Does anyone honestly believe that this White House has acted in good faith? With its allies in Congress? With its constituents? Hell, with its own campaign promises?

Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen an spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far removed from the actual concerns of people’s lives–so far removed that, last weekend, we had a gathering of the politically halt, lame, blind, and crippled in Washington, gathered for the sole purpose of petitioning various oligarchs to keep screwing them with their pants on.

Never in my long career as a professional cynic have I seen a spasm of Beltway bubblehood so far beyond even the limits of Irish Smartass to describe it. The political class in this country–politician and journalist, lobbyist and legislator, Republican and Democratic, Executive and Legislative — has made a collective decision to protect the profits of one of the least popular industries in the history of the Republic, to preserve the iron grip of corporate bureaucrats over the practice of medicine in America, and to refuse vitrually without serious discussion to adopt measures favored by 77 percent of the voting public.

It is to be in awe, is what it is.

Charles Pierce | Altercation

As the likelihood of genuine healthcare reform dwindles, laughter may be the only medicine we can afford:

From Billionaires for Wealthcare

Getting to be too late for Obama and healthcare, though he still has a chance for a radical start-over when he addresses the full Congress in two days.

He could do himself a big favor by listening to Moyers even better, put him charge of the process.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

In this season of American healthcare reform, we frequently hear comments that begin: “In the richest nation in the world….” and finish with some variation of “….we should be able to provide decent affordable care to all our citizens,” or “….we should have better health outcomes than some 30+ nations that are not nearly as wealthy.” The assumption being that, while money can’t buy you love, it certainly can buy you the best doctors, hospitals, technologies, and drugs.

Unfortunately, America allows some 20% of its healthcare spending to go to sickness profiteers in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Since non-profit, single-payer solutions were not even allowed into the current debate — the “public option” proposal, in its current form, is more frustrating tease than radical transformation — it seems inevitable that post-reform healthcare in America will continue to function as a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to the rich.

This is indeed most unfortunate because it feeds into an even greater problem facing America: the vast and ever-widening gap between the wealthiest 5% and the rest of us. This income inequality is not just crassly immoral, as so puke-ishly personified by greedy financiers grabbing billions in booty for themselves, while millions of their “fellow Americans” lose jobs, homes, and health insurance. As British researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett explain:

Until recently, most of the argument about the scale of income inequality in modern societies has been about fairness and unfairness. But it has recently become possible to compare the scale of income differences in different societies and see how the social fabric of society is affected by how much inequality there is. Research using this data carried out since the early 1990s shows that many of the most pressing health and social problems are worse in more unequal societies — often much worse. Societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor seem to suffer more of a very wide range of health and social problems.

Everyone agrees that reforming American healthcare requires reducing costs. We spend far more per capita than any other modern country, with significantly poorer outcomes, including millions of citizens without insurance.

Of course, there’s less agreement about which costs most need cutting. Defenders of the status quo oppose anything that might impact their already adequate care. They offer little in the way of solutions and would prefer to table the issue for another twenty years.

Single-payer advocates point out that the major difference in America’s healthcare bill, compared to other nations, is that some 20% of every healthcare dollar goes to administration. Most other nations (and our own medicare system) spend less than 5%.

Sounds bad, but calling it “administrative costs” conjures a picture of large bureaucracies filled with secretaries, clerks, and mid-level managers who spend all day doing paper-pushing tasks in wasteful, inefficient ways.

For all the talk of reducing health care costs, there is a little conversation about the huge costs that are most easily reduced: all of the billions that insurance companies, HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals spend on non-patient-care reasons: high administrator salaries, advertising, political bribes campaign contributions, lobbying fees, and corporate profits.

The Washington Post reports that private insurers, drug companies and their representatives spent more than $126 million on lobbying in the first quarter of this year. That’s over $1.4 million a day.

And they’ve hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress to do all that lobbying work.

When Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, sat down with health-care lobbyists on June 10, two were his former chiefs of staff. Their aim: to minimize the “damage” in profits to insurers, hospitals and drug makers from any change in approach from government. Specifically, they oppose any even remotely public option, the details of which are right now up for debate.

Want to hush the activists? The real scandal, it seems to me, shouldn’t be the thousands of dollars that on-line organizers are spending on advertising to the public and Congress. The real scandal should be the millions that private insurers and pharmaceutical firms are spending infiltrating the government.

If the public option lobbyists had the access Big Pharma’s got, they might not need to buy all those ads. Besides — $1.4 million a day. Imagine what real-life nurses could do with that! —Laura Flanders, Common Dreams

Only a single payer system can eliminate such costs. So, of course, we’re not allowed to even talk about it…..

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

Donna Smith has long been a strong voice for single payer coverage. Her passion comes from a series of awful experiences that she and her husband — both with health insurance — have had dealing with our current system.

OK, if this wasn’t personal enough just yet for me, it just got a whole lot more so. And if you think for one instant that in this nation at this point in history and with this popularly elected President and Democratic Congress you will be treated for a heart attack simply because you might die if you are not treated, think again. And if you think having insurance helps, think some more.

On Friday, my husband was denied a blood test because a computer record from some distant time past and some other state showed he had a $7 balance with LabCorp. I am not making this up.

CommonDreams

Even Obama’s doomed “Public Option” would not be the change we need. Nobody should be profiting on human misery the way the insurance and pharmaceutical companies are.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

I graduated from college in 1973 and left home shortly after. I had been a sickly kid with several hospitalizations during childhood, including a near-fatal condition at 14. So, as I left my family care, my mother worried constantly about my lack of health insurance. Like most people in their “invincible twenties,” I paid no attention to such worries.

By the time I reached my thirties, I had settled into what has become a lifetime of self-employment. I’ve never had employee-based health insurance, and have never made enough money to justify the expense of getting my own. I’m happy to say that, except for periodic adventures in dentistry, I’ve never missed it.

I have always recognized, however, that I must take full responsibility for my own health. If the medical system would not insure necessary care in the future, I must do whatever I can to assure good health without it.

This is a great article from Ezra Klein. First he makes clear that our current insurance system actually works against the commonhealth, not for it. Then he offers five steps to improving the system — none of which have any chance of ever happening — ultimately making the case for non-insurance-based, universal coverage:

It is actually counterproductive for insurers to compete on giving us the best care. It’s not simply that they’re not doing it, but given the structure of the marketplace, they shouldn’tdo it. Imagine insurer X creates the best damn diabetes protocols in the country. And they begin advertising this fact. What happens on Day Two? Well, they’re flooded with individuals suffering from diabetes, or individuals who fear they will one day be suffering from diabetes. These people, in the current system, are a bad deal. Not only is it near impossible to insure them at a profit, but pooling their costs (which is what insurers do, after all) raises premiums for all the insurer’s other customers. When the average customer of an insurer gets sicker, prices go up for all their customers. So the healthy folks contracting with that insurer quit the pool, and go find a cheaper deal, which forces the insurer to raise premiums again, driving out more healthy folks, which forces them to raise premiums again, which drives out more healthy folks, and so on. It’s what we call an insurance death spiral, and it ends with the collapse of the insurer.

Given those incentives, insurers cannot compete to offer better care, because if they offered better care, all that would happen is they would attract worse deals. Which is why, in the current system, insurers make things worse.