Zack Exley

Should I post this?: One Reason I Will Have Trouble Voting for the Dems in 2010 17 March, 2010

Should I post this on HuffPo? I got a little worked up…so I thought I’d ask your opinion first.

One Reason I Will Have Trouble Voting for the Dems in 2010

Tonight, when I read Representative John Larson’s “Top Ten Immediate Benefits You’ll Get When Health Care Reform Passes“, the first thing that came into my mind was the memory of a Pennsylvania worker named James who once told me how he traded his $30/hour job at Bethlehem Steel for a nearly minimum wage job in a nursing home.

In the 1980′s, a company called USX bought up most of the American steel industry with the intention of milking it for cash while gradually dismantling it. Step One was busting the union. The company proposed a deep pay cut in contract negotiations. It cited low wages in the rising Korean Steel industry. At the time, the Korean government was investing billions of dollars to develop steel as a national champion. Today Korean steelworkers make up a big chunk of the high-income Korean middle class. But I digress.

Humiliated, James and his fellow workers voted to accept the pay cut. USX then made it clear that their intention was to provoke the workers to strike, no matter what it took. It immediately came back with a new demand for an even deeper pay cut.

James told me, “Some of the union leaders told us we should accept what they offered — that a $15/hour job was a hell of a lot better than a $5/hour job.” This time, though, he and most of his co-workers voted against the second cut.

“You have to be able to look yourself in the mirror,” he said, “I wasn’t going to be able to do that if I had said, ‘yeah, go ahead, take away everything, I don’t mind.’ Sometimes it gets to a point when you have to say go f–k yourself. Because they’re going to take what they want with or without your consent. They’re only asking your consent because they don’t want to think of you as a human being any more. Only animals walk themselves willingly to the slaughterhouse.”

John Larson’s top “immediate benefit” is: “Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans.”

Do I have to spell out what that means? As it stands in the apparent bill they’re going to vote on, the Democrats are not willing to protect all Americans from the “pre-existing condition” scam — but are attempting to win our consent by dangling a promise to cover our children. My best friend in high school lived below the poverty line — something we never talked about until recently. He told me about the terror he felt when his mother could not go to the doctor, and the shame that he felt when she was able to take him thanks to a program that covered children only.

The Dems say we should trust that adults too will be protected, according the current bill, starting in 2014. Why the wait? It is simply a concession to insurance companies who will reap at least an additional few years of super profits and at most get the new rules repealed. Meanwhile, I have several friends with “pre-existing conditions” who are in trouble right now. Larson’s second “immediate benefit” is that they will be put in a “temporary high risk pool”. Will that pool be subsidized? How much will my friends have to pay? What if they can’t afford it?

What can possibly explain why the Democrats would write the bill to protect only children from the pre-existing condition scam and not everyone? Don’t be distracted by talk of campaign contributions or “pressure” from lobbyists. Donations from one industry are not going to make the difference to any candidates. Moreover, any candidate who stood up to insurance lobbyists would find the lost contributions more than replaced by rewards from the grassroots. And finally, you dumbasses, the health care donors are simply going to give you MORE money if you vote against them in hopes of winning you over the next time.

The hard truth is that the Democrats, as a body, don’t care if you have health care. They are just as much on the side of the insurance companies as James’ sold-out union was on the side of USX.

Over decades, insurance companies have worked together with corrupt and careless politicians to make super profits while bleeding America of nearly one fifth of our total economic product. It would be wrong to blame the insurance companies for this — because, after all, their purpose is to maximize profit. Politicians — both Democratic and Republican — wrote the regulations that give a handful of companies an oligopoly and prevents a normal competitive market from developing. Single payer or Medicare For All would be great — but baring that, I’d settle for a normal insurance market over this Soviet-style oligopolistic bureaucracy that stands between us and our doctors today. Instead, what we have is a cancer that’s devouring the whole American economy.

Just ask yourself why the price of computers falls by half every few years and the price of health insurance doubles every few years? In the information age, you’re telling me that there’s no way to arrange for the sharing of health care costs that more efficient than how our health insurance dinosaurs do it now?

That’s not it. We’re simply being taken advantage of. And our elected representatives are the ones handing us over for the slaughter. And now, the 2010 elections are coming up. And the Democrats are going to be asking us to vote for them again. I’m not voting for the bastards. I’m going to do what James did. I’m going to tell them to go to hell. And don’t say to me it’s because I’m covered. I’m right in the middle of worrying about health insurance coverage for my family. Last year we had to pay Cobra because we had the “pre-existing condition” of a pregnancy. And now I’ve got a baby girl to worry about who may go un-covered for a couple months now that our Cobra is running out.

What the Democrats are doing is wrong. It’s not a “compromise” with anyone but the American people. It’s a defense of the Insurance industry — an industry in which a number of the execs are actually embarrassed about how lavishly they’ve been protected at the expense of the American people. Of course they have an army of lobbyists. It is their job to lobby for rules that benefit them. And it is the peoples’ representatives to say, “Sorry, no.”

And it is the American people’s job to say, “Sorry, No” to any political party who asks us to casts votes in favor of our own demise.