If you've somehow managed to avoid hearing the news about what's been going on lately with the US effort to reform the country's health-insurance and healthcare systems, an impassioned article by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi provides a good look at the progressive perspective on recent events.
We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad. [...]It's really worth taking the time to read the whole thing. And keep in mind that Mr Taibbi's article came out a few weeks ago, before Senator Max Baucus's Group of Six decided to altogether eliminate the public option from its proposed legislation (PDF).
All that's left of health care reform is a collection of piece-of-shit, weakling proposals that are preposterously expensive and contain almost nothing meaningful — and that set of proposals, meanwhile, is being negotiated down even further by the endlessly negating Group of Six. It is a fight to the finish now between Really Bad and Even Worse. And it's virtually guaranteed to sour the public on reform efforts for years to come. [...]
It's a joke, the whole thing, a parody of Solomonic governance. By the time all the various bills are combined, health care will be a baby not split in half but in fourths and eighths and fractions of eighths.
Illustration: Rolling Stone
6 comments: