Health insurance and cost cutting

Hi Gary,

What is most likely arise at the present out of the health care bill is a cost cutting measure that will cut medicare "overpayments" to hospitals. The public hospitals in turn will have less in the way of funds to treat people without health insurance in emergency rooms, compounding a bad situation for public hospitals around the country. People do have a good reason to fear these cost cutting measures. National Health Insurance has been an illusion that the Democratic Party has tried to sell its "voter base" in every election for decades now. Any scheme for insuring the uninsured will likely take the form of a coercive scheme to force the uninsured to buy discount health insurance, as exists in Massachusetts.

The Obama administration, could easily sign an executive order mandating the expansion of the existing Medicare program into a national health insurance program for everyone, not simply the bureaucrats in the government, the armed forces and the elderly as the current Medicare plan in the US is, for the most part, set up. For the capitalists health care "reform" can only be a cost cutting measure.

With China warning the US to stop printing money or it will sell off its treasury bills, more ominous troubles are appearing on the horizon. With jobless reports showing no tangible let up in layoffs and unemployment benefits lasting at the most for twenty seven weeks. With food stamp use at an all time high, the average stipends being approximately $83 to $133 dollars per person. Cuts to the programs and changes to the way they are administered have resulted in UI and Food Stamps having a backlog of claimants that aren't getting served. Since there is technology now employed in these programs that largely eliminating the need for human beings to answer claimants questions, there us usually no recourse in obtaining benefits than to wait for benefits you might never receive. The recovery as it was being called last week has now been shaken with the weeks news that the rate of new unemployment claims has increased by another 15,000.

I would say so much that it wasn't creativity or technological innovation that was repressed in the former USSR, but rather it was the working class that was repressed and the very crisis caused the Soviet Union to fall apart is the same thing that is now plaguing the world economy and has been plaguing it since the Nixon administration was compelled to end the Bretton Woods accords and unhinge the dollar from any remaining link to gold, thus floating the value of the currency to the advantage of US capitalism alone. Rounds of state bankruptcies, cuts and layoffs are likely to continue for the rest of this year and next. By the end of this year it has been said that half of all the country's mortgages held could be "underwater". As the prices of homes are still falling the numbers of bad mortgages are bound to keep increasing. It isn't even certain just how much on the capitalists balance books is toxic debt and what isn't, given the creative accounting, the massive injection of treasury funds into the system, the fluid economic situation, the capitalists themselves cannot know just how much debt is so-called toxic debt. The reduction in workers living standards is meant to be permanent. The anger on the right-wing has a social basis that goes deeper than just hysterical reactionary politics. For a badly confused and depoliticized mass to react to the current crisis, they then predictably do so in a reactionary fashion. The "teabag" protests are a reaction to the fact that the Obama administration handed the keys of the treasury over to Wall Street. It is easy to manipulate such sentiments. It isn't just the rightist reactionaries that are angry, as Obama has abandoned almost everything he said he would do. Guantanamo is set to be shut down but the prisoners will be sent to a new prison, possibly in Michigan. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will only continue. It was only last October that Obama was promising universal health care in his speeches.

It is Democratic Party itself that has defeated the health insurance proposal, cleverly creating a cost cutting measure and giving it a public "option", then dropping the public option as fast as you can say EFCA (the "Employee Free Choice Act" touted by the unions as their salvation-quietly killed off by the Obama administration).

Revolutionaries need to start arguing, not simply for a break with the two-party system but the overthrow of the capitalist system that created it. There is more than enough anger among the general population currently for a major social explosion, but there is an enormous legacy of passivity, propaganda to be overcome. Workers should seize the democracy for themselves while giving the capitalist class nothing less than a dictatorship.

Internationalist Greetings