Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

by Matt Taibbi

Thus in the end the health care drama played out almost entirely within the Democratic Party. It was a multistage process. Stage one involved the election campaign of a magnetic, personable intellectual named Barack Obama who corralled millions of voters into his camp by promising health care reform with a public option that would reduce costs without being an open giveaway to the drug and insurance industries. Stage two: after getting elected, Obama invited said industries to the White House early on in the process and cut a private deal to reverse virtually all of his campaign promises in exchange for their support of the bill. Stage three then involved pretending the deal hadn’t been made (the White House to this day denies that the PhRMA deal that Tauzin admitted to took place) and insisting instead that the bill Obama supported was not an industry giveaway but simply good policy—and to prove it, they moved to stage four, which was repeatedly citing the research of an MIT economist who received nearly a million dollars from the federal government. Stage five involved bullying their own ranks to lay off conservative Democrats and get in line behind a public relations campaign against a totally idiotic and irrelevant Republican-led protest movement. Stages six through eight were blaming the Senate for taking all the good stuff out of the bill, buying off the remaining recalcitrant members for $100 million apiece, and then sauntering off into the sunset atop a multitrilli...