Trumpcare has long been with us

Watching CNN’S New Day health care exchange Tuesday morning I was ready to explode after Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo traded words. Cuomo pointed out that many Republicans now favor simply doing nothing on health care until Obamacare falls apart, with, perhaps, a push from the president. He then remarked that a great many people would suffer.

Camerota interjected that this was okay, it would show that Obamacare was a failure. Cuomo again tried to explain to her that allowing the medical care system to go under would mean a great many people would suffer terribly.

Camerota’s eyes lit up and a cruel grin spread over her face as she again pointed out that it wasn’t a bad thing, the Republicans were going to win this way by proving that Obamacare was a failure.

TV news is not about what is in the best interest of the American people, and Alisyn Camerota knows this, from all of her years fronting for the ruling class at FOX and CNN. It is about what’s in the best interest of that which Daddy Bush used to call the “investment class,” and their two subservient political parties whose candidates kiss butt for the campaign contributions flipped at them like dog treats.

What’s important in the health care debate, therefore, is who wins, the Democrats or the Republicans. The American people have never participated, other than to pay taxes and vote in the rigged elections. The investment class does not pay taxes, their job is to take the taxes and use them to their advantage, sprinkling a bit of it back into campaign bribes to ensure that democracy has absolutely no chance to emerge from the slime.

Later in the day on CNN, microphones were placed before libertarian Senator Rand Paul, who is always good for propaganda supporting the super rich and their transnational corporations. When asked about the failing Republican health care plan, Paul responded that 27 million Americans do not have health care under Obamacare because Obamacare makes health insurance too expensive.

Not one of the butt kissing “journalists” at CNN pointed out that there were even more Americans without health insurance before Obamacare, some 47 million, so Paul’s sacred “free market” did not work.

A mainstream media that care so much about the contest between Republicans and Democrats never allow facts to get through that would show that the problem is we do not have a health care system–we have an insurance system whose priorities are to make the wealthy wealthier, with billions in “health care” profits going to the super rich, and 7-figure salaries going to executives of “health care” companies, including Big Pharma, private hospitals and insurance companies, as thousands die each year for a lack of health care.

For example, although corporate media will allow anyone access to their microphones to criticize the bureaucracy of socialism, they do not allow that billions of dollars are spent in the Land of the Free on paperwork in the most bureaucratic health care system on earth. This is primarily to document the collecting of money from those unfortunate enough to be sick or injured. My friend Malcolm, who is a medical doctor practicing in Virginia, told me he had absolutely no paperwork when he practiced medicine in Scotland under what corporate media would call “socialized medicine.”

Nor are guests on corporate media programs allowed to point out that the difference between Free Market Care and Obamacare may be that more people are insured, but not necessarily receiving medical care. The bottom tier insurance plans require so much in co-pays and deductibles that users, often the working poor, cannot afford to use the plan. They only have the plans because Obamacare forces them to either buy the plan or be fined.

Obamacare is a slight improvement over Free Market Care, and helps many, but it does not help most Americans. Democrats once opposed such a system. When Nixon was president, I recall his proposing a similar system and the Democrat-controlled Congress rejected it. Later the conservative Heritage Foundation updated Nixoncare and Governor Mitt Romney implemented it in Massachusetts.

When running against Romney for president, Obama responded to Romney’s attacks on Obamacare by saying it was basically a knock-off of Romney’s plan.

So we are left with a Republican plan implemented by President Obama and put forth by our corporate media as the only legitimate plan other than no plan at all, which is pretty much what congressional Republicans are proposing (they like to say it is “free market”).

And those paying attention will notice Alisyn Camerota cheerleads on the sidelines of a game being played between Democrats and Republicans to see who’s best at faking health care. She would probably tell you that she is a journalist and that what she is doing is somehow related to news.

What she will never tell CNN viewers is that Trumpcare proposed by Congress in its various forms is nothing more than a disguised free market system with health care going to the highest bidders, like Obamacare, Romneycare, or Nixoncare. The rest of the industrialized world long ago realized that single payer is much cheaper, provides much better care, and fixes the human rights horror that is American health care.

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.