The ferocity and desperation of the opponents of health care reform leads me to believe there is much more to this resistance than just the usual conservative desire to commodify and exploit all essential services. The usual excuse given is that insidious public institutions must be kept from gaining too much power, although it seems to me that the obvious motivation may simply be the reluctance of our benign private institutions from giving up that same power, which they already control. Aftrer all, this is the fastest growing, most profitable, recession- and market-proof industry, ever. No one who has a piece of it will want to give it up.

I submit there there is another factor at work here, one which threatens the middleman market mentality even more than any loss of profits, or rise in prices, due to inefficiency or even fraud. The clue to this is that health care expenses is the leading cause of consumer bankruptcies, and one of the fastest-growing:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/05/bankruptcy.medical.bills/

And many of these people were "protected" by private insurance. No, not all the nation's poverty is caused by those who are too lazy to "get a job", or who "foolishly indulged themselves with credit card debt". It happens to prudent, hard-working people all the time. These are people who had some sense of financial security due to their savings and investments, and their job skills, experience and education. In other words, people like us. We are terrified of what a medical emergency can mean to us, and how helpless and vulnerable we are to them.

These are people who have the financial resources to survive or risk a long bout of unemployment, either because of bad luck, a slow economy, or just a desire to bargain with their employers for a better deal or to start their own business. Now they have an additional obstacle: they know they are one illness away from catastrophe, even if they survive their medical problems. Most affordable insurance is from employer-provided plans. And without it, the salary negotiation between employer and employee becomes terribly one-sided. "You can't reason with a man who has a shotgun in his hands." If the government started funding this insurance, workers would not need to bargain desperately for it and might even start demanding some of the insurance savings realized by employers should start showing up in their paychecks.

In short, health care reform, regardless of its effectiveness or success, would have one largely unforeseen and uncommented-on consequence. The balance of power between labor and management would be shifted greatly in labor's favor. This is the financial and economic power that is really at stake here, over and above the profits of the medical industry itself. And this is why the GOP will stop at nothing to stop it.