Does Obama have the guts?

Could Hillary Clinton have been right about Barack Obama?

by Roger Simon
August 18, 2009

Could she have been right when she said that he was the candidate of lofty promises —“the skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect” — and not the candidate of real leadership?

In her former life as a presidential candidate, Clinton warned voters that Obama would let them down. She warned them that when the going got tough, he would fold up.

She said it was not just a matter of Obama lacking experience — that was the least of it — but that he lacked the strength, the toughness, the will to get the job done.

In January 2008, at Nashua High School North just before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton said of Obama: “I applaud his incredible ability to make a speech that really leaves people inspired. My point is that when the cameras disappear and you’re there in the Oval Office having to make tough decisions, I believe I am better prepared and ready to lead our country.”

Democratic voters disagreed with her (though she did win New Hampshire), and Obama went on to win both his party’s nomination and the presidency. But Clinton, now his secretary of state, left him with a warning:

“You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.”

It is prose time for Obama.

And we are now going to see how he governs when it comes to meaningful health care reform. In his heart and in his head he knows what it takes for such reform. He knows that a public option — a government-run health care program like Medicare — has the best chance of competing with the insurance industry.

In Grand Junction, Colo., last week Obama said that if the public option “could keep its costs lower and provide a good-quality service and good benefits, then that would help keep the insurance companies honest.”

The public option would do so by creating not socialism but competition. In order to compete with the huge health care industry, you have to be huge yourself or you get steamrollered. That’s why a public option would work and a system of smaller health care “co-ops” almost certainly would not.

In general, the health care industry wants health care reform and for a very simple reason: It would mean 47 million new customers, many of them young and healthy.

But the industry does not want a public option as a part of that reform, because a public option would be large enough to negotiate with private insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and doctors for lower costs.

“A public option would cut deeply into their current profits,” writes Robert Reich, former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. “That’s why they’ve been willing to spend a fortune on lobbyists, threaten and intimidate legislators and ordinary Americans, and even rattle Obama’s cage to the point where the administration is about to give up on it.”

We don’t know for sure that Obama is about to give up on the public option. I think, in the end, he will not. I think he may be tougher than some think and stronger than the polls show. But I admit there are troubling signs.

“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform,” Obama said at Grand Junction. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

But it is a very important sliver, a critical aspect. And how Obama acts right now on health care reform could tell us how he will act for the rest of his presidency.

Sometimes it is not enough to have just your heart and your head in the right place. You have to have your guts there, too.

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The comments you read below mirror my own. I had planned to comment in a line by line format.. but

‘tedium ad infinitum’.

(ht/rgb44hrc) @ Big Pink:

“Insurance companies are delighted with the way “reform” is unfolding. Think of it: The government is planning to require most uninsured Americans to buy health coverage. Millions of young and healthy individuals will be herded into the industry’s welcoming arms. This is the population the insurers drool over.”

“If the oldest and sickest are on Medicare, and the poorest are on Medicaid, and the young and the healthy are required to purchase private insurance without the option of a competing government-run plan — well, that’s reform the insurance companies can believe in.”

“The White House, for its part, agreed not to seek additional savings from the drug companies over those 10 years. This resulted in big grins and high fives at the drug lobby. The White House was rolled. The deal meant that the government’s ability to use its enormous purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices was off the table.”

This Is Reform?

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rgb44hrc’s: Epilogue to the above three quotes. Posted in it’s entirety.:

“It’s never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest. So if we manage to get health care “reform” this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary.

Forget about a crackdown on price-gouging drug companies and predatory insurance firms. That’s not happening. With the public pretty well confused about what is going on, we’re headed — at best — toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’ve hit the jackpot.

The hope of a government-run insurance option is all but gone. So there will be no effective alternative for consumers in the market for health coverage, which means no competitive pressure for private insurers to rein in premiums and other charges. (Forget about the nonprofit cooperatives. That’s like sending peewee footballers up against the Super Bowl champs.)

Insurance companies are delighted with the way “reform” is unfolding. Think of it: The government is planning to require most uninsured Americans to buy health coverage. Millions of young and healthy individuals will be herded into the industry’s welcoming arms. This is the population the insurers drool over.

This additional business — a gold mine — will more than offset the cost of important new regulations that, among other things, will prevent insurers from denying coverage to applicants with pre-existing conditions or imposing lifetime limits on benefits. Poor people will either be funneled into Medicaid, which will have its eligibility ceiling raised, or will receive a government subsidy to help with the purchase of private insurance.

If the oldest and sickest are on Medicare, and the poorest are on Medicaid, and the young and the healthy are required to purchase private insurance without the option of a competing government-run plan — well, that’s reform the insurance companies can believe in.

And then there are the drug companies. A couple of months ago the Obama administration made a secret and extremely troubling deal with the drug industry’s lobbying arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The lobby agreed to contribute $80 billion in savings over 10 years and to sponsor a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in support of health care reform.

The White House, for its part, agreed not to seek additional savings from the drug companies over those 10 years. This resulted in big grins and high fives at the drug lobby. The White House was rolled. The deal meant that the government’s ability to use its enormous purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices was off the table.

The $80 billion in savings (in the form of discounts) would apply only to a certain category of Medicare recipients — those who fall into a gap in their drug coverage known as the doughnut hole — and only to brand-name drugs. (Drug industry lobbyists probably chuckled, knowing that some patients would switch from generic drugs to the more expensive brand names in order to get the industry-sponsored discounts.)

To get a sense of how sweet a deal this is for the drug industry, compare its offer of $8 billion in savings a year over 10 years with its annual profits of $300 billion a year. Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote that the deal struck by the Obama White House was very similar to the “deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it’s proven a bonanza for the drug industry.”

The bonanza to come would be even larger, he said, “given all the Boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade.”

While it is undoubtedly important to bring as many people as possible under the umbrella of health coverage, the way it is being done now does not address what President Obama and so many other advocates have said is a crucial component of reform — bringing the ever-spiraling costs of health care under control. Those costs, we’re told, are hamstringing the U.S. economy, making us less competitive globally and driving up the budget deficit.

Giving consumers the choice of an efficient, nonprofit, government-run insurance plan would have moved us toward real cost control, but that option has gone a-glimmering. The public deserves better. The drug companies, the insurance industry and the rest of the corporate high-rollers have their tentacles all over this so-called reform effort, squeezing it for all it’s worth.

Meanwhile, the public — struggling with the worst economic downturn since the 1930s — is looking on with great anxiety and confusion. If the drug companies and the insurance industry are smiling, it can only mean that the public interest is being left behind.

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The salient points are covered in the above narrative by “rgb44hrc”. Illustrating so well my deep disappointment as well as yours, I’m sure; when we learned President Obama had negotiated with drug companies behind closed doors. He negotiated our strength in buying power away for a mere pittance of a discount on medication for a period of ten years. When he was in a position, a position the American people granted him, to do us some real good. He chose to acquiesce the Power of the People for the political support of Corporate Drug Companies.

How can we ever Trust a man.. so weak and so evil using the power of the office of the US Presidency to nakedly sell out the people who elected him for his own personal gain?

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