Wampum

Passing for the moment on the fraud the Chicago machine party elites perpetrated on the Dems, both Iowa dems caucusing and dems working the Iowa caucuses, and subsequent, when marketing their "change" candidate as a regular guy who really thought we would pass single-payer when the Dems had majorities in the House, the Senate, and controlled the Executive Branch, a condition which apparently has not yet ripened, there are the possible unintended consequences of dumping all of the progressives, some of the Party, and according to the polling data, most of the population that live on wages, not inherited wealth or unearned income, for our incorrect beliefs.

Single payer would dislocate hundreds of thousands of workers in the insurance rackets, and end dividends to hundreds of thousands of racketeering stockholders, and hundreds of heads of organized crime families would be ... without.

And the wealth of hundreds of millions of protection policies, hundreds of dollars per week paid for "protection", would be no longer seized, as a condition of employment, a "fringe benefit" created as a work-around for war-time wage and price controls. Roughly half of the cost of health care is the maintenance cost for this WW2 social gimmick, the care and feeding of a class of "service providers", where the fundamental service is a "fringe benefit" that doesn't breech no longer extant wartime wage caps. From the first google hit for "origins of health insurance in the us"

Employee benefit plans proliferated in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Strong unions bargained for better benefit packages, including tax-free, employer-sponsored health insurance. Wartime (1939-1945) wage freezes imposed by the government actually accelerated the spread of group health care. Unable by law to attract workers by paying more, employers instead improved their benefit packages, adding health care.

Government programs to cover health care costs began to expand during the 1950s and 1960s. Disability benefits were included in social security coverage for the first time in 1954. When the government created Medicare and Medicaid programs in 1965, private sources still paid 75 percent of all of the health care costs. By 1995, individuals and companies only paid for about half of the health care with the government responsible for the other half.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the cost of health care rose rapidly and the majority of employer-sponsored group insurance plans switched from “fee-for-service” plans to the cheaper “managed care plans.” As a result, most Americans with health insurance were enrolled in managed care plans by the mid-1990s.

So we've lost health, that is, we have no real change from the present system of "fringe benefits" for the salaried or unionized workers and their predominantly female dependents and their children, which serial monogamy (divorce and remarriage) makes into a benefits following maze for about half of all fringe benefit privileged children, and no real change for the uninsured, just some gimmick about as useful for real health as mandatory liability coverage is for motor vehicle maintenance.

So what's the real problem? It isn't that some dems won't vote, its that here we are in the first summer of the Great Recession, the first summer after the Stimulus Package was voted in, and just before Congress went on recess it did not pass a historic bill, a bill that extends Medicare to all, a bill that captures, and expresses, all of our hopes that the common weal will prevail over adversity, that past sacrifices have not been in vain, that our society, our culture, is more functional than dysfunctional.

We don't have that, so what do we have? Why does anyone who works for a wage, or worked for one, or is still looking for work that pays a wage, minimum or more (or less to be honest), why does anyone who needs for there to be work, either to keep a paid job that still exists, after millions have been lost, or to get a job created by an expansion of work, believe that "we've turned the corner" or "the darkest days are behind us"?

What we've lost is the economic recovery, not simply the staggering waste lost to parasitism, to endemic corruption, but the social confidence, aka "consumer confidence", upon which the administration's plan of record for economic recovery is based.

What we got is PTSD -- post-tempest summer disorder -- the "malaise" the corporate hacks hung on the Carter administration after his "Crisis of Confidence" speech of July 15, 1979. Malaise which will measure with skepticism each claim by the administration that it has the fix for the economy, that hope is more rational than management of failure, that we are not, fundamentally, simply managing the impoverishment of most of the world, dinosaurs convinced of both the possibility of evolution and the certainty of extinction.

We'll muddle. Through is an open question. Without leaders. That's what we lost.