David Van Os On Health Care Reform

The Texas Democratic Party has far too many "blue dogs" in it -- conservatives who really don't support the progressive ideas of most Democrats. They want to use the party to achieve their own political ambitions, but are not willing to help the party to help ordinary Texans and Americans. A prime example of this is the party's current candidate for governor -- Bill White.

But fortunately, there are many good progressives in the state party. One of these is David Van Os. Mr. Van Os is a true progressive, a real Democrat, and has the best interests of the people of Texas and the United States at heart. We could use a whole lot more people like David Van Os in state party leadership positions.

The following is the latest missive I have received from David Van Os. I agree with every word he has written, and I reprint it here because I think it needs to be distributed as widely as possible.

Ohio Congressman and two-time presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich says that he will vote against the pending Senate-White House health care bill as it is presently constituted. In an interview on MSNBC last week Kucinich explained, "This bill represents a giveaway to the insurance industry. $70 billion a year, and no guarantees of any control over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance. I'm sorry, I just don't see that this bill is the solution. The insurance companies are the problem and we're just giving them a bailout." I'm with Dennis. I want health care reform, but not through the corporate giveaway that the Senate and the White House are pushing to pass. In my opinion, the idea that the federal government may require every American citizen by the force of law to purchase the retail product of an insurance policy from a private corporation that is in the business of selling that product for a profit is odious and intolerable.

It is not a parallel to requiring motorists to carry liability insurance as a condition of operating a motor vehicle on the public roads. I voluntarily partake of the privilege of driving on the public roads. It is an option that I am free to decline. The compulsory health insurance mandate, however, will be a condition of the act of living itself. For the insurance corporations it will be the greatest gift of corporate welfare that any government could ever bestow on private enterprise: a total economic oligopoly guaranteed by state power. This will represent no moderate step forward at all, but rather a huge step backward, because it will enthrone private corporate profiteering in the drivers seat of health care more firmly than ever. The only way to make the bill even marginally acceptable is by inserting a meaningful public option, through which at least a governmet-sponsored plan could offer non-profit competition to the corporations and put a chink in the oligopoly. Without the public option, the plan will give the extremely greedy giant health insurance corporations a level of control over the average American's living standards that is utterly inconsistent with democracy. Make no mistake about it; the public option is only a weak prescription for what ails us. Fourteen months after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, we should be debating about a genuine single-payer plan, a home-grown American national health system, an improved Medicare for all managed through the uniquely American genius for reflecting the self-governing democratic will of the people. But in spite of our best hopes, the new President who promised audacious change turned out to be a cautious incrementalist; so instead of fighting to support visionary change we are left struggling to maintain a minimal level of protection against the growing corporate state. Nevertheless, notwithstanding that it will not give us the single-payer system we need, insertion of the public option is the absolute minimum necessary to make the health care legislation something that is tolerable enough to be considered at least a mild step forward in the direction of a sane health care system. Otherwise, we the people are facing the possible enactment into law of one of the most dramatically far-reaching mistakes in our history, by which the entire American population will become a captive market for a single sector of private corporate enterprise through governmental coercion. Tragically, another chunk of our great democracy will be supplanted by corporatocracy.

If as Mussolini said, fascism is the marriage of the corporation and the state...........