My latest reading of Arianna Huffington's Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream was rather discouraging, for it concerned the influence of special interests on the government.
According
to Arianna, while the media may portray debates over legislation as
dramatic conflicts over the public good, the sad fact is that, if
legislation made it far enough to be debated, the lobbyists had their
hands in it beforehand, making sure that there were enough loopholes for
them to get by with what they do. Moreover, Arianna discusses
how the monetary penalties on unsafe mines and on certain polluters are
far from tough, for they are not much money, in light of what the mines
and the polluters make. The problem, for Arianna, is not that
there aren't enough regulatory bureaucrats, but rather that the actual
oversight is not adequate. Arianna also talks about the chummy
relationship between the government and special interests, as well as
the revolving door between the government and lobbies. And, sad to say,
both Democrats and Republicans are at fault, according to Arianna.
Arianna's
discussion reminded me of something that I read not long ago. I was
watching the first Presidential debate in 1996 between Bill Clinton and
Bob Dole, and both were touting the Kennedy-Kassebaum law as a
significant step in reforming health care. The law essentially allowed
people to keep their health insurance if they lost or changed jobs, and
it also addressed the issue of pre-existing conditions. I wondered what
happened to Kennedy-Kassebaum, for people still lose their health
insurance when they lose or change their jobs, and how insurance
companies treat people with pre-existing conditions was an issue even
after Kennedy-Kassebaum. According to Mike Lux's post on
OpenLeft, the law had loopholes. Lux argues that, if the health
insurance industry accepts a certain law, then that's a fairly reliable
indication that the law will not bring about reform. True reform would
make the insurance companies kick and scream!
So is
there any hope? Some would say that we should not expect much out of
this carnal political system but should wait for Jesus to come back and
set things right. But there are countries with health care systems that
work, systems that are (in my opinion) more humanitarian that what the
U.S. has. Could we move towards their kind of system? I don't know.
The special interests are strong in the United States. Moreover, some
of these other countries got the system that they have now by
necessity----Howard Dean says that Great Britain, for example, decided
to have government-funded health care in the aftermath of World War II,
as people needed to be treated, and it stuck with that system ever
since. We don't have that history, however. Rather, in our history,
Harry Truman proposed national health insurance, and it was killed. But
there have been some glimmers of hope, such as Medicare, which emerged
because private health insurance companies were not sufficiently taking
care of the elderly (see here).