Kill Bill

Barry O. continues to have problems dancing with those that brung him.

Matt Tiabbi:

...So Obama gets elected and swoops into Washington with a big mandate and now the question for him becomes, how do I make all of my various sponsors happy? If you look at the proposals carefully you can see that the whole policy debate is shaped by this dynamic. What is consistently present throughout the policies favored by the White House is an effort to use tax money to subsidize the existing employer-based private system instead of doing the logical thing and taking the bite — for a bite had to be taken out of someone — out of the pharma and insurance industries.

As an added bonus for all of us, the “reform” will include individual mandates designed to significantly increase the insurance and pharma industry’s customer base. So in the end, what we’re looking at is a pair of handouts to corporate donors: tax subsidies to ease the cost of insurance for employers, and mandates to push more business to the health care industry.

On the road to trying to pull this appalling snow job off, however, the Obama administration has stumbled on opposition from both sides. Obviously it will be an enormous victory if progressives can somehow get passed a bill with a real public option and reform of drug prices. But failing that, it would be a very important achievement just to kill the bill entirely. It seldom happens that the public is awake and focused enough to have this kind of OK Corral confrontation with the DC oligarchy, and it has to take advantage.

Of course, if the bill is killed entirely, the beckista will be crowing, and the main$tream will be gushing about how re-energized the Rethuglicans are.

Never mind. Remember that a public mandate without a public option is the worst kind of tax paid directly to the banksters without even the appearance of pausing in the U.S. Treasury. This must be stopped in its tracks.