Cynical but accurate?

Thanks to the folks at the Facebook "Boycott Whole Foods" group for posting a link to Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone blog post about the health care reform process. I've read some of Taibbi's writing before on AlterNet, and I'm not sure I trust him. In the past, my impression has been that Taibbi is something of an arrogant blowhard. Some of that arrogance comes across in this piece, but underneath his self-righteousness and bad language, this is also a comprehensive history of the health care bills making their way through Congress.

Here's a sample:

To recap, here's what ended up happening with health care. First, they gave away single-payer before a single gavel had fallen, apparently as a bargaining chip to the very insurers mostly responsible for creating the crisis in the first place. Then they watered down the public option so as to make it almost meaningless, while simultaneously beefing up the individual mandate, which would force millions of people now uninsured to buy a product that is no longer certain to be either cheaper or more likely to prevent them from going bankrupt. The bill won't make drugs cheaper, and it might make paperwork for doctors even more unwieldy and complex than it is now. In fact, the various reform measures suck so badly that PhRMA, the notorious mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry which last year spent more than $20 million lobbying against health care reform, is now gratefully spending more than seven times that much on a marketing campaign to help the president get what he wants.

So what's left? Well, the bills do keep alive the so-called employer mandate, requiring companies to provide insurance to their employees. A good idea — except that the Blue Dogs managed to exempt employers with annual payrolls below $500,000, meaning that 87 percent of all businesses will be allowed to opt out of the best and toughest reform measure left. Thanks to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, we can now be assured that the 19 or 20 employers in America with payrolls above $500,000 who do not already provide insurance will be required to offer good solid health coverage. Hurray!

The rest of the piece is a bit long, but I think this is necessary in order for Taibbi to do justice to a complicated subject. I would really be interested in any comments that you have afterward.