SICKO a bipartisan headache

By Libby Spencer

You have to love how the conventional wise men are spinning Moore's new movie as a problem for the Democratic party. And then there's the experts who soberly advise us why our health care problem can't really be fixed.

"To presume that the private sector is going to sit idly by to see the destruction of private coverage I think is a misreading of reality," said Ron Pollack of the advocacy group Families USA. "I think the presidential candidates understand that if healthcare reform is going to have a chance of success, it will require bipartisanship and a balance of public and private coverage. It cannot be the triumph of one ideology over the other."

What the hell does ideology have to do with it? It's about money. It always has been and the only threat from the private sector is that the deep pockets of the health care industry lobbyists would be emptied and all that lovely campaign funding would dry up. As ABC reports:

In the first quarter, the Center for Responsive Politics found that the leading '08 candidates are relying mostly on those donors giving the maximum $2,300 contribution, not the smaller contributions.

"We've tracked the sources of the funds and it's largely the same as in past cycles," Krumholtz said. "You're going to see a lot of money coming from the finance, insurance and real estate sectors."

The corporate lobbyists don't have any ideology and their loyalty is to power, not either party. They'll back the perceived winner and hedge their bets by throwing a few crumbs to the losers, just in case. But back to the LAT's expert advice.

Whatever mix of private and public sources will increase the number of people with coverage, the insurance companies would like it to be managed by them," UC Berkeley health economist James Robinson said in a recent interview. "They can work with Medicare, they can work with Medicaid, they can work with employers, they can work with whomever."

I guess that depends on what your definition of work is, but he's right about the insurers wanting to keep their grubby paws on the administrative profits. I guess we're just supposed to ignore that it's the insurance companies' mismanagement that caused this mess in the first place. God knows, that's what you can expect our politicians to do.

It's absurd to suggest health care reform is "political poison with the larger electorate." Americans are tired of paying outrageously high policy premiums that deliver the bare minimum of coverage. The politicians won't lose votes for cutting the insurers out of the picture, they'll just lose the industry's payola.

I haven't seen the movie, but from what I've read, Moore's premise is right on. Our health care system is mortally ill and we can't trust the spin doctors inside the beltway to heal it. This is a case where the voters are going to have to prescribe the right medicine themselves and force our politicians to swallow it.

(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)