As money talks, real health care reform falters

There comes a time, as one ages, where you (meaning, me) realize how little you really know. And you (meaning, me) hear the clock ticking.

So, you read up a storm, ingest books (bless you, Albuquerque Public Library), magazines, blogs and other Web wisdom. And you take classes. Like Fred Nathan’s fascinating presentation a few days ago at OASIS, the adult education program.

Nathan is executive director of Think New Mexico, the “results-oriented think tank” that pushed our state to sever some Gordian knots by focusing public attention, banging the drums of good government and taking the Legislature in hand to enact relief.

Think New Mexico’s triumphs include full-day kindergarten, removal of most food taxes, competition in title insurance rates and more lottery dollars funneled to scholarships.

But until hearing Nathan recount a war story or two, I hadn’t realized how much he (and his board of pragmatic Democrats and Republicans) did hand-to-hand combat with lobbyists.

This reminded me that I’m reading a lot about the intricacies of national health care reform but little about the lobbying and almost nothing about the role of the mother’s milk of politics — money.

In fact, the health industry — a term that should make us tremble — maintains a permanent drip of cash at Washington bedsides. And after taking the electorate’s temperature, Big Medicine began to share its largesse with the other party before the 2006 mid-term elections, continuing through the presidential primaries last year.

“Health Sector Puts Its Money on Democrats” was the headline on an October 29, 2007 report in the New York Times.

Today, however, as committees actually write legislation, corporate medicine is allocating significant sums of fresh, new legal tender aimed primarily at killing the public option.

As reported, the American Medical Association opposes that option. If this is news, it’s the “dog-bites-man” kind, since the doctors’ union has an impeccable record of fighting efforts, including Medicare and Medicaid, to make health care accessible and affordable.

What you may not have read is how generously the AMA funds its priorities. It gave $9.8 million to congressional candidates since 2000, according to Robert Reich, the liberal economist, in a June 15 Alternet.com post.

And health industry expenditures on lobbying soared in the first quarter of this year compared to 2008. America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group for the largest private insurers, spent $6.4 million, United Health Group spent $1.5 million, Aetna spent $809,793 and Pfizer, the world’s biggest drug-maker, spent more than $6.1 million.

Killing the public option makes good business sense, of course; it protects private insurers (and Big Pharma) against price competition.

But health insurance reform isn’t just about health.

For the last 25 years, American incomes have grown so unequal they evoke the Roaring Twenties. The top 300,000 Americans enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans, per IRS data from 2006. Individually, they received 440 times as much as the average Joe in the bottom half, nearly doubling the gap back in 1980.

So making health care affordable for the great majority of Americans might just begin to redress the balance, narrow the gap, bring the class warriors perched atop the hierarchy into view from below.

Sadly, it won‘t happen, not this year.

Oh, President Obama may get a bill that tidies the mess, but nothing more. While the cliché says money “talks,” it really shouts in our democracy, buys public office, enacts laws or aborts them.

We’ll never get money out of politics, but we can turn down the volume. If and when we do, we may get real health care reform. Not before.