Home » Blogs » DCblogger's blog

Why Obama's health care is wrong for the country

Wed, 01/07/2009 - 2:18pm — DCblogger

Black Agenda Report

Obama's "Guaranteed Choice" health care plan amounts to a probably unworkable "half way solution" that falls well short of the public's longstanding desire for universal national health insurance. It preserves the power and profits of the institutions most responsible for the health care crisis - private insurance and pharmaceutical corporations. "Despite Barack Obama's avowed hopes for change," Roger Bybee notes, the President Elect's health reform, "manacled to private insurers, may ultimately deepen public cynicism of the possibility of meaningful reform." (Z Magazine, December 2008).

»

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

"Obama's "deeply conservative" take"

By amberglow on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 5:57pm

great piece, as always from BAR -- and something people would do better to always keep in mind instead of "hope" he'll do good things and help us.

... Such refusal to advance large reforms - e.g. single-payer health insurance on the Canadian model - reflects what MacFarquhar found to be Obama's "deeply conservative" take on history, society and politics: "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good."

MacFarquhar found that Obama's "deep conservatism" was why "Republicans continue to find him congenial, especially those who opposed the war on much the same conservative grounds that he did." (Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?," The New Yorker, (May 7, 2007)

"Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama," Ryan Lizza noted in the New Yorker last July. "is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them" (Lizza, "Making It") ...

»

this too --

By amberglow on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 6:04pm

... Obama is a "progressive" of a very particular corporate, imperial, and racially neutral type. With Obama, as with the neoliberal icon JFK, this is the dark reality behind deceptive claims of post-ideological and nonpartisan commitment to technical expertise ...

Again and again in American history, we have seen that in-power Democrats move off their attachment to concentrated wealth and power only when they are faced with serious threats of popular rebellion and radical change from below. Big and meaningful reforms - and we need serious reforms (e.g. single-payer national health insurance, massive public works programs, and the restoration of union organizing rights in this country), however insufficient they may be in and of themselves - are only attained when elites are convinced that the cost of changing is less than the cost of not changing. The change comes when the governing class believes popular forces are ready, willing, and able to create serious disruption and move society to the left. That's a "pragmatic" reason that progressives should not to shirk from calling for revolution ...

voting is an essential part of that -- no matter how much Americans want govt to do it's job and provide real and lasting help, unless they're willing to vote on it instead of simply by party or charisma or whatever, we're sunk. So far, we just continue to reward them for ignoring our needs even after they prove over and over they're happy to harm us.

»

The etymology of sabotage

By lambert on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 6:30pm

"Sabot" means "shoe".....

—

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi

»

I'm for revolution

By ElizabethF on Thu, 01/08/2009 - 12:18am

nt

»