Sadly, No! Our st00pid health care system is still st00pid

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Sadly, No! is a liberal/progressive humor site based in Germany, originally as a project of founder Seb, but since 2004 operating as a group blog, currently with American contributors. It has daily traffic between 7,000 and 15,000 visits.

Gullible’s Travails

Oct 1

Our st00pid health care system is still st00pid

Posted at 18:02 by Brad

So:

I’ve been spending the last two months researching the ins and outs of our st00pid health care system and learning why it’s proven such a wicked beeyotch to reform. The results can be found here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). I’ve put a ton of work into this and I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Getting back to the current debate: as enjoyable as it is to whack Obama around for the tactical errors he’s made in pushing reform, we should understand that this is something that has confounded progressives since the time of Woodrow Wilson. We have a fragmented medical establishment made up of hospital chains, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies who have all created fiefdoms within the system and have all staked their claim to profit from it. Without the government acting as the lead negotiator to drive down prices, this inefficient and fractured system has led to absurdly high prices for medical services that simultaneously price tens of millions of people out of the insurance market.

Combine this with the fact that nearly a century’s worth of propaganda has made universal health care seem unpalatable to the American public, and you’ve got the bizarre specter of uninsured, blue-collar workers standing outside of town hall meetings and demanding that the government not give them health care. Yes, we’re the only country where this sort of thing occurs.

What, then, needs to happen going forward? Welp, it’s pretty clear that we’re not going to get real reform — i.e., a single-payer system or a system of tightly-regulated nonprofit private insurers — with this round of legislation. Meaning, that we’re going to have to go back to the damn well again once the costs of health care truly threaten to bankrupt us. And if we’re going to be successful in getting that done, it’s going to require a long-term siege war against the status quo with strong, consistent messaging that makes it 100% clear to Americans that our system is a racket and a ripoff. As I put it in my latest AlterNet piece:

And to be fair, we Americans have a lot to be proud of: in addition to prevailing in two world wars and the Cold War, America has brought the world the cotton gin, the electric telegraph, the electric light bulb, the airplane, the moon landing, the Internet, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, hip hop and all the world’s biggest blockbuster films.

But our health care system is not Miles Davis, Raiders of the Lost Ark or the Chevy Corvette C3. Our health care system is Kevin Federline, Waterworld and the AMC Gremlin. Our ability to spend 16 percent of our gross domestic product on health care and still leave tens of millions of people uncovered is not something the rest of the world looks upon with a mix of envy and awe. Rather, it’s something that makes them crinkle their eyebrows and say, “Dude. For real?”

And that’s what it’s gonna come down to.

I think the failure of a lot of the left over the past 30 or so years has been a clear failure of consistent messaging. Bob Somerby hit on this theme recently:

For decades, almost all conservative spin has derived from two simple messages. When you get to work with such clear messaging, being a conservative pundit is the easiest job in the world:

• Big government never did anything right.

• Liberal elites think they’re better than you are.

Later in the week, Somerby made his own attempt to craft a more effective liberal message:

First, it would turn on some well-crafted statement of an obvious fact: Big Moneyed Interests will try to loot you. They’ll do it every time—till they’re stopped.

Second, it might turn on a second obvious fact: Big Moneyed Interests will send tribunes out to deceive you. They will lie in your faces—till they’re stopped.

And I think this is what needs to be said over and over again by Democrats, liberal pundits and political operatives. Ever since the Age of Reagan, liberals have tried to achieve their goals by co-opting the Big Moneyed Interests into playing ball (or, in the case of Rubin-era financial deregulation, letting the Big Moneyed Interests simply run the show). This is the approach that the Obama Team has taken to health care reform so far. And to be fair, it’s gotten us a lot further along in the process than Truman, Carter or Clinton ever could. The trouble is more that it isn’t fundamentally fixing the broken system. It isn’t challenging the Big Moneyed Interests. Going forward, that’s what all of us are going to need to do.