Health reform

Health reform, as I am reading it, consolidates the political power of the for-profit health industry by forcing everyone to buy their product, designed as it is for the purposes of profit, not care. So there is a real problem with the product, which always wants to cut corners on people's needs in order to direct resources away from care.

The legislation we are looking at does nothing to address this fundamentally, so we are still faced with an extremely expensive system that will surely dedicate its new, nationally mandated revenue stream toward fighting whatever proponents think is "the next step" on the path of reform, having achieved their "foothold." The government will now guarantee the market of the very lobby which obstructs meaningful health care reform; it is hard to see this as a stepping stone to anything but a much bigger fight.

From the perspective of the most vulnerable, the uninsured, there is a moral imperative to getting people on some kind of insurance, one way or the other. But that hardly makes one excited to see women's rights and other serious political considerations go right out the window.