The screaming match in the US over public healthcare is a classic example of money versus the people. On one side, we have tens of millions of Americans - most of them with jobs - who cannot afford (or are simply denied) health insurance, plus tens of millions more who are hanging on by their fingertips. On the other, we have a rapacious medical industry driven by corporate sociopathy to higher profits. Unfortunately, money seems to be winning. Over the last few months they've spent US$380 million in their campaign to keep those people uninsured, deploying six lobbyists for every member of Congress and making enormous "campaign contributions" (otherwise known as "bribes") to key legislators. The chair of the Senate committee drafting the legislation, for example, was given US$1.5 million.
And they're getting what they've paid for. The bill has morphed from an attempt to widen public healthcare so that ordinary Americans can get the care they need to a measure to force people to buy private insurance or go to jail:
"It's a total victory for the health insurance industry," said Dr Steffie Woolhander, a GP, professor of medicine at Harvard University and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Programme (PNHP).But its what happens when you have that level of money in politics: outright corruption, policy for sale, and the best government money can buy. As for the people it is supposed to serve - voters - they get screwed for someone else's profit, while their corrupt "representatives" smile and clip the ticket. And you wonder why Americans don't vote? It's because they know it doesn't matter - whoever they elect as "their" representative will serve money, not them."What the bill has done is use the coercive power of the state to force people to hand their money over to a private entity which is the private insurance industry. That is not what people were promised."
By raising spending limits and starting an arms race for donations, National's electoral finance "reforms" risk taking us down this path (with the added bonus of less disclosure than the US - American politicians get away with it by shamelessness, not secrecy). Don't let it happen here.
