by Dave McGill

With the Legislative Branch mired in money and the Judicial Branch wallowing in whimsey, the nation needs, more than ever, the presidential candidate we all remember as the one who championed “change.”

The healthcare reform efforts have exposed, as never before, the ugly underbelly of our political system to all who have their eyes open. Faith in Congress is at a low level. A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll taken this week found that only 22% of Americans approve of the way it is doing its job.

Also this week, the government released a new report indicating that healthcare spending rose to a record 17.3% of the U.S. economy during the past year, representing the largest single year jump in the 50 years during which such records have been kept.

This is likely to raise even higher the public’s support for the option to buy health insurance from a government plan. However, one question looms large – does public opinion matter any more? Congress has shown that it is far more concerned with the money and perks its members receive than with the wishes of its constituents. And, in a nutshell, this means that democracy in the United States, by any standard definition, is simply not working.

For example, back in September, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found that Connecticut voters supported, 64% to 30%, giving people the option to buy health insurance from a government plan. Yet, Connecticutt Senator Joseph Lieberman told Fox News in November: “If the public option plan is in there, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote.” Lieberman has accepted millions of dollars from the healthcare industry and Aetna Insurance Company is headquartered in his home state.

Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), is chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee. In September, he proposed a health care compromise that effectively terminated the public option in the Senate’s deliberations. That was the same month that a Montana State University poll found that residents of Baucus’ state supported such an option, 48 percent to 42 percent. Senator Baucus has accepted nearly $4 million from the healthcare industry.

Senators Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) took millions from the Insurance industry and then opposed the public option despite strong support for it within their states.

And, the list goes on. The opportunity for Americans to select a government-run plan is now apparently dead despite the fact that, as a New York Times/CBS poll revealed in September, two-thirds of Americans, overall, support it.

The system, indeed, needs the “change” that was championed by candidate Barack Obama. It seems that the people elected a man they thought to be the much needed gladiator only to find that he appears to be more like the ultimate compromiser.

Where is the presidential candidate, we must wonder, who said: “There will be no lobbyists in the White House?” This theme was considered to be the cornerstone of his campaign that set it apart from that of John McCain, as when he said during a late-fall stop in Wisconsin: “Make no mistake…You need leadership you can trust to work for you, not for the special interests who have had their thumb on the scale. And together, we will tell Washington, and their lobbyists, that their days of setting the agenda are over.”

But then, President Obama nominated former Raytheon lobbyist, William J. Lynn, to be deputy defense secretary. And, during his first six months in office he held a series of meetings in the White House with the chief lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, Billy Tauzin, and together they worked out some healthcare provisions that were important to the drug industry.

This was particularly inappropriate, given the president’s campaign promises and it is little wonder that he kept the meetings secret until they were eventually revealed by others. By agreeing not to negotiate the cost of drugs under Medicare he broke one campaign promise. By agreeing to prevent Americans from buying cheaper drugs at pharmacies in Canada and Europe, he broke another. By holding the meetings in secrecy he broke his promise to make all healthcare deliberations public. And, by meeting with Tauzin….well, consider this.

Billy Tauzin might accurately be called the poster-boy for illicit political influence. He is an ex-Republican congressman from Louisiana who was the subject of a 60 minutes episode in April of 2007. During that report, two other congressmen accused Tauzin of using unethical tactics while in Congress to push through a bill that “the pharmaceutical lobbyists wrote,” creating the pharmaceutical-friendly drug program known as Medicare Part D. Shortly after bringing the legislation to reality, Tauzin retired from the House and immediately was awarded his present job lobbying by the drug industry, earning a reported $2.5 million per year.

As a result of the unrelenting and mostly hidden efforts by lobbyists for the healthcare industry, as well as the changing face of politics, effective healthcare reform is now on life support. Once again, as in the seventies and in the nineties, the healthcare industry, which has always publicly supported reform, appears to have stymied the process with its monumental behind-the-scenes efforts.

The message is becoming clearer with each passing decade. Before any significant program with populist support can be legislated, the government – or the people – must first remove the destructive influence of money and lobbying perks.

Candidate Obama was dead right. The system is dead wrong, as is the Supreme Court’s support of it. The unrestrained greed of such sectors as the healthcare industry, the financial industry and the military-industrial complex, as well as that of the politicians themselves, is hurtling the nation towards an economic disaster. Among the nasty things we might experience down the road, if nothing changes, could be a runaway increase in the interest on the national debt, driving the deficits ever higher in the mother-of-all vicious cycles.