Health Care Reform: A Well-Documented, Fully Acknowledged Corporate Sellout

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There are many legitimate diverging opinions about the quality of the new health care reform law, what shouldn’t be in dispute is the well-documented fact that it was a corporate sellout, or at least contained several large very specific sellouts to large corporate interests. Yet David Leonhardt, who must have been hiding under a rock during the entire debate, put it “on the list of blind spots for the noneconomist left”

Last year’s health reform bill was a sellout to the insurance companies. (Or alternatively, real health reform requires a “public option.”)

I didn’t come to the vague conclusion that the law was like a “corporate sellout” simply because it failed to implement many of the needed cost controls that would reduce profits for some health care corporations. I know for a fact that it was an actual corporate sellout because the Obama administration quite literally sold away provisions in exchange for money in the form of direct financial assistance with public relations campaigns.

The fact that the Obama administration sold out reform in deals with different health care industries, like the drug companies and the hospitals, was widely reported. Senators even publicly admitted in the Senate hearings themselves that provisions were sold in exchange for campaign money.

People can argue that these corporate sellouts were acceptable, necessary evils required to pass something, but no one can deny the fact that they happened.

Given the widely reported facts, to not believe that the health care reform law (lacking a public option, providing massive subsidies for private insurance companies, and forcing people to be their customers) dramatically resembled the health insurance companies’ reform proposal would require one to actively engage in willful ignorance.