Posted 1:32 pm by BOTE
Is US democratic accountability weakening?

Republicans are about to do it again. You have to hand it to them, they have mastered the art of focusing public attention on the appealing and uncontroversial aspects of otherwise radical and egregious legislation. The first target was taxation, next came civil liberties, and now social security.

Legislation is currently working its way through both congress and the senate that would fundamentally alter the character of Medicare, the programme that provides millions of Americans with healthcare security. The bait on this occassion is enhanced prescription benefits for the elderly. Laudable in principle, but as usual there are a number of catches.

The least important but more instructive catch is that the legislation won't make most elderly people much better off. Deductibles and other holes in the proposed coverage will, in many cases, require the elderly to continue paying most of their own drug costs. The $400 billion proposed for the programme is a fraction of the total projected prescription bill for seniors over the next 10 years. This aspect of the legislation fulfils two key aims of the Republicans:

- To demostrate to the electorate that George W. cares about the weaker elements of American society and to deflect criticism that he has spent the last three years pandering to an elite minority.

- To disguise the real intention of the legislation

That real intention is to shift as many beneficiaries as possible out of Medicare and into private provision. Private health insurers will initially be subsidised by the government to allow them to lure people away from Medicare. Then in 2010 Medicare rates will be set by market forces. Private providers are likely to cherry pick the healthiest leaving Medicare with the weak and the sick who would face a substantial hike in the cost of provision. All this, of course won't happen until well after the 2004 election.

How is it that Republicans are still getting away with this? They have pursued a blatantly radical agenda for three years now with virtually no dissent from the media or the American public. Something is not right here.

One of the biggest problems is the way Americans get their information. For the most part Americans learn about the world around them through television. During the last three years slick network news channels like Fox, CNN and ABC have been among the most popular sources for news. They have also been surprisingly uncritical of the domestic agenda of the Bush administration preferring instead to provide minute by minute coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Half truths and lies have gone unchallenged.

A fundamental part of any well functioning democracy is a system of checks and balances that prevent any one arm of the government from holding and exercising too much power. In recent years voters have usually achieved this by giving the Senate, Congress and Presidency to different parties but now Republicans control all three. The media is the next line of defence. They must be the eyes and ears of the electorate and raise the alarm when abuses of power are in progress.

It is no accident that in recent years one of the few news sources that has consistently performed this role is the New York Times. Editorial decisions there are not subject to the implicit supervision of a large parent company that may find it uncomfortable to offend the Bush administration. Whatever the reason, many of the most popular news sources in the US are not doing their job and in the end the American people will be worse off as a result.