I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts!

When the big insurance companies promised to "work with" the white House to cover more people and reduce health care costs many rejoiced. I winced. I feared. I felt my stomach churn. The reason? Obama "welcomed" them, and since then I have heard nothing about the promised public plan. In fact the Rhetoric from Obama seems clear: he will work with the insurance people and leave it up to them! I treat this more fully in a Huliq News story

This is bad news indeed. Paul Krugman has recently written at length on this:

here’s the question: Will Mr. Obama gloss over the reality of what’s happening, and try to preserve the appearance of cooperation? Or will he honor his own pledge, made back during the campaign, to go on the offensive against special interests if they stand in the way of reform?

The story so far: on May 11 the White House called a news conference to announce that major players in health care, including the American Hospital Association and the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans, had come together to support a national effort to control health care costs.

The fact sheet on the meeting, one has to say, was classic Obama in its message of post-partisanship and, um, hope. “For too long, politics and point-scoring have prevented our country from tackling this growing crisis,” it said, adding, “The American people are eager to put the old Washington ways behind them.”

But just three days later the hospital association insisted that it had not, in fact, promised what the president said it had promised — that it had made no commitment to the administration’s goal of reducing the rate at which health care costs are rising by 1.5 percentage points a year. And the head of the insurance lobby said that the idea was merely to “ramp up” savings, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry is busily lobbying Congress to block one crucial element of health care reform, the public option — that is, offering Americans the right to buy insurance directly from the government as well as from private insurance companies.

Krugman is surely right to be alarmed. The problem with our current system is that private companies run the show. Private insurance is driven by one goal ... profit. The way to maximize profit is to avoid paying for health care whenever it is possible to do so, but to take as much money (via premiums, deductibles etc) from the "consumer" as possible. And this is what Health insurance corporations do. Without a public plan and a federal committee to regulate private plans, they will continue to rob us blind in this way.

Krugman continues:

Back during the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama argued that the Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a “big table.” And that May 11 event was, of course, intended precisely to show this big-table strategy in action.

But what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform? Back then, Mr. Obama assured voters that he would get tough: “If those insurance companies and drug companies start trying to run ads with Harry and Louise, I’ll run my own ads as president. I’ll get on television and say ‘Harry and Louise are lying.’ ”

The question now is whether he really meant it.

The medical-industrial complex has called the president’s bluff. It polished its image by showing up at the big table and promising cooperation, then promptly went back to doing all it can to block real change. The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity.

It’s up to Mr. Obama to prove them wrong.

Let me here state my own thought: Obama will cave. He will not come through. He will let big business take the lead and Health reform will NOT happen. I hope I'm wrong, but I have a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that Obama will fail us here.