Read it and weep

Over on CommonDreams.org, Norman Solomon discusses the The Incredible Shrinking Healthcare Reform.

It's enough to make you weep, or gnash your teeth with anger, or worry about the consequences for your loved ones -- or the loved ones of people you'll never meet.

During his campaign last year, Obama criticized big pharmaceutical firms for blocking efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. But since the election, the LA Times reports, "the industry's chief lobbyist" -- former Congressman Billy Tauzin -- "has morphed into the president's partner. He has been invited to the White House half a dozen times in recent months. There, he says, he eventually secured an agreement that the administration wouldn't try to overturn the very Medicare drug policy that Obama had criticized on the campaign trail."

The story gets worse. For instance, "Tauzin said he had not only received the White House pledge to forswear Medicare drug price bargaining, but also a separate promise not to pursue another proposal Obama supported during the campaign: importing cheaper drugs from Canada or Europe."

Meanwhile, with a "mandate" herd of cash cows on the national horizon, the health insurance industry is licking its chops. The corporate glee is ill-disguised as the Obama administration pushes for legal mandates to require that Americans buy health insurance -- no matter how dismal the quality of the coverage or how unaffordable the "affordable" premiums turn out to be for real people in the real world.