We won!
When President Barack Obama signs the health care reconciliation bill on Tuesday, we can crow about a robust public option – en route perhaps to a more inclusive, cost-effective single-payer system. Soon, private profiteers (and subsidies to them) will be sidelined, and the government will save taxpayers billions by providing service directly to Americans in need.
I’m not hallucinating. We should savor this victory.
Unfortunately, it’s not a health care victory.
Attached to the health care reconciliation bill is an unrelated college loan measure that goes in the opposite direction of health care reform. The loan measure sidelines private profiteers – the banks – and saves taxpayers money by making the government something of a “single-payer” which will soon be directly issuing most college loans in our country.
Direct lending by the government will cut out the middleman and save taxpayers, according to the Congressional Budget Office, $61 BILLION OVER 10 YEARS – with $40 billion in savings being redirected to higher education in the form of more Pell grants, more aid to minority-serving colleges and more aid to lower-income graduates for paying off their student debt.
What a concept!
Instead of moving to subsidize a bulky private industry and its waste, profits and exorbitant executive pay (as the new health bill does by mandating that millions become new customers of corporate insurers), the college loan reform reduces bureaucracy, profit and streamlines the system.
Yes, the right-wing in Congress yelled “government takeover.”
And, yes, corporate lobbyists put up A FIERCE FIGHT to stop this common sense approach that ends years of wasteful subsidies to private banks.
But Democrats in Congress stood up to them – passing a measure in the public interest that can easily be explained and justified to the public.
It’s a far cry from the backroom deal-making Obama and top Democrats engaged in with lobbyists as health care reform got watered down, as even a weak public option got jettisoned and as private insurers and big pharma deepened their control over the system.
I want to be happy at a time like this. I keep hearing everyone from liberals to mainstream media to right-wingers hailing this health care bill as a world-historical event. Sort of like the first man walking on the Moon.
To the skeptic in me, it’s more like “one small step for humankind, one giant leap for private insurance firms.”
But, today, it’s great to be able to crow about some good news – college loans – where Congress put the needs of the public and students and families above the needs of private interests.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
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