After the president’s speech on Tuesday, the nation has turned it’s eyes from the health care debate to the war in Afghanistan.  Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be a problem because the debate about true reform is already over for this cycle.  Our choice has become:

1. Increase the power of the private insurers with one or two positive changes (no pre-existing conditions, no denial of coverage)
2. Kill the bill

There’s not much of a choice and, as I read on this obscure, yet informed blog, health care reform is dead:

Yep, that’s it. It has been dead for quite some time now. Unfortunately, it’s not always apparent *why* that has been the case.

Warning: Political and healthcare-related opinions below, linked to various reputable sources.

Public Option, Single Payer, Medicare for All? The most contentious part of healthcare reform has been the concept of a government run health care plan. HR 676 refers to the idea of “Medicare for All”, extending our Medicare program for seniors to cover all Americans, effectively creating a single payer system in America. As expected, people who didn’t give a crap about running up deficits to blow holes in the sand halfway across the globe were outraged, *outraged* at the idea that we could possibly spend money on healthcare. So much, in fact, that they paraded around like morons, complaining about how large and awful government has gotten. (You know, after they didn’t say jack since the *last* Democrat was president.) A simple google search seems to show that the only places that are worried about Medicare deficits are right-wing thinktanks like the “Heritage Society” and Pravda-like news organizations like “Fox News”. Did I forget to mention that Kaiser and BCBS were up there as well? Trusting insurance companies to control costs in healthcare is like handing over a chicken farm to a drooling fox. No mention whatsoever that estimates of savings with single payer are in the hundreds of *billions* of dollars. And those estimates aren’t some cherry-picked thinktank garbage. It’s from the CBO. PNHP has a substantial list of studies which all seem to conclude that we’re flushing money into private insurance companies. Not to mention that 59% of doctors favor it.

This is a fabulous piece that “Jeff” has written with links galour.  I invite everyone to read the whole damn thing.  With the exception of Eric and Dennis, we have elected a congress which has no interest in increasing health care access to the masses and has every interest in preserving their war chests (courtesy of private insurance companies and drug companies) for their re-election campaigns.

I really have very little interest in the passage of this bill.  Ultimately, we need to see what the final draft looks like, but,  if Stupak-Pitts is still part of it, I sincerly hope that it does not pass.

Related posts:

1. Get on the Bus for Health Care Reform
2. Health care reform hope springs eternal
3. The Doctor is in and Health Care reform is the issue
4. Incremental Health Care reform is the correct approach - proponents just use the wrong start date
5. Robert Reich weighs in on health care reform