Democrat Howard Dean Says Health Care Bill is a Gift to Insurance Companies
By Barbara Lock, MDDecember 21, 2009
Howard Dean, the progressive physician-politician who ran to be the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, has been speaking out against the Senate health care bill.
On December 17, he said "...[The senators] get so invested in this bill, what they want is just anything to bring a bill home. And at the end of the day they craft the bill in order to get votes instead of in order to do the right policy. And there's a line, and if you go over the line you're going to do more harm than good, just to get a bill....In the last week, anybody will do anything to get this bill out...and if you start making concessions just to get votes from people who really don't have the best interest of ordinary people at heart, i.e. who care about the insurance companies, then you put this company on a trajectory which is a disaster."
On December 20, Dean said in another interview: "There is going to be insurance that is unaffordable....Here's the major problem: we have committed in this last week of unseemly scrambling for votes to go down a path in this country where private insurance will be the way that we acheive universal healthcare. That means we're going to have a 30 year battle with the insurance industry every time when we try to control costs....It is not a coincidence that insurance company stocks...hit a 52-year high on Friday. They must know something that the rest of us don't."
Blogger P.M. Carpenter found himself agreeing with Dr. Dean over similar comments made on Meet the Press, but also disgusted that he never once gave an example of how the bill should be improved in a way that was politically feasible.
Many congressional Democrats are angry that Dr. Dean has not stood behind bill after the provisions for a public option and Medicare extension were removed. Canadian columnist Hassan Arif agrees that the bill is a sellout to insurance companies.
He writes: "The Senate bill would undermine state regulations and actually make health care more expensive in jurisdictions, such as [Howard Dean's] home state of Vermont, which have strict limits on the health insurance industry in terms of costs charged to patients and coverage. Furthermore, Americans will be forced to buy health insurance from private companies that give 30 percent of their revenues to CEO salaries. This is not freedom of choice."
Rich Lowry of the National Review writes "The death of the public option left the individual mandate exposed. Disappointed liberals now confront in the cold light of day a provision that will, by force of law, make people hand over money -- and a lot of it, as a percentage of their total income -- to the insurance companies. Should they fail to do so, they face fines that could total billions of dollars a year, or even jail time."
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