Cognitive Dissonance: The Healthcare Reform Battle's State of Mind

by Donna Smith. Published on Friday, January 30, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

It seems everyone in the healthcare reform movement is hitching up his or her britches and feeling mighty proud of the prospects for action under President Obama and the adoring Democrats in his Congressional arsenal. Even some prominent Republicans are inching ever closer to supporting change to the broken health system. But I'm feeling significant dissonance between the words spoken and the policy offered to move forward.

So listening to the speakers here at the Families USA Health Action meeting this week has been upsetting - OK, it is outrageous to watch these folks being self-congratulatory while also promoting those purporting the overhaul of the health system with the biggest bailout we've yet given any industry in recent months. The proposed mandates for all Americans to purchase private, for-profit health-insurance (or buy into a public pool that will be weakened by the insurance interests) is being sold to us as reform and it simply is not. And my brain hurts from the disconnect.

I cannot reconcile Princeton's Uwe Reinhardt's message that we've become an aristocracy - not a middle-class society or even a democracy - with his embrace of the insurance industry and expansion of the broken healthcare system that clearly provides better healthcare protection for our American royalty and not the peasants among us. He carefully charts for us the rising debt of American families - including crushing medical debt assumed under the for-profit health insurance based system-and the lack of savings by Americans in recent years. But there is little acknowledgment that some of the debt and lack of savings directly relates to the increased costs American families and workers must shoulder for health coverage - health coverage that doesn't adequately protect financial standing.

Sen . Charles Grassley of Iowa assured the crowd that there's a big difference between the Hillary Clinton plans of years gone by and the Obama plan now - "He (Obama) will stick to his guns on a private-public mix (for insurance)." Grassley goes on to say everyone knows you get over-utilization when you have "gold-plated" plans. The implication is always that if you give access to care then millions of us will clamor to sit in doctors' offices and get procedures and tests done simply because we have the means to do so. I actually think the gold-plated stuff will be reserved for Sen. Grassley and his cohorts - the rest of us will work hard to even get a plan that can assure minimal coverage or care. Grassley said they'd remind the Democrats that they said they'd adhere to a "pay as you go" with healthcare reform and other programs. Here's the nod to the "bi-partisan" efforts we hear will guide the day for us all - the new agenda, the cooperation that will bring us all to the promised land of expansion of the insurance industry.

Then the Dems. I hear Rep. Steny Hoyer rightfully cite his outrage about a Maryland child dying for want of a tooth extraction, yet stay safely and clearly away from angering the insurance industry. I listen as Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan talk about her compassion for families struggling for care yet quickly adding when she talks about providing healthcare for immigrants that we should reward with healthcare those doing "the right thing." I have a hard time reconciling the disconnect between the suffering unfolding every day - death by death by denial by denial - as the dance continues.

We want a "uniquely American" answer to the healthcare nightmare, they all say. I've heard that until my brain hurts just considering it. Oh, we're unique all right. We're the only industrialized nation on earth that tolerates the killing of its citizens on our own soil at the hands of this healthcare system and then wants to fix it all by handing more business, more money and more power to the same industry committing the murders. That's unique enough.

None of this sounds like the language of basic human rights. And I think I heard our new President say that he clearly understood healthcare to be a human right in response to a debate question just a few months ago. That was such a gift just to hear the words spoken. I just know he knows that this basic human right is not going to be protected by hoodwinking the American people into bailing out the insurance industry.

The heavily funded activists (come on folks, that alone should send up big, red flags - heavily funded activists for human rights?) pushing for a private-public national healthcare policy are in and of themselves a conundrum to me. I hear on the one hand the message that the private, for-profit health insurance industry is very bad indeed - blocking healthcare through denials and high premiums and all the practices the American people have had to endure for years. But then I also see the activists and the industry folks co-mingling ever so deftly in a dance of political theater aimed at convincing us all that in response to demands for insurance regulation and restriction the industry will put up a fight but then capitulate to the demands or risk being left behind.

Look at the list of bedfellows and trust your instincts America. Like our moms and dads taught us, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, guess what? It's a duck. A bailout called healthcare reform is still a bailout even if we're told otherwise. If AARP and UnitedHealth Care and Wal-Mart and SEIU and the others in the HCAN coalition are joining hands and forces, is there anyone among us who doesn't know that's about money and power and influence still? That's a duck. And that's going to be a very well treated duck.

So, let me get this straight... the insurance industry has been a big part of the problem. Worse. The industry has allowed the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans every year in order to protect profits.

I think of dead -- 2-year-old Mychelle Keyes and dead 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan and dead 38-year-old Tracy Pierce, and that dead little boy with an infected tooth in Maryland -- and I don't wonder at all what the new for-profit insurance-friendly political coalitions are fighting to protect. And it isn't the future Mychelle's or Nataline's or Tracy's. They are fighting to protect the folks who killed them.

All of these dead were killed at the hands of the industry now being simultaneously chastised and coveted. This same greedy industry can be trusted to roll over just a little while helping craft their own industry's regulations going forward? Oh, yes, that seat at the table is firmly fixed and being kept ever so warm for the insurance folks. In exchange for setting some of their own regulation, the insurance industry will be rewarded with the business of millions more of us who have had absolutely no say in the matter. None.

Those Americans not acting as political operatives for the quasi-activists organizing the reform transition for the insurance industry are not exactly anxious to hear from you and me. No, they have well-heeled and well-connected leaders who rub elbows and move easily within all of the halls of power where we can never go.

And unless we rise up and say we know what is going on and we smell a lot of big, fat rats, reform that expands the broken system and enriches the already elite of the healthcare profit-mongers will be sold to us by bipartisan bluffing and insurance company operatives slip-sliding us forward.

As for me, I will keep listening to Rep. John Conyers talk about human rights and healthcare for all and the long arc of history leaning towards justice. Oh, and his talk about how the automakers just barely across the river in Canada can build cars much more cheaply than in his native Michigan because they don't suffer the health-insurance nightmare. Huh? Human rights and good business. I do like the quack of that. And my dissonance subsides...

Donna Smith is a community organizer for the California Nurses Association and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.