Niagara At Large

By Doug Draper

Whatever happened to the ‘audacity of hope’?

Less than a year after his inauguration as president of the United States, the person who turned those words into a rallying cry is already dashing hope that his country will ever establish an affordable, universal health care system for its people, and millions of Americans and possibly even Canadians are the losers.

As of this posting, it’s beginning to look like nothing short of Christmas season miracle will keep U.S. President Barack Obama’s promise of fair and affordable health care for all American citizens from turning into another windfall for private health insurance companies through a health-care bill that will make in mandatory for millions of uninsured Americans to buy insurance from them.

And how much longer will it be before Canadians have no choice but to purchase health care insurance from these private corporations too?

Thanks to the lobbying power of the private insurance industries, the option of a “public option” or a not-for profit, government-paid insurance plan that might have forced private insurers to bring the price of their policies down, has been purged from the legislation Obama may soon sign. And even the recent idea of expanding the Medicare coverage available to seniors in America to uninsured people as young as 55 has been wheeled off to the morgue.

What appears to be left of Obama’s once-vaunted health care reform is a complex and confusing web of rules and regulations that journalists I’ve been listening to and reading in the U.S. media, including some of the best at the Washington Post and New York Times, are still struggling to understand, but that U.S. congressional leaders claim should control the soaring cost of health insurance for American citizens.

There are provisions in the legislation, so we are told, for preventing private insurers from denying coverage to people with so-called “pre-existing conditions,” which could include anything from being overweight to having a slight case of asthma, being on medication for high-blood pressure or just being older. But there is also reportedly wording in the fine-print that allows insurers to charge rates two or three times higher to people who are older or have pre-existing conditions, which might just be enough to price them out of the market for insurance and achieve the same objective of denying them coverage in the first place.

All of this appears to add up to a great victory for private health insurers over a president who was swept into office as an agent of change with a Congress and Senate dominated for the first time in many years by members of his own.

This Democratic majority promised to give Obama the kind of support few other presidents have had in recent times to defy the special interests groups and do a few things that have nothing but the best interests of ordinary citizens in mind. But it has proven to be little more than a house of cards in the hands of a powerful health industry lobby.

So much for “government for the people.”

The demise of Obama’s promise of accessible, quality health care for all Americans is akin to an early Christmas gift for insurers and other members op private health care industry and it can only embolden them in their future endeavors.

Among those endeavors is the industry’s determination to slowly but surely establish itself as an alternative to publicly funded health care services in Canada. And as governments in our country choose to view access to publicly funded health care as more of a cost burden than a right it should be protecting for all of their citizens, growing numbers of private health care companies specializing in clinics, home care and other services, are supplanting public services.

Unfortunately for Canadians, there is little evidence are governments have the will or courage to do what needs to be done to make our publicly funded health care system more sustainable. It’s been easier to let the private interests take over. Had Obama and his Democrats had the will and courage to stand up to the private health industry in their country – had they, for example, started with a plan advocated by the late U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and said they were going to extend government-funded Medicare to everyone, and to hell with the private insurance companies, they may have ended up with legislation that at least still contained a public option.

But short of killing the legislation and starting again, as former U.S. presidential candidate Howard Dean recently suggested, it looks like its bombs away from the private health care industry on both sides of the border.

Indeed, here in Canada where, right now, they have a federal government that believes in letting the free market reign, the world is their oyster. So enjoy what’s left of any publicly funded health care services while you can. The writing for publicly funded health care, I’m afraid, is in the sky.