can't Americans get real health care reform done? Other countries have. Are we too poor? Are we just too damn dumb to figure out how to do it?
Both of those reasons would be less shameful than the truth — our representatives in Washington have been bought and paid for by the insurers and pharmaceutical companies, and no one knows that better than Max Baucus. Here's how Ed Schultz ended a terrific segment recently about Baucus and health care reform (about 10:25 into the video):
Senator Max Baucus has taken more money from pharmaceutical companies and insurance industry folks than any other Democrat in the Congress. [Since 2005,] Baucus got $183,000 from health insurance companies and $229,000 from drug companies. May I remind you — they were at the table [at Baucus' health care reform hearings].
And single-payer advocates, who insurers and drug companies fear more than God, were not.
