ABSTRACT
Barack Obama's sick corporatist health reform was a highly predictable outcome in the real world of power that young Barack Obama chose to climb instead of resist. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announces that that he would drop the Senate health reform bill's recently added on Medicare buy-in provision. Health reform turns out to be a gift for insurers and a knife in the backs of the American people. Obama epitomizes what Christopher Hitchens once called the essence of American politics, the manipulation of populism by elitism. Obama's nationally televised high-stakes health care address to a joint session of Congress in the late summer of 2009 was an excellent case in point. The great business-friendly reserve tag in Obama's September health care address came when he promised not to add "a dime" to the federal deficit with health reform and with his related pledge to fund his proposal at just $900 billion over ten years.
