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

Tomorrow is Obama’s big healthcare speech. This is his last chance to significantly alter the downward spiral of American culture.

We are dying a slow death of poison-by-status-quo. The way America has been doing things — financially, militarily, medically, and environmentally — is not only not working, in each area our actions are so unsustainable that continuing on the same path can only lead to massive chaos and human suffering.

In each of these areas, Obama came with a sense that he definitely got it and was prepared to usher in monumental change. Financially and militarily he has been, at best, a continuation of Bush. Bankers are still getting richer while the rest of us get poorer, and we’re still dropping bombs on Iraqi and Afghani civilians in pursuit of policies that benefit no one but military contractors.

Environmentally, he has been better than Bush, barely. But mostly he’s still defending status quo industries like coal and automobiles when, again, what the planet needs is monumental change.

Healthcare “reform” has been the hardest to watch. When we discount the people’s voice right from the outset — strong majorities of patients and doctors favor a single payer system — it’s a clear sign that the status quo is ruling the day.

The unsustainable status quo in American healthcare is insurance and pharmaceutical industry profits, including shareholder dividends. That is the main reason American healthcare costs too much. It is unconscionable to have a great nation brought to ruin, and for its people to needlessly suffer, so that a small overfed elite can make money.

That’s what Obama needs to say. When they scream “Socialism” he has to say “Yes, when it comes to healthcare, that is the best way.” He has to unequivocally remove the profit motive from American medicine.

If he fails, then the status quo rules, and a once great nation continues its downward spiral.

Michael Sky | CommonHealth

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

As he retired from office, Dwight Eisenhower imparted a scary warning about the “military-industrial complex”: an insidious merging of America’s security apparatus with private and corporate profiteers that gobbles up vast national resources while spewing waste and destruction in its wake. Though there’s long been much nodding in agreement with Ike’s assessment, nothing has slowed the growth or dimmed the power of the military-industrial complex.

In 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” promising a cure within the decade. Nixon totally misunderstood the “enemy” and committed the nation to an endless war of attrition and frustration. Even worse, he committed vast amounts of wealth to the funding of the “medical-industrial complex” that, like its military counterpart, drains the public treasury while providing a too often unhealthy medical product.

These mammoth conglomerates share a number of traits:

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

The debate over the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (Schip) — whether to continue it, and for how much money and how many kids — is providing a clear view into the ugliness of anti-government conservatism. Nobody contends that the program isn’t successfully providing much needed care to millions of children, or that providing the care via SCHIP is less expensive for the nation than having all of these uninsured children show up at emergency rooms when sick.

When CNN was picking the YouTube questions for the recent Democratic debate it passed on an excellent challenge from Michael Moore:

I am calling on each presidential candidate to pledge to refuse their free government health care until every person in this country also has it. I want every candidate who said they’d work for the minimum wage as president to work uninsured, too, until health care is universal. And I want the other candidates to join them. (Yes, I’m looking at you, too, Republicans. I know you can afford to do it.)

To be really effective it would have to be extended to the full Congress also. And  the Judiciary. Just end the free government-run healthcare they and their families are all receiving and let them experience the joys of the free market system they never tire of praising and pushing on the rest of us.