Thoughts on Healthcare and the Obama Administration

Last week (1/6/09), there were reports that President-Elect Barack Obama has approached Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN for the position of Surgeon General. Dr. Gupta is pretty popular on television, but is he the right pick for Surgeon General?

Below is a video of Dr. Gupta having a debate with Michael Moore on healthcare and the positions he put forth in his movie "Sicko." In it I think you'll see a man firmly in the pocket of the drug companies and the profit system doing everything he can to attack universal healthcare by calling Moore a liar.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said it well:

You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.

Michigan Democratic Congressman John Conyers is opposing this appointment and is lobbying the Senate to defeat it.

One part of Michael Moore's argument in the above debate which I think is important is his criticism of our healthcare system being motivated by profit. He argues that the profit motive does not lead to the needs of people being taken care of but rather the needs of big drug companies being taken care of. Does this logic not extend to other things as well?

What about food companies? What about housing? Who's needs does Capitalism serve when the system of distribution is controlled by the needs of making profit? What if we lived under a system where production and distribution was determined by human need?

So many seem to have hope that Obama is going to bring all this change but, even if we take for granted that he actually wants to bring real change, he will be limited by the Capitalist system of production for profit and will face constant pressure from corporate interests who will use all there vast resources to make sure the needs of their stockholders are met before anything else.