Does Obama’s health care reform merely prop up blood-sucking private insurance companies?

Anyone reading this blog knows that I've vacillated mightily on what to do about health care reform. A single-payer system seems obvious as the best way to make the health care industry work in favor of ordinary people. But maybe the option of allowing folks to buy into a public plan that competes with private insurers would be a workable compromise? I keep going back and forth. I think that I just don't know.

Writing in The Socialist WebZine, Billy Wharton makes a compelling argument that President Obama's proposed health care reform does little to help ordinary people and a whole lot to prop up the private health insurance industry:

The bill does little to address the structural failures of private corporations. Instead of a single-payer plan which would address the problem of cost and coverage by eliminating private health insurers, thereby opening access, the House bill proposes coercive mandates to herd the great mass of the uninsured toward private plans. Key to this is a focus on keeping costs low in the private plans. The problem is that there are only two ways to do this -– offer high-fee, high-deductible plans or offer plans with bare-bones coverage. Both maintain high profitability for the corporations, while fuelling the logic of health-care avoidance and debt accumulation.

Some of the uninsured may resist this drive into private health insurance plans designed for corporate profitability. The House of Representatives, under the advice of President Barack Obama, has therefore designed an intricate system of coercive penalties. Americans will either have to prove enough hardship to qualify for the public option or pay a 2.5% penalty on their annual income. Considering the high costs of monthly health-care premiums, we can imagine that many may opt to pay the fine in order to avoid the higher costs of a private plan.

To make up the difference, the House bill proposes the issue of “affordability credits” in order to, “reduce cost-sharing to levels that ensure access to care”. Where will these credits, read taxpayers' money, be headed? Directly to the private health insurance industry. Here again the new logic of the Obama regime is put to work. Instead of using the state to solve social problems by nationalising, or socialising industry, the administration chooses to toss taxpayers' funds at the private sector. All the while, they employ free-market language –- increased competition, market areas and individual responsibility -– to cover what is essentially a transfer of public funds to large corporations. No wonder nary a word of protest has been uttered by the normally vociferous private health-care industry.

Wharton observes -- accurately, I think -- that only a mass social movement can make real health care reform possible. If anybody knows how to ignite such a movement, would you please share that information with me?