The Myth of 'Free-Market Health Care' [View all]

[Galraedia]

On this the 10th anniversary of the Republican health-care plan (which consists of Medicare Part C or "Medicare Advantage" private medical insurance, and of Medicare Part D private drug insurance), what are the impacts, on the U.S. taxpayer, and on the people who have signed up for the plans, and for the corporations who receive the massive public subsidies under these plans? First, we shall explore here the history and content of this Republican plan, so that its outcomes will be readily understandable as having been predicted at the start by federal and academic budget-planners. Nothing in this plan's outcome is at all a surprise.

In November 2003, a Medicare prescription drug and supplemental insurance bill was presented in Congress, which Democrats vociferously opposed, whereby the Republicans offered seniors some help in affording prescription medications, but only if, following President Bush's anticipated re-election, the private health insurers would be permitted, for the very first time, to compete against Medicare after 2006, by offering health insurance, called "Medicare Advantage" supplemental insurance, replacing Medicare Part B supplemental insurance, and with these insurers being heavily subsidized by taxpayers so as for them to be able to compete against the government-provided Medicare Part B. Another Republican demand was that Medicare not be permitted to do what the Veterans Administration already was doing and which saved billions to the government and reduced by billions drug company profits: use the massive bargaining power of their millions of patients to negotiate lower prices for the drugs they purchase. The self-styled "seniors' lobby," AARP, which received huge kickbacks/commissions from insurers and the like (typically over $300 million per year) of which over half would now come from private health insurers whose insurance plans they would sell, issued a press release expressing their "strong endorsement" of the bill, without considering or mentioning, at all, that such a law might gradually destroy Medicare.

Indeed, the bill resulted from communications between former Republican congressional leader Newt Gingrich and his friend Bill Novelli, the AARP chief, who had written a foreword to one of Gingrich's books. (Furthermore, as Barbara T. Dreyfuss noted, in the 7 June 2004 American Prospect, under the headline "The Shocking Story of How AARP Backed the Medicare Bill," "Novelli had first honed his marketing skills on behalf of Richard Nixon. He worked in 1972 with the November Group, the in-house advertising unit that helped devise attack ads against George McGovern.&quot By financially harming Medicare, such a law would produce a financial gain for AARP and for other sellers of health insurance. Sick seniors would be more desperate: a diminished Medicare system would offer them less. The enormous taxpayer-financed subsidies to the private insurance companies would increase pressure against the government plan. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne thus headlined about the bill on 18 November 2003, "Medicare Monstrosity," and he observed: "How do you know this bill is such a great deal for the drug companies and [health insurers such as] HMOs? On word of an agreement last week, [their] share prices soared." As for the sick and poor, those people were to be shoved off in a Medicare boat now to be shot full of holes.

The key vote occurred on November 22nd at 5:53 A.M. in the House. Syndicated columnist Robert Novak headlined five days later, "GOP Pulled No Punches in Struggle for Medicare Bill," and he wrote that "There were only 210 yes votes ... (long past the usual time for House roll calls), against 224 no's. A weary George W. Bush, just returned from Europe, was awakened at 4 a.m. to make personal calls to [Republican] House members. Republicans voting against the bill were told they were endangering their political futures." An example cited was Republican Rep. Nick Smith, who was retiring, and his son Brad was gearing up to run for his seat. "On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote," but Smith still refused the bribe, and so his son didn't get a chance to succeed him. (The gangsters additionally threatened to pour cash into the campaign of his son's Republican primary opponent. They did what they threatened to do, and Republican primary voters -- a faithful bunch of suckers -- chose Brad Smith's primary opponent, Joe Schwarz, who went on to beat the Democrat and to go to Congress.) Bush did, however, manage to persuade enough Republicans to pass the bill by 220 to 215. 204 Republicans voted for it; 25 voted against. 189 Democrats voted against it; 16 voted for. The lone Independent, Bernard Sanders, voted against it. When the U.S. major media reported on the corruption behind this bill, the slant was usually to play down the bill's having been rammed through by the Republican President and Republican congressional leadership, and the bill's having been opposed heavily by the leaderless Democrats in Congress; the focus was instead upon the corruption of drug-industry lobbyists. However, those lobbyists were not corrupt -- they were merely doing the job that their employers, the drug companies, and the insurers, paid them to do. By contrast, the politicians who voted for this bill were violating their solemn obligation to the public, who were their legal employer. Like all gangsters, these Republicans (that's almost all Republicans in Congress) simply despised the public. Thus, though the drug companies looked bad (or else appeared to be excessively focused upon their own profits, depending upon how one looked at this matter), the Republican Party itself, which had actually worked hand-in-glove with the pharmaceutical industry and with private health insurers to shape this bill and to pass it) did not -- the major news media covered over or hid the vileness and profound corruption of the Republican Party on the Medicare Prescription Drug and Medicare Supplement bill.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/the-myth-of-freemarket-he_b_4318021.html?utm_hp_ref=politics