In an article linked to on the TPM front page, yet another oh so smart guy, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The New Republic amazingly reveals his insightful discovery in a piece titled "The Single Biggest Issue that Could Undermine Reform". http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_treatment/archive/2009/04/01/the-single-biggest-issue-that-could-undermine-reform.aspx  Along with everyone else I'm sure; I was shocked to learn the single biggest issue that could undermine health reform is... money!  Wow!  Ya think?

The author points out how expensive it will be to have "reform" in the general sense that our cowardly political leaders are comfortable discussing it.  Naturally, any program of subsidizing the parasitic health insurance industry in order to get more (not all, just more) people covered by the rotten system we have now while maintaining the precarious and inexcusably expensive employer based health insurance racket most working people rely on, is going to be damned expensive.  That should not be considered news. 

Cohn also reveals that Obama has not proposed how to fully pay for this pig in a poke proposal he has made though he vows to "work with Congress" on finding the rest of the money at some undefined future point in time.  Cohn ends the article with hands raised and shoulders shrugged like most of the smart guys in the mainstream and inside the beltway.  He doesn't see how reform gets done and offers no possibilities of how to do it.  In some ways I don't blame him.  Why should he waste his time?  After all, even if what the President proposes actually gets passed, all it does is provide subsidies for insurance companies to keep sucking the lifeblood out of premium payers and our economy.  It's not reform, it's a shell game.  At best, the President's proposal would serve as a band aid and an excuse for those who don't want to do what is obviously necessary which is to assign our current system to the ash heap of history, and subordinate it to a supplementary role in a new, single payer health care system.  Such a model would replicate the superior models we find in all the industrialized nations of the west.  If the band aid is passed, it will only delay the inevitable and give aid and comfort to the very interests that continue to grow rich by sucking money out of productive society to keep their bottom lines fat and bloated.

Yes, obviously, changing our health care system and then paying for it is going to cost money.  But since our current situation is the most expensive on earth and does not produce outcomes comparable to the allegedly "inferior" systems elsewhere what the hell are we waiting for?  The only practical solution to our health care crisis is a single payer system of some kind.  Everyone knows that if they are honest about it.  It's the only way to cover everyone and it's the cheapest alternative and it will provide better outcomes because it will be health based instead of profit based.

Yes, the insurance industry and other vested interests will oppose it.  This is a given.  But for crying out loud, are we to accept cowardice as an excuse for not doing anything about any of our major problems?  I think it's time to let our "leaders" who seem to all be chickenshits that they need to start doing their jobs which is representing the interests of the people who elected them instead of the people who wine and dine them.

But, back to Mr. Cohn's revelation.  Where is the money going to come from?  Well for one thing, if we'd quit fooling around with these dumbass subsidy plans that won't improve anything for anyone in the long run and go for single payer, there will be substantial funds available in the form of all the trillions of dollars that go for paying the premiums to the health insurance parasites right now since people wouldn't need to be paying off those bloodsuckers anymore.  In all probability, both employers and employees could pay less than they pay now and get more health care as a result.  For another thing, if we start taking a look at the waste, fraud, and abuse that is available to cut in the federal budget and we don't exempt anything we could probably find on the order of $300-$500 Billion annually by cutting out all the obscene and unnecessary, wasteful contracts and programs for instruments of war upon which we waste grotesque amounts.  We spend more on defense annually than all the other nations on earth combined.  Last year, without the two wars we're talking about $650 Billion for "defense" and we all know it isn't because it is needed it is because the legendary Military Industrial Complex is an insatiable and malignant cancer on our nation that instead of protecting us drains the very lifeblood from America and robs our future of enormous possibilities including peace and prosperity.

So, if you need the cheapest and best "reform" it's clear that some form of the Medicare for All bill sponsored by Rep. John Conyers is the route to take.  It provides the best coverage for all our citizens--not some---ALL our citizens for much less than our current system costs and will improve the health of the nation dramatically.  And if you need money to pay for it there ought to be plenty to be found in the private sector that would, under single payer, be freed up and available to be rerouted to pay for the new single payer plan instead of paying for premiums to keep the parasites fat sucking off of the productive members of society.  Combine that windfall of money with massive cuts in our obscene and utterly unjustified "defense" budget and there's more than enough money to pay for making sure all Americans have what every citizen takes for granted in all the other industrialized nations on earth and have for years: knowing that when they get sick they can get the medical care they need because they need, not because they can pay for it out of their own pocket.

When I see the nation's smart guys like Cohn going round and round in circles about how to do this healthcare thing but being so blinded by the wedded bliss they experience as part of the status quo, it makes me wonder why anybody thinks these smart guys are so damn smart.  And of course, in my foolishness I start thinking that I see the same sort of limited vision, bad judgment and defense of the status quo everywhere I look in our society whether it is the financial sector disaster and handout, er, I mean "bailout" or the coddling of the interests of big oil at the expense of our environment, or just about anything else you can think of.  And then in my foolishness I start to conclude that maybe what we need is to flush our society altogether, top to bottom of the atrophied thinking and leadership that has led us to so many disasters they are now asking us foolish little people to pay for.  Our economic, political, civic, and media elites with precious few exceptions have utterly and completely discredited themselves.  Their incompetence, failures, irresponsibility, and disasters appear to know no bounds.  I know I'm not one of the smart guys in DC but seems to me it's high time that we got a new New Deal that radically redistributes power and wealth in this society if we hope ever to see improvement on any of the major issues the nation faces.  But you won't read about that in the New Republic or any other established organ of the status quo even if it claims to be "liberal". 

I think it is time Americans started thinking along the radical lines of Martin Luther King with respect to how this society works and how we both want it to work and how we must have it work if we are actually a nation that values justice, fairness, equality before the law, peace and prosperity.  See this link for a reminder of what King was really all about:  http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/03/31/remembering_and_misremembering_king/index.php#comment-3426293