Healthcare Reform, part two
Congress has been considering universal health care legislation financed by a surcharge on income above $280,000 — that is, a levy almost exclusively on 1-percenters. This surtax would graze just 5 percent of small businesses and would recoup only part of the $700 billion, the 1-percenters received from the Bush tax cuts. In fact, it is so miniscule, those making $1 million annually would pay just $9,000 more in taxes every year — or nine-tenths of 1 percent of their 12-month haul.
But as usual lawmakers, being affluent and/or from affluent districts, are driving their luxury cars over the middle-class. Hence, the letter from Boulder, Colorado’s dot-com tycoon Rep. Jared Polis calling for the surtax’s death. Echoing that demand are those like Sen. Max Baucus, who come from the heartland’s culturally conservative and economically impoverished locales, and quietly build insurmountable campaign war chests as the biggest corporate fundraisers in Congress. They claim to be just “regular folks” from “back home.” Folks who now promise to kill the health care surtax because they say that’s what their communities want. As if their impoverished constituents would knowingly support the richest one percent of the country when they can barely support their own families.
The Media, elite journalists and opinion-mongers who represent corporate media conglomerates and/or are themselves extremely wealthy, support them in this ridiculous fairy-tale. They ignore all the data about inequality, then legitimize the claims that America’s fat cats are being unfairly persecuted. This, at a time when those fat cats are better off than they have been since 1929. NBC’s Meredith Vieira asked President Obama why the surtax is intent on “punishing the rich?” Obama responded with, “No, it’s not punishing the rich. If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that’s part of being a community.”
Meanwhile, reform supporters fear that the White House’s bill has been so compromised, so bent to favor the big interests, it’s less Waterloo than watered down, a mockery of the change they had hoped for and that America desperately needs, with 22,000 Americans dying each year simply because they lack health insurance.
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