Paid-off "representatives" who block medicare for all ARE Corporate whores

[RiverLover]

Why Congress Did Not Enact Health Care Reform

By Vicente Navarro, Johns Hopkins University
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Summer 1995

Many explanations are given for the failure of the 103rd Congress to enact health care reform. The most frequent explanation in the mainstream media and academic press is that people were not ready and were confused. Congress, it is said, merely reflects the voice of the people because the U.S. political system represents the population. Thus the roots of health care reform’s failure can be found in people’s ambivalence: They wanted health care reform but were not quite ready; they were confused or misinformed.

I believe this view is wrong. The American public certainly has a voice in its political system, but it is not one of the most important voices that shape the federal government’s decisions, including those about federal health policies. Most people agree with this perception. Seventy-four percent believe that the U.S. Congress does not represent their interests but rather the interests of what they call the “rich,” the popular term for the corporate and upper middle classes.1 And much evidence supports the accuracy of this perception. The gap between what people want from their government and what they get is substantial and growing, which may explain citizens’ increasing anger with the political establishment. Since 1954, whenever polled on whether they favor a universal health care program, large pluralities or majorities have supported it.2

Even during the 1980s and early 1990s, when concepts such as the “greed” of the privileged few and austerity for the many were supposed to be fashionable, most Americans supported a government-run national health care program (Shapiro and Young 1986).3

Yet Congress has failed time after time to enact such a program.

Another proposed explanation for Congress’ failure to pass health care reform is that government experts have not yet got it right. In this scenario, professionals and experts are primarily responsible for establishing public policies and convincing key political actors of the merits of various proposals. But this scenario is clearly insufficient to foster an understanding of the failure of health care reform. It ignores the sociopolitical context in which these “experts” operate and the interests with which they are identified or represent. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Health Care Task Force, for example, was not merely a group of experts. Its key members were persons identified, for the most part, with some of the primary forces (including the insurance industry) responsible for the current predicament of the U.S. health care system. I offer just one example: The chairman of the Governance Committee, a critical committee of the task force, was for many years a high-ranking official of the Health Insurance Association of America. The task force was a predominantly white, male, upper middle class group in which the interests of insurance companies (large and small) and other components of the medical industrial complex were well represented. Obviously, these persons were not on the task force as “representatives” of these groups, but their positions were, for the most part, the same as those of the industries in which they worked and with which they were identified. Others who had no professional association with these interest groups accepted the theoretical framework dictated to them by their spokespersons — the Jackson Hole Group. Indeed, the primary objective of the task force initially was to achieve a synthesis of the major interests at work in the health care sector, to develop a blueprint — managed competition — that could be approved by the major players in this sector.

Similarly, the members and staff of key committees of the House and Senate that craft health care-related legislation have long-standing relationships with these health sector interests. The list of recipients of donations from insurance and professional groups reads like a Who’s Who of federal health policy circles (Kemper and Novak 1992). Of course, part of the official discourse is that such intercourse between politicians and lobbyists does not influence policy makers. None other than Congressman Thomas Foley, then Speaker of the House (and himself a recipient of health care industry funds), has denied the existence of such influence. Empirical evidence shows, however, that lobbyists and their financial contributions do influence the behavior of congressional recipients (New York Times 1994). Common Cause has also documented how most Washington lobbyists for the medical industrial complex previously worked within the U.S. Congress, with which they retain close ties (Kemper and Novak 1992).

This link between the medical industrial complex and the legislative and executive branches of government offers better grounds for understanding the failure of health care reform than does simply examining what the “experts” recommended. Who those experts represent is far more important. The relationship between the components of the medical industrial complex, the large and small insurance lobbies, the large and small employer associations, the representatives of professional associations, and other interest groups, on the one hand, and the U.S. government, both the executive and legislative branches, on the other is crucial to our understanding of that failure. Many authors writing in the “interest group” theoretical tradition have provided useful information on the key relationship between the medical industrial complex and political power (Marmor 1994). Yet this approach, however helpful, is insufficient to explain why health care reform failed. We cannot understand the behavior of U.S. political institutions by focusing only on the interplay of groups and actors while failing to analyze the social, political, and economic contexts in which these political institutions and interest groups operate. In other words, we cannot understand the nature of the tree — the existence or absence of health care reform — without understanding the forest — the structure of power in the United States and how these power relations are reproduced through the state.

In the United States, power is distributed according to race, sex, and, most importantly, class. Alain Enthoven, the principal theoretician of managed competition, the dominant framework in the health care debate, recognized as much when he wrote “The U.S. political system is incapable of forcing change in such power institutions as the insurance industry, the hospital industry, organized medicine, the medical devices industry and the pharmaceutical industry” (Marmor 1994). What these components of the corporate and upper middle classes have in common with the other components, the large and small employers, is not only their composition of race and sex but, most importantly, their class composition: corporate class for large employers, large and small insurers, and the medical industries, and upper middle class for small employers and professionals. Conventional wisdom now dictates that the single-payer proposal, the only proposal that clearly threatened that class dominance, was politically unfeasible because it was unacceptable to those classes.

.........

http://www.pnhp.org/news/1995/august/why-congress-did-not-enact-health-care-reform

And this was 20 years ago!

NOTHING has changed, but corporate interests are even more entrenched.


Our reps are corporate whores because they're paid by Moneyed Interests to work for them, not US.

NO ONE called anyone a run of the mill whore. Though Bill definitely fits that description, he isn't the one running.

[JoePhilly]

1. Bernie should start using that term.

He'd win in a landslide!!!!!

[My Good Babushka]

2. 45000 Americans die prematurely from lack of adequate health care

but this word gets them all really steamed.

[RiverLover]

3. Boom!

That sure puts it in perspective.

[bigtree]

4. Paul Song, the idiot who called Dems corporate whores is a BIG PHARMA LOBBYIST

...OUCH.


Dr. Song is a Senior Adviser at Berg Pharma, where he previously served as its Chief Medical Officer for the company’s first four years.
http://www.naisaglobal.org/team/paul-y-song/


Backed By a Billionaire, Berg Pharma Aims to Speed Drugmaking

...Berg has yet to prove that its approach can produce an effective drug. Its most advanced prospect, an experimental cancer drug called BPM31510, is only in early studies. It has cut a few research deals with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Parkinson’s Institute Clinical Center, all of which are enabling those organizations to tap into its discovery platform to help find disease biomarkers, diagnostic tools, and drugs. But the company doesn’t have the big industry partnership that startup biotechs crave for validation. And many industry observers are taking a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude.

Eric Schadt, one of the leaders in the genomics field, the director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York—and an advisor to Berg—put it this way:

“I think many of us share that kind of healthy skepticism about how far they’re going to be able to take this, but of course I am a fan because of my own work trying to solve the same thing. That’s why I joined the [scientific advisory board]— I wanted that data. I wanted to be able to see how far we could go with that data,” says Schadt, an Xconomist. “On one hand, there’s lots of literature to support for the approach they’re taking on the integration of the data, the building of the models. But what there isn’t any publication on, is that the predictions made, the therapeutics made, actually achieve clinical efficacy in a human population—and, of course, that’s the money shot.”

One biotech venture capitalist I spoke with did, indeed, share that skepticism. To be clear, while the VC has plenty of experience in drug discovery, the person chose not to be identified for this story due to a lack of deep, detailed knowledge of Berg’s technology. After delving into the company’s approach, the VC says while it’s “totally reasonable…any claim that it is either totally novel or will single-handedly revolutionize discovery is fluff.”

http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/04/02/backed-by-a-billionaire-berg-pharma-aims-to-speed-drugmaking/