Joe Biden proper now could be attempting to denationalise the Democratic-Party-created Medicare system, with the intention to full the privatization plan that was began by the Republican George W. Bush, and that was then additional superior by the Democrat Barack Obama, after which by the Republican Donald Trump, with the intention of all of them being to switch the extremely environment friendly socialized (i.s., government-administered) Democratic-Party-produced, unitary Medicare system, by way of a number of competing corporate-administered profit-motivated insurance coverage corporations and sickness-care-providing organizations, in order that right now’s Democratic Party will be capable of entice sufficient donations from the billionaires who management these personal firms, to ensure that Democratic Party candidates to beat Republican Party candidates in future elections. Getting funds from Wall Street, legal professionals, and high-tech, isn’t sufficient.
On January sixteenth, the Corporate Crime Reporter (Russel Mokhiber, at russellmokhiber@gmail.com) bannered “Elizabeth Fowler Defending Trump Program to Privatize Medicare”, and he opened:
Put apart Democrat versus Republican.
Let’s simply have a look at firms versus folks.
Elizabeth (Liz) Fowler has a stellar company resume.
For seven years, she labored at Johnson & Johnson, as vice chairman for world well being coverage.
Before becoming a member of Johnson & Johnson, she was chief well being counsel to Senate Finance Committee chair [conservative Democrat] Max Baucus, who banned single payer advocates from the deliberations that led to the insurance coverage firm dominated Affordable Care Act. [That’s why Obama chose him to produce his Obamacare.]
In her off time, Fowler is a runner.
She runs marathons and triathlons around the globe.
During work hours, she carries the torch for the medical health insurance business and massive pharmaceutical corporations.
And it doesn’t matter whether or not she is within the public or personal sector.
It’s the identical purpose – privatize public well being packages.
She presently sits within the public sector, working for President Biden as head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
During her first yr in workplace, she has been very lively, making public appearances on company sponsored podcasts, continuously pushing the company privatization agenda.
She even met with a gaggle of single payer docs final month throughout a Zoom name to defend her Medicare privatization insurance policies.
The docs had been alarmed by a program instituted throughout the earlier Trump administration known as Direct Contracting Entities (DCEs).
DCEs are entities arrange by personal fairness corporations and others to enroll conventional Medicare sufferers with out their data into Medicare Advantage kind organizations.
The Intercept reported final month that “in January 2019, ahead of the launch of a new direct contracting model, the Office of the General Counsel for the Health and Human Services Department warned, in comments on a draft of the proposal, that it appeared as if the new project was being set up to benefit specific companies.” …
Mokhiber famous that when docs from the democratic-socialist Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), had requested probing questions at Fowler’s press convention, she refused to reply them, however stated merely that we have now to get away from the “financial incentives in the U.S. healthcare system.” Beyond that, she wouldn’t reply, aside from to say that privatization should exchange present Medicare, and that competitors (greed-motivation) should be elevated in America’s well being care, and that the present (super-inexpensive) Medicare forms must be changed by consumer-choice (in order that the shoppers, who will then have been misinformed by the competing suppliers, will select between them, and the most-ruthless of the suppliers will win probably the most enterprise). (This is an software of the thinker Herbert Spencer’s “social Darwinist” interpretation of the scientist Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution. Darwin himself by no means endorsed that interpretation of it.)
In truth, as early as 15 October 2019, The Intercept had bannered “DOCUMENTS REVEAL HOSPITAL INDUSTRY IS LEADING FIGHT AGAINST MEDICARE FOR ALL”, and reported that America’s hospital chains had created a “Dark Money” group to fund propaganda in opposition to the present socialistic U.S. Medicare; so, in America the administration of public opinion is nicely taken care of by the mega-investors. Whereas many healthcare employees favor socializing drugs as is finished in nearly all different industrialized international locations, healthcare buyers are strongly in opposition to that; and in America the buyers are in charge of the Government; employees are usually not. That’s why America has the shortest life-expectancies of any industrialized nation.
On February sixteenth, Branko Marcetic headlined “Joe Biden Is Quietly Pursuing the Creeping Privatization of Medicare”, and he reported that:
The Biden administration has quietly determined to proceed a Trump administration scheme whose final purpose is the privatization of Medicare. Americans could be outraged — if anybody knew about it.
Last November 30, a group of physicians and activists had been in Washington, DC, its federal buildings nonetheless largely closed for enterprise due to the pandemic and worry of one other Trumpist rebellion. They had been there to protest what they warned was an try to finish Medicare as we all know it.
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), the main group behind the hassle, had been attempting for a while to make its displeasure in regards to the “direct contracting” program recognized. After accumulating greater than 13 thousand signatures for a petition opposing the initiative, they’d requested repeatedly for a gathering with Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Xavier Becerra at hand it to him. They known as, emailed, left voice messages, all to no avail. The most they obtained was a single response from a staffer, despatched the evening earlier than their DC go to, promising to arrange a gathering someday sooner or later.
It’s within the works, and can nearly actually be handed by each homes of Congress and signed into legislation by President Biden (or else President Harris, or perhaps President Trump). It’s merely a matter of time now.
Currently, the EffectivelyCare govt, Fowler, represents, truly, Republican-Party billionaires. EffectivelyCare’s “Total Contributions by Party of Recipient” within the newest reported cycle, 2018 was 76.52% Republican. But Joe Biden needs these billionaires, too, to be on his aspect — not solely backing Republican candidates. Party now not makes a lot of a distinction amongst billionaires, as a result of the partisanship is more and more turning into simply us-versus-them, and “them” has more and more grow to be your entire public — all employees and all shoppers — and people (not like the megadonors) are the individuals who have to be fooled, not to learn. As America’s financial system turns into hollowed-out, its billionaires must idiot the home public much more, and to increase their overseas enterprise to make up for home declines, as wages fail to maintain up with inflation. Healthcare is a superb instance of this, as a result of ever since 2014, common lifespans (longevity) have been declining in America, regardless of America’s now spending almost 20% of GDP (by far the very best share in any nation) on healthcare. America’s misinformed shoppers are dying youthful than earlier than, and this may possible speed up if the Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden plan turns into handed into legislation, as now appears more and more possible.
Privatization of governmental companies is an concept that was began by the inventor of fascism, Benito Mussolini, within the Twenties in Italy, after which picked up by the fascist Adolf Hitler in Germany, within the Nineteen Thirties. Mussolini appropriately known as his fascism additionally by the identify of “corporationism,” as a result of fascism stems from the nation’s aristocracy and represents their firms, particularly those that increase overseas and subsequently want the home public to pay greater taxes to assist an empire’s increasing army, in order to have the ability to implement the fascist aristocracy’s will in overseas lands, and thereby to grow to be in a position to supply to conquered nations’ aristocracies “a deal they cannot refuse.” This is how an empire works. As Mussolini (the inventor of fascism) proudly stated, “Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created.” And “Private organization of production being a function of national interest, the organization of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction of its production.” Today’s bipartisan — Democratic and Republican — propagandists name it “public-private partnerships”. It’s the way in which empires are executed. The firms serve the State, and its homeowners management the State.
However, Biden is principally carrying ahead what Obama had began, and what Obama had began was carrying ahead the privatization plans that George W. Bush had began. Here’s only a little bit of the historical past of Obama’s half on this:
On 18 January 2012, Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo, headlined “Key Reform Ally Dishes on ‘Weak-Kneed’ White House Health Care Push”, and reported that in a brand new ebook, Fighting for Our Health, the reformer activist who had labored with the Obama Administration on its healthcare plan, Richard Kirsch, wrote that the rationale there was no public choice in it, was that, “The White House had negotiated a number of deals with the health industry, designed to win their support for reform, including agreeing to oppose a robust public option, which would have the greatest clout to control how much providers got paid.” (A public choice that’s managed by Medicare would additionally have lower the insurer-administrative prices to far lower than half of what profit-making insurers cost, and this far greater privatized administrative price is a significant cause why America’s healthcare per-capita prices total are greater than twice as excessive as in different industrialized international locations whereas producing healthcare in America that’s within the backside 10% of all of these international locations — America’s medical health insurance is much extra company, far much less socialized, than in any different industrialized nation.) The former JPMorgan Partners WellPoint investor Nancy-Ann DeParle, and the previous WellPoint VP Elizabeth Fowler who truly wrote Obama’s Affordable Care Act, didn’t need any public choice, as a result of WellPoint and the opposite for-profit medical health insurance corporations needed excessive income; so, Obama didn’t desire a public choice, both.
As Wikipedia merely put it of their article on Elizabeth Fowler (subsequently eliminated with the intention to assist conceal the truth of right now’s Democratic Party), she was “the WellPoint executive and lobbyist who joined Senator Max Baucus’s staff to write the Affordable Care Act, then joined the Obama Administration to oversee its implementation.” Her having been a WellPoint VP wasn’t even talked about there. (And now the article is solely gone.)
On 3 July 2011, the “PEU [Private Equity Underwriter] Report” bannered “DeParle’s CareMore Sold to WellPoint for $800 Million”, and reported that:
Ms. DeParle was in a perfect spot to select winners for JP Morgan Partners/CCMP.
That spot obtained sweeter with her White House Health Czar appointment, the place she crafted the nuts and bolts of well being reform. How did her redesign revenue her former employer? Dealbook offered perception. ‘CCMP, formerly JPMorgan Partners, acquired CareMore in 2006. The PEU is expected to earn about five times its original investment in the company, people familiar with the deal’s phrases stated.’ A 5 bagger! That’s one bag per yr of possession.” Moreover, “White Health Health Czar Nancy Ann DeParle sat on the CareMore board for nearly three years.” Coming into the Obama White House, she needed to eliminate her shares. So: “She transferred her stakes in CCP/JPMP Friends to her son, a transfer just like Rick Scott’s giving his Solantic shares to his spouse. Red and Blue love PEU’s (personal fairness underwriters).
By DeParle and Fowler maintaining the general public choice out of their Obamacare, the values of their shares soared. As for President Obama and the person whom he selected to supervise the drafting of the brand new legislation (Montana U.S. Senator Max Baucus), their funds had been to be of a less-immediate kind: lavish lifetime monetary assist, for them and their households and associates, from the aristocracy, after leaving public workplace.
In different phrases: From the get-go, Obama not solely refused to deal with Democrats in Congress, however just about all of his negotiating that produced his final Obamacare had been with the medical health insurance corporations and the drugmakers and the opposite suppliers, together with physicians’ teams. (After all: physicians had been the power behind the Republican proposals to cap medical legal responsibility, in order to permit incompetent physicians to proceed training. Republicans and Obama referred to it as “malpractice reform.” That’s Orwellian Newspeak for: let the victims endure all of the losses.)
All of Obama’s negotiations with John Boehner, the Republican congressional chief, got here after Obama had already designed his plan in order to please the medical industries.
Lawrence Summers (Obama’s financial guru) introduced in as one in all his two Deputy Directors of the National Economic Council Diana Farrell, who, like the opposite Co-Director, Jason Furman, and like Summers himself, had been a supporter of Hillary Clinton within the Democratic primaries. Farrell was the Director of the McKinsey Global Institute from 2002-2009, the place she headed an August 2003 report, “Offshoring: Is It a Win-Win Game?” which answered its query sure, as a result of she concluded that delivery American jobs abroad could be of profit to buyers in each international locations. Thus: “Offshoring is as beneficial to the US as it is to the destination country, probably more so,” particularly as a result of “Lower wages in foreign countries translate into significant savings and, often, improved quality. A software developer in the US, for example, costs $60 an hour whereas one in India only [sic] costs [should have been ‘costs only’] $6 an hour. [That was a logical error, not just a grammatical one, and she was very illogical, stupid and not just corrupt.] This and other benefits could translate to a net impact of a 50 percent increase in profits for American businesses.” She didn’t care in regards to the affect on the American working class: “While Forrester, a technology research and trend analysis firm, predicts the loss of some 3.4 million jobs to offshoring in the US by 2015, MGI’s analysis shows that the United States has much more to gain,” as a result of company income would enhance. In her value-system, buyers and their corporations’ prime executives had been primary, shoppers had been quantity two, and employees had been non-existent. She grew to become the chief individual contained in the Obama White House engaged on international-trade offers. Her scandalous file as a number one promoter of delivery American jobs abroad was not a lot as talked about, a lot much less analyzed, within the billionares-controlled U.S. press. But, mainly, she could be main the cost within the race-to-the-bottom on wages and on the setting within the U.S., for this nation to “compete” internationally, by decreasing its wages and weakening its environmental enforcement. Only the American folks could be saved in the dead of night about all this. They could be simply fodder for the worldwide aristocrats’ gristmill.
Farrell hadn’t modified in any respect after her 2003 report, both. For instance, in a 14 June 2004 Yale School of Management panel with her fellow aristocratic brokers Tom Friedman, Jeffrey Garten, and even the AFL-CIO’s Ron Blackwell because the individuals, the subject was “The Brewing Storm: Offshoring, Innovation & Social Change” (likewise faraway from the Web and by no means archived, as a result of too embarrassing looking back) and, “Farrell discussed the jobs issue, and observed that ‘as distressing as the loss of jobs is,’ it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that ‘a vibrant, dynamic economy is one that bundles activities into increasingly higher value added activities’” for the good thing about aristocrats – the homeowners and managers of firms. The AFL-CIO’s consultant didn’t object. “Blackwell echoed her sentiment, noting that ‘the world doesn’t stand still.’” So, not even the labor unions raised hell in opposition to the then-emerging Obama Administration.
Even earlier than he grew to become President, Obama employed and surrounded himself by supporters of Hillary Clinton, and added to that just a few black aristocrats resembling Valerie Jarrett and her buddy Desirée Rogers. Even earlier than he grew to become President, he dedicated himself to being a President like Hillary Clinton however with only a slight contact of Black. His incoming crew was 100% pro-aristocratic, nothing populist.
One of Obama’s purely Chicago Cabinet selections was his buddy Arne Duncan, the son of a University of Chicago psychology professor. Arne went to personal college after which Harvard, then in 2001 was appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley as CEO of Chicago’s Public Schools (regardless of by no means having attended a public college and having no background in public training), the place, within the low-income neighborhoods, he imposed Milton Friedman’s libertarian idea of privatizing the general public faculties by altering them into constitution faculties, run by for-profit firms and with pay dependent upon college students’ scores on standardized exams. He grew to become particularly recognized for pursuing a militarized mannequin of education, in order to provide graduating college students who he thought would slot in nicely in company America. On 17 December 2008, Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman headlined at truthout.org (likewise eliminated by the location as being a humiliation to the Democratic Party, and sadly not archived, however subsequently posted by its authors to Researchgate), “Obama’s Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling”. They wrote: “At the heart of this plan is a privatization scheme for creating a ‘market’ in public education by urging public schools to compete against each other for scarce resources and by introducing ‘choice’ initiatives so that parents and students will think of themselves as private consumers of educational services. … Under Duncan, Chicago took the lead in creating public schools run as military academies.” One report famous that: “He shut down dozens of neighborhood schools, practically all in lower income areas, and dismissed thousands of committed and experienced teachers, the vast majority of them African American women,” who “filed suit against the Chicago Board of Education, charging that the mass dismissals … of mostly black veteran teachers and their replacement with uncertified and generally underqualified white teachers is racially discriminatory.” They had been “replaced by a much younger, much whiter and much less experienced corps of instructors graduated from a handful of accelerated programs funded by Boeing, the Bill and Melinda Gates, Bradley [far-Right], Walton Family [far-Right], Rockefeller and other foundations, and favored by City Hall and the Commercial Club. The new teachers are paid half or less what experienced teachers with advanced degrees were making.” Those veteran lecturers had spent their careers instructing youngsters from poor and damaged households, and had been thus handled by Duncan as failures merely as a result of their college students scored much less nicely on account of their disadvantaged house backgrounds; the lecturers had been being punished as a result of their college students had been punished by circumstance of their poor births. “In school ‘turnaround’ operations, every teacher, food service worker, building engineer and custodial staff person is fired and the slate wiped clean.” This immediately added but additional to unemployment amongst Blacks. Politically linked personal contractors relaced these folks. This is what Duncan subsequently imposed underneath President Obama within the guise of the nation’s “Race for the Top,” the place it decimated training in low-income neighborhoods and failed totally, simply because it had earlier failed in Chicago when Duncan had headed the general public faculties there. Obama believed in a punitive mannequin for dealing with the poor; he was a Republican in all however identify, and he remained on this mildew though it had constantly failed. But not for the aristocrats; for them it meant but extra profit-making alternatives. For the aristocracy, their very own failures don’t matter, as a result of they don’t penalize their very own failures. (The Waltons, Gateses, Rockefellers, and now evidently Barack Obama, merely despised the poor and revered the wealthy.) Teachers at elite faculties who taught college students who had been chosen by these faculties, which might thus flip down “slow” college students, confronted no such threats of mass-firings, however lecturers in poverty-stricken neighborhoods did – these being the very lecturers who ought as a substitute to have been paid probably the most, since their jobs had been probably the most difficult of all. On 2 November 2007, the AP in Chicago had headlined “Chicago Leads in Public Military Schools”, and reported CEO Duncan saying, “These are positive learning environments. I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline.” He equated hierarchy/subordination to “leadership” and “discipline.” If Arne Duncan had been almost as strict in penalizing his personal failures as he was in penalizing the failures of people that had been born to poverty, or the individuals who taught these, he’d have dedicated suicide, as he ought to certainly have executed for his personal vileness; however as a substitute, President Obama anointed this reactionary public-policy failure Duncan to grow to be the U.S. Secretary of Education. That alone indicated Obama’s deep contempt of the poor – folks whom Obama/Duncan noticed as army fodder, extra like Spartans than like Athenians, simply as troopers for the aristocracy’s wars and company raids.
America’s incoming President Obama was overwhelmingly a person of religion (NOT science), himself. On 10 January 2009, the 2 nominal leaders of his forming Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, issued their evaluation “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” (which doc was likewise eliminated from the Web due to its embarrassment to Obama, looking back; and is sadly not at Web-archives.) and promoted in it their financial stimulus package deal, by predicting the “Unemployment Rate With and Without the Recovery Plan”: With passage of the $800 billion financial stimulus invoice, the anticipated degree of unemployment would peak at 8% in 2009 and decline again down to five% by 2013; with out passage, predicted unemployment would peak at 9.2% in 2010 and decline to five% by 2014. These predictions had been based mostly on the false financial idea that had led to the crash, and it turned out to be simply as false because the false idea that had produced them. This identical day, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman blogged on the New York Times, “Romer and Bernstein on Stimulus”, and he stated, “The estimates appear to be very close to what I’ve been getting.” Like Romer and Bernstein and the remainder of Obama’s financial crew, Krugman used the pretend ‘scientific’ idea of economics, and thus he thought that if the restoration plan could be put into place, then unemployment would peak at 8% in 2009 and be again right down to solely 5% by the top of Obama’s first time period. Of course, this expectation, from the pretend ‘scientific’ financial idea, turned out to be means off, however Obama didn’t hearth and exchange his financial advisors over that, nor did Krugman proclaim that his personal career was pretend due to its abysmal prediction-record. Corruption went proper to the highest, in each political Parties, and permeated academia too, in each Parties. Obama’s financial crew vastly underestimated the financial disaster that 8 years of George W. Bush, and that 30 years of Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Lawrence Summers economics, had truly produced in America. Obama saved the religion, though the track-records of his financial predictors had been awful (folks of religion don’t be taught from their repeatedly false predictions), and though these folks had produced the exact same issues that a few of them had been now being assigned by Obama to rectify. It was insane, however (extra deeply) it was corrupt. The incentives weren’t formed by science, however by greed.
Naturally, subsequently, unemployment underneath Obama shortly rose even greater than 9.2%, and stayed above that degree, though his financial restoration plan was, certainly, handed by Congress. The solely individuals who boomed from it had been the mega-investors. Yet, regardless of that abomination and failure in Obama’s understanding of the problem he confronted (or else due to his not even caring about something besides the backing he obtained from his megadonors), America’s liberals (who nonetheless haven’t been knowledgeable what a pretend ‘progressive’ Obama was, a lot much less what catastrophic hurt he produced) saved their religion in him. He’s nonetheless probably the most extremely esteemed individual in America. And Obama by no means misplaced his religion in these aristocratic lies, and within the economists who held them as likewise issues of religion.
So there’s no actual shock that Biden is only a much less slick model of Obama, and no shock that, for instance, Biden is pushing for much more army spending than the 98% neoconservative Congress has approved (though America already pays round 50% of your entire world’s army prices).