Bill Moyers & Michael Winship: Some Choice Words For “The Select Few”
Bill Moyers Journal
July 10, 2009
Enter “the select few who actually get it done.” Three out of four of the big health care firms lobbying on Capitol Hill have former members of Congress or government staff members on the payroll — more than 350 of them — and they’re all fighting hard to prevent a public plan, at a rate in excess of $1.4 million a day.
Health care policy has become insider heaven. Even Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House health reform director, served on the boards of several major health care corporations.
President Obama has pushed hard for a public option but many fear he’s wavering, and just this week his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — the insider del tutti insiders — indicated that a public plan just might be negotiable, ready for reengineering, no doubt, by “the select few who actually get it done.”
That’s how it works. And it works that way because we let it. The game goes on and the insiders keep dealing themselves winning hands. Nothing will change — nothing — until the money lenders are tossed out of the temple, the ATM’s are wrested from the marble halls, and we tear down the sign they’ve placed on government — the one that reads, “For Sale.”
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2009/07/bill_moyers_michael_winship_so.html
Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
The public option was the strategy of a large group of progressives to circumvent “the select few” who have continued to make sure that comprehensive reform was not politically feasible. With the favorable election results and with their campaign to market “your choice of health plans,” the progressives were confidant that they would be able to use the public option as a backdoor entry to affordable health care for all.
Once you think that you’ve closed the deal, you’re supposed to take down the “For Sale” signs. These progressives forgot to do that, and “the select few” came in with a lot more money and bought the place out from under them.
Who is left to toss the money lenders out of the temple? Or do they own the place in perpetuity?