Health care reform? You mean the Massachusetts plan for everyone? Great. We can do without that shit.
These revelations do shed light on why Daschle declared single-payer to be off the table, though. He was raking it in from the inscos!
[WS:] No, this was just campaign talk, I think, playing it safely if you will. I think that a lot of people in this country want a genuine health care reform - not a largesse for parasitic insurance companies, and O was trying to capture that crowd but playing it safely and not exposing himself to the Repug attack dogs - hence the Mass plan.
I think many people in this country would like to see a single payer system - not just grunts like us, but corporate execs who would love to shift health care cost on the public sector and stay more "competitive" especially now when the economy is tanking. If that is any indication, I recently red an issue of the Johns Hopkins magazine that for all practical purposes endorsed a single player plan, albeit very cautiously, claiming it is not panacea for exorbitant health care cost (other contributors being environmental factors.)
But I also think that the main impediment to such a reform is not the corporate establishment that has to pay the price of that high health cost, but the bipartisan political establishment that sits in the pockets of insurance companies and big pharma. I am not sure what O's true sentiments on this issues are, but but it looks like Dem establishment will not let him do anything radical.
Wojtek