The lobbyists are about to beat us again

We the people are about to get kneecapped by the special interests yet again.

And Barack Obama is about to fail to deliver on the most important promise he made to the American people. Unless the American people get up off the couch, turn off the television and make their voices heard.

Support for a public option in health care reform – that is support for any real health care reform – is ebbing even among Democrats in Congress in the face of intensive lobbying and big-money bribery (in the form of campaign contributions) from the big insurance, pharmaceutical and health maintenance companies.

That’s despite the fact that more than 70% of Americans say they support a single payer, government option.

Which they should, because it’s the one way that the United States will cut its ridiculous health care costs, while insuring universal coverage. It’s the one way to force the insurance companies to get serious about cleaning up their own houses, if they are forced to compete with a public option, which is likely to be cost less and be run more efficiently.

Part of the problem with the health care debate we’ve been having in this country is that proponents of universal health care have presented the issue poorly. They’ve focused on the uninsured. Any reasonable proposal for health care reform will cover the uninsured as a matter of course.

But proponents of health care reform should be talking to the rest of us, the vast mass of the American public that is being cheated by our current health care system that benefits only insurance companies, Big Pharma and a few large health care providers.

They should be talking to those of us who have health care provided through our employers but every year we see premiums, deductibles and co-pays increase and coverage shrink.

They should be talking to the millions of Americans, many of whom think of themselves as middle class, who have to delay or forego needed tests or treatments because they can’t afford the co-pay. (If your insurance covers 80% of a $10,000 MRI that leaves you with a $2,000 bill. Not everyone has $2K on hand.)

They should be talking to the majority of the American middle class who live one catastrophic health issue away from financial ruin. Medical expenses are the single greatest cause of bankruptcies in the United States. (This surprised me – I would have thought it was divorce.)

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Financial Safeguards: A little late, not nearly enough

Congress and the Obama administration finally got around this week to considering reforms to the financial industry to try to avoid the type of theft, malfeasance and greed that ran the economy into the ground over the last few years.

Frankly, it’s surprising that this wasn’t a matter of first priority for the incoming administration.

One of the stated priorities of Obama’s administration was to restore confidence in the nation’s financial system. It eludes me, how that could be done when the lax rules, watered down regulations and paltry oversight that let a few Wall Street greed heads bring the nation to the brink of another Great Depression for the own personal gain remained in place.

How the faint-hearted proposed reforms will avoid a repeat of that situation also eludes me.

Financial reform should have been pretty straightforward. All it really required was a repeal of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Depression-Era Glass-Steagall Act and replaced the regulations that had kept our economy safe from Depression for 60 years with a deregulation scheme that turned Wall Street into the Wild West.

What was needed were restraints on the trading of derivatives that have no underlying value in the economy and turn the stock markets into casinos.

With all due respect to Colonial Williamsburg, which managed to offset $120 million in losses during the stock market plunge with put contracts on the Standard & Poor 500, such contracts add nothing to the economy of the nation. They don’t represent an investment, they represent a wager.

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