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Eric Zuesse
Lee Fang at The Intercept revealed on March 31st, that the Republican Party were defrauding the American people with assertions that their Party has an alternative to Obamacare — the Affordable Care Act — and that they’ll pass it if and when they come to power. His headline summarized the considerable evidence for this, "GOP Lawmakers Now Admit Years of Obamacare Repeal Votes Were a Sham”, and his article made clear that the Republican Party has no desire to serve the public, in public office, but are total fraudsters, whose sole real goal is to gain power in order to do what their big billionaire donors want done.
This mirrors what the Democratic Party does regarding its Obamacare fraud. As I documented at great length on 3 March 2013, headlining "Why Obama Will Probably Be Low-Rated By Historians”, Obama designed his Obamacare so as to please the medical industries that donate heavily to politics, and he had no real intention of fulfilling his campaign promises, such as that it would include a “public option” which, according to the Congressional Budget Office study — as Jon Walker reported the CBO study — "would on average have premiums 11 percent cheaper than private insurance and the public option would end up also making private insurance cheaper.” And, as my article reported that study, the CBO had actually found that, “It would cost ‘18-percent lower that the average for private health plans,’ so ‘Premiums for the public health insurance option are estimated to be 11 percent lower than those for private plans on the Exchange.’ This would be due to ‘10 percent lower administrative and margin costs’ and other factors.” Also, as my article pointed out:
Obama had always said that the public insurance option would “help keep the insurers honest,” or words to that effect: it would “keep them honest” by making available to every American a public option competing against the private insurers’ offerings, which needed to pay dividends and capital gains to stockholders, not just medical care to insureds. For example, on 11 June 2009 Obama had told a town hall in Green Bay, “If the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it will keep them honest and help keep prices down.”
Obama knew the same dynamics that the CBO study ended up confirming; but Obama didn’t care about truth or the public’s welfare, he wanted to build the public’s support for his plan, even while, in the back rooms (of U.S. Senator Max Baucus’s office, which Obama chose to write the legislation), Obama (his White House aide Nancy-Ann DeParle) never pushed at all, for inclusion of a public option. Her boss, Obama, actually didn’t want it in the plan.
Also, Obama constantly promised that his plan would be “universal,” which actually already exists in all other industrialized nations except the U.S., and it means 100% of the population having insurance for preventative and other basic healthcare expenses. At the time when Obama came into office, 14.6% of Americans were uninsured. By the time he left office, 10.9% were. He had raised the existing 85.4% of insured Americans, to 89.1% insured. He increased the insured percentage by 3.7%, to 89.1% — and that’s not 100%; it’s not “universal.” Not even close.
Another example of our government’s fraudulence is headlined in Britain’s Daily Mail on March 31st, “Latest WikiLeaks release shows how the CIA uses computer code to hide the origins of its hacking attacks and 'disguise them as Russian or Chinese activity’” which reports that the latest from wikileaks “says the CIA disguised its own hacking attacks to make it appear those responsible were Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean.” The CIA’s ‘finding’ that Russia was behind the wikileaked Hillary Clinton campaign information, is based upon a CIA program to misattribute to Russia (and to other countries the CIA wants to overthrow) things (such as ‘Trump-Putin-gate’) which the CIA itself is actually behind. It’s a U.S. government disinformation campaign designed to promote U.S. coups and invasions.
The CIA was heavy into disinformation when ‘verifying’ the “Saddam has WMD” lies that George W. Bush was pushing.
Jimmy Carter was correct to say that the reality today about the American government is that “Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members.” It’s one “oligarchy” represented by two Parties, sustaining the myth that it’s still a ‘democracy’. The public are trapped between two styles of actually the same oligarchy.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
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