Republicans and Health Care

Reporting from Washington, Stephanie Kirchgaessner has published a useful, if disquieting, analysis of Republican efforts to “frustrate” the health care reform efforts motivated by the Obama Administration.  Basically, there are any number of ways to sabotage the achievements that are now on the books as legislation, the most important probably being the appropriation of funding.  This raises the usual cui bono question:  Who would be the real beneficiaries of such promised undermining?

On the one hand one might say that the Republicans represent a constituency that believes that the Federal government is not responsible for fundamental provisions of the welfare of the American public.  However, one wonders just how valid that premise is when even the most enthusiastic Tea Party supporters are asked if they would be willing to give up Social Security.  No, the real beneficiaries are not the general American public, regardless of their demographic sector.  The real beneficiaries are, simply enough, those who oppose reform because it is not in their interests to see any change whatsoever.  I speak of these as if they were people;  but they are actually individuals with a strong personal stake in specific institutions, those being the many institutions responsible for the United States having the most expensive health care system in the world.  Thus, when we read some of the follow-the-money analyses of Tea Party support, we gain a better understanding of what is actually happening, which is a full-court press from those who have flourished from transmogrifying health care from a service to an industry to maintain that profit-driven industrial status.  This effort is so effective that most voters who profess to support the Tea Party fail to recognize the extent to which the abuses of big business vastly outweigh the sorry state of our government, to the point where those businesses may be seen to be directly responsible for that sorry state.  So what will all those businesses do when their customers die off due to a health care system too enfeebled to keep them alive?