November 07, 2009 06:39 PM UTC

Health and Jobs: The Faux Connection

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• by: JO

By now we’ve all read the “extended” unemployment figure–17.5% of Americans who want to work full-time are unable to find full-time jobs.

HOW CAN IT BE, I ask, that Congress is about to pass a health insurance bill–let’s call it by the more accurate term health care financing bill– that is built primarily on the proposition that employers continue to act as the primary financiers?

There is no connection between needing health care and having a job. Most likely, just the opposite. But the solutions being offered are (a) require employers to offer health insurance and/or (b) a health care tax on self-employed or unemployed or underemployed individuals that is to be paid to private companies, aka mandatory purchase of health care insurance.

How did this come to pass? The answer, of course…,  

…is that a large industry, health care insurance, is built around this structure that rose during the days of the post-WW2 wage and price freeze. Long gone. As illogical and nonsensical as this nexus is 65 years after that time, the Great Health Care Reform (Not!) debate of 2009 largely takes it for granted. How can this be?

Short answer: Votes of Congressmen and Senators are for sale. The highest bidder in this case was the private health insurance industry; citizens affected by the outcome were effectively not participants in the auction because they had no concentrated group of lobbyists armed with dollars.

It is a pattern repeated over and over in virtually every area; energy is the biggest one that springs to mind besides health care.

Bottom line: In 2008 lots of people went to rather a lot of trouble to elect a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic White House. We did so in the expectation that looming problems would be addressed effectively and in a timely manner.

For whatever set of reasons you want to choose, it ain’t happening. For all the good the Democrats did us, we might as well have had Republicans! Why should I, or anyone else, spend time, money, or energy typing on a blog site like this one if electing Democrats yields health care reform that is only marginally different/better than what the Republicans come up with? And no energy policy at all! And an economic policy that crows, a year later: ‘Well, things aren’t getting worse as fast as they used to be! Wait a year or two or three for jobs to return! Be patient, O Ye of Little Income!’

Democrats have clear majorities in both houses and, of course, in the White House. Maybe Democrats aren’t the answer. Maybe the existing party system is no longer functional. Maybe it’s time for citizens to take the iniative, abandon faith in existing institutions that have proved ineffective at addressing pressing problems, and take our wrinkled trousers into our own hands.

We could even give such a movement a name: The New American Revolution.