What is ObamaCare?

From CounterPunch, former Reagan administration economist Paul Craig Roberts:

It is extraordinary that “liberals,” “progressives,” “Democrats,” whatever they are, are defending a “health program” that uses public monies to pay private insurance companies and that raises the cost of health care.

Americans have been brainwashed that “a single-payer system is unaffordable” because it is “socialized medicine.” Despite this propaganda, accepted by many Americans, European countries manage to afford single-payer systems. Health care is not a stress, a trauma, an unaffordable expense for European populations. Among the Western Civilized Nations, only the richest, the US, has no universal health care.

The American health care system is the most expensive of all on earth. The reason for the extraordinary expense is the multiple of entities that must make profits. The private doctors must make profits. The private testing centers must make profits.The private specialists who receive the referrals from general practitioners must make profits. The private hospitals must make profits. The private insurance companies must make profits. The profits are a huge cost of health care.

And

To make the costs as high as possible, conservatives and the private insurance companies devised ObamaCare. The bill was written by conservative think tanks and the private insurance companies. What the “socialistic” ObamaCare bill does is to take income taxes paid by citizens and use the taxes to subsidize the private medical premiums charges by private health care providers in order to provide “private” health care to US citizens who cannot afford it.

More here.

As Real Art readers know, I am definitely not one of those liberals, progressives, or Democrats who support ObamaCare. And my reason is pretty simple: in spite of the prolonged continual rantings of conservatives, the Affordable Care Act is not socialism; indeed, it is essentially crony capitalism, potentially worse than what we have now, and that's bad, really bad, because what we need is, in fact, socialism. I mean, real socialism. Or single payer. Whatever, I'm cool with either one. As long as we have a system that is geared toward providing universal health care coverage for the United States instead of a system that is geared toward making profits for skimmers and middle men. Because we can't have both. We can't provide health care access for everybody while at the same time using the system to enrich a few individuals--the latter undermines the former; the economics just don't work like they do for other markets.

But here we are. Obama forces us to pay for capitalist health insurance which we may or may not actually be able to afford, and may or may not provide health care for us when we need it. But the health insurance companies, wired into the political establishment as they are, will get rich because they now cater to a captive market, one that is required by law to pay for a product that is very likely to be defective. And the conservatives call this "socialism."

Sometimes this shit makes me wonder if evil hippies keep spiking my coffee with LSD.

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