the citizen-viewer

A decade and a half ago when the Clinton health care plan thumped down on this citizen-viewer’s desk in its thousand-page majesty, the c-v pronounced it dead on arrival. Not to brag, but the c-v added that it would kill any future reform efforts for at least ten years, and it did.

Like one of Dr. Moreau’s hideous experiments, the Clinton plan was doomed not only by its irrationality but by its complexity. This complexity was built into its genetic code by the major private insurers that fathered it.

President Obama’s health care plan is strategically vague and thus not subject, yet, to the range of specific attacks that killed the Clinton plan. It is not a Maginot Line but a submarine, lurking in the deep.

At this point its most visible feature, and the one getting the most attention, like a conning tower above the waves, is that a public option be available to compete with private insurance for the loyalty of the customer base (that’s us, citizen-viewers).

The thinking here seems to be that a properly run, publicly financed system can compete well on a level playing field against private insurance.

However, the fact is that on a level playing field, public financing of health care would cream private financing every time, and by a wide margin. That’s been proven by variations on public financing all over the world. It’s proven by economics, by mathematics, by logic and by experience.

The problem is that the private health care financing industry doesn’t want a level playing field any more than it wants a publicly financed universal health care system from the get-go. The industry will fight to the death to cripple any public plan. Its very existence is at stake.

So there’s an inherent contradiction in the concept: For private plans to be viable, the public plan must be cut off at the knees. (And by the way, putting a public plan into a private marketplace is to cut it off at the knees. As long as we are customers for insurance, rather than citizens choosing health care providers, we’re toast.)

The possible outcomes of the Obama approach are basically two:
1. The industry wins the political fight, and we see an unfair but ‘equal’ competition, or
2. The industry’s back is broken and we see a competition in which the public option is so obviously better that the private options wither away and die the deaths they deserve.

Believe it or not, some health care advocates, appear to be fighting for option 1.

We deserve better. For the vast majority of citizen-viewers—those who aren’t health insurance executives or major stockholders, only outcome 2 can be acceptable. Yet the industry will fight to the death to avoid outcome 2.

The central fact of the health care financing issue is that quality, efficient, cost-contained health care for all on the one hand, and private insurance on the other, are mutually exclusive. The private health insurance industry has to die.

There’s only one way to win this fight. We citizen-viewers must break the back of the health care finance industry, and we must break it now.

Even Amnesty International is excited about Senator Patrick Leahy’s proposal to create a truth commission to investigate rights abuses during the last administration, or claims to be. Reading between the lines of their announcement (which seems to be on e-mail only), what’s missing is an endorsement of his plan.

And there’s good reason to withhold it.

Before you sign Leahy’s petition, take a close look. He proposes, in vague terms, “a truth and reconciliation commission, to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration’s constitutional abuses so we make sure they never happen again.”

Missing from his language is any mention of the possibility of prosecution. And in fact, truth commissions in other countries and similar inquiries in the US have typically foreclosed or severely limited future prosecutions — essentially trading away justice to get some of the truth as a consolation prize.

This approach may be appropriate in countries that are emerging from civil conflict, delicately trying to rebuild a peaceful society and desperate to avoid renewed war. In these cases, justice may be out of reach, and a bit of truth might be as much as one could hope for.

But it’s not appropriate in a country with well-developed legal structures and an operational judiciary, where all the tools exist to conduct criminal investigations, to indict those with substantial evidence of criminal activity against them, and to put them in the dock to face their accusers.

Assuming we live in the latter kind of country, Leahy’s proposal seems to be designed to put perpetrators of the most serious crimes of our time into a special category: above the law. After all, the rest of us don’t get to face a truth commission if we’re accused of a crime. We face a court of law, and the possibility of prison. Even death.

Are our institutions so weak that we must compromise justice in hope of escaping civil conflict? Senator Leahy seems to think so. If he is right, then as a senator he shares responsibility for the collapse of our civil society.

Too many times, we’ve seen the frightened rabbits in Congress join with their collegial collaborators to create mechanisms that gives us half-truths instead of justice. Like the Iran-Contra hearings, these mechanisms allow privileged criminals to go free, and to join future adminstrations. And kill again.

The Greatest Americans web site now features TOP TEN COMBAT ROBOTS.

Sure, I’d love some guilt and culpability with my mashed potatoes!

One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.

Mmm, that was tasty! I think I’ll just have a little more…

Watching the last week of political news, I realize a new approach is needed post-2008 election.

Obama and the Democrats seem to be showing us that this election drove out the far right and reinstated the center-right establishment, even if the people voted for something else.

One could document the atrocities, but that takes work, and others are better at it than I. See OpenLeft for example.

Instead it’s probably a good time to shift gears and think about the big picture, outside the box (or is bun?), beyond the fringe, one step ahead, macro …

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In the contested Minnesota recount of the Norm Coleman (R-MN) vs Al Franken (D) race for US Senate, Coleman’s people are apparently challenging ballots for the simple reason that some citizen-viewers who marked their ballots for Franken for Senate must have intended to vote for Coleman, simply because they voted for McCain in the presidental race.

This is interesting: from the Minnesota contested Senate race.

Today the House Democrats narrowly voted to replace John Dingell with Henry Waxman as chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

I know, you probably had to step back from the computer just now to fight off the vapors.

But seriously, this is news.

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They’re all about how much he sucks. In the poll I voted for douchebag.

As predicted in an earlier post, I and my mythical ideological kinfolk are becoming “gradually disillusioned as hangover sets in and inherent centrism of Democratic party manifests; spends much of the next four years reminding selves that this is ‘better than Bush.’”

I amended the title to this post because “better than” remains to be seen given the past week of depressing concessions to the right. Most recently, today’s ringing endorsement of Joe Lieberman’s turncoat bad-mouthing of the party.

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Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

If you’re looking for a well-written interpretive account of the dangerous continuity in U.S. national security policy since the 1940s, this is a great place to start. I’ve been reading it since the election, and it brings out the real challenge facing Barack Obama.

Getting rid of Bush is much easier than getting rid of a national security establishment that operates beyond the reach of elected officials.

Indeed, Obama, like all other 2008 presidential candidates, indicated that he agreed with the “national security” thesis that America is surrounded by threats, must always be ready to use military force, and therefore should keep spending dollars, sending soldiers and making policy on the premise that the U.S. has to be a global imperial power in order to survive.

Bacevich makes the case better than I’m making it. He’s an academic, but he has written this with a broad reading public in mind. The notes are light and the argument provocative.

At 223 pages, The Limits of Power is worth the effort.

Special Times Edition of Saturday, July 4, 2009.

Download the PDF from here (or if it doesn’t work, try here) or read the online version.

NY Times blog reacts (calmly)