Taibbi On Obamacare

Matt Taibbi gets all inevitable on us with Obamacare, and not in a good way (emphasis mine):

If the Obama administration wanted to pass a real health care bill, they would do what George Bush and Tom DeLay did in the first six-odd years of this decade whenever they wanted to pass some nightmare piece of legislation (ie the Prescription Drug Bill or CAFTA): they would take the recalcitrant legislators blocking their path into a back room at the Capitol, and beat them with rubber hoses until they changed their minds.

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing.

I don't completely agree with Taibbi on this one. I honestly do think there are lawmakers who want to see this done, and I think the President wants to see this done. But they are terribly outnumbered, and Obama's not looking like he's going to fight. It's not the American people he needs to convince. The only people who get a real say in this are 435 people in Washington, and they're not listening for the most part.

But he is right about the second point there: the insurance industry is going to get their way on whatever passes, just like the banks got everything they wanted over the last 12 months. Whatever passes for Obama's energy bill will do the same for energy companies, whatever passes for Obama's education bill will do the same for the student loan industry, it just never ends.

Lobbyists own everything. They always will.