Despite achieving feats that very few people would have believed politically possible just a few years ago, both the House and Senate health care bills leave much to be desired — namely that the House’s public option is too weak and the Senate’s public option is non-existent.
At this juncture, however, what’s most important is distilling exactly what went wrong. The grueling health care debate highlighted a number of issues that have slowly brought our democracy to its knees. This health care bill is good, but its far from great largely because it was constructed within an insidiously broken system.
This brings me to the Lesson #1 from the health care debate: WE NEED ROBUST CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM, AND WE NEED IT NOW —–
Since the beginning of our great republic, rich and powerful interests have been building a wall of influence around Washington. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson warned of this when he said: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
The health care debate proved that not only did we fail to crush this aristocracy in its birth, we allowed it to grow into an undermining force of our democracy.
Lets take a look at a couple of the opponents of reform or, more appropriately, the political bedfellows of the health insurance industry:
- Sen. Joe Lieberman (I – CT): Even though he’s supposed to represent Connecticut, he has been recently accuses of being the “Senator from Aetna.”
Since he became a Senator in 1989, Joe has received a healthy sum of $2.4 million in campaign contributions from the health sector. Even though its true that the health insurance industry employs 22,000 people in his state, 325,500 Connecticut residents lack health care coverage (Urban Institute and Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured). I guess the health insurance people have been giving Joe more cash than the uninsured folks…. not a far-fetched idea when considering the $1.4 billion in profits the Connecticut-based Aetna raked in last year alone.
- Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA): If you don’t remember, Senator Grassley is the guy that fed the death panel frenzy back in August when he said we should not “have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.” That’s funny. Not just because the comment confirmed his increasing senility, but because throughout the summer Grassley was seen hobnobbing with health care lobbyists and dining at fundraisers hosted bythe same health insurance CEOS whom he’s received $1.3 million from over the past 6 years.
This isn’t a new phenomenon either. Back in 2003 the health industry spent $300 million on lobbying and another $300 million on campaign contributions to politicians between 2000-2003.
The health insurance industry has been buying up congress for years, now we need to take it back.
More on this subject to come. I promise. Campaign finance reform is one of my great passions, its about time I blog about it.
- Matt
