Obama said he wanted national healthcare, and presented Congress with a bill that would create a public health insurance option for people who can’t or won’t afford the ones offered by the private sector. It’s like having public school for people who can’t/won’t afford private, or even public libraries for people who don’t want to buy and own books. The idea was that it would save so much money by preventing poor people from showing up at the emergency room in crisis (or just being sick at all), it would pay for itself. The insurance companies got really upset, and got Republicans to argue that this would hurt competition, and upset the free market.

Obama understands this perspective: that the sanctity of the free market is in some ways more important than the health of the nation’s people, and has begun to back down. What is being ignored is that health insurance is not a free market. It is part of a monopoly of corporations currently controlling what we call healthcare in America – a healthcare system that promotes the use of costsly patented pharmaceuticals over preventative care, nutrition, and basic health education. If we had a truly free healthcare market… well, don’t get me started.

But all that aside, when Obama suggests he is open to removing the national healthcare part of the national healthcare act, he is turning it from social spending to straight corporatism. Now, instead of requiring everyone have insurance, and then subsidizing a person’s participation in a government health plan, the act will still require everyone have insurance, and then subsidize a person’s participation in a private health plan. So the net effect of the law is to use public funds to subsidize a private, highly inefficient healthcare insurance industry which has been documented to care much more about profit than anyone’s health.

This is corporatism.