Hank Kalet

I’ve written before about Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson, so everyone who reads this blog knows I think he’s one of the best columnists going.

Today’s column is a case in point. He writes about the only presidential candidate on either side of the aisle offering a real plan for fixing the mess of a healthcare system we have in the United States, Dennis Kucinich.

On healthcare, he says what Americans believe, even as his rivals rake in contributions from the industry.

In a CNN poll this spring, 64 percent of respondents said the government should “provide a national insurance program for all Americans, even if this would require higher taxes,” and 73 percent approve of higher taxes to insure children under 18. Those results track New York Times and Gallup polls last year, in which about two-thirds of respondents said it is the federal government’s responsibility to guarantee health coverage to all Americans.

Such polls allow Kucinich to joke that, far from being in the loony left, “I’m in the center.

Everyone else is to the right of me.” More seriously, in a recent visit to the Globe, he accused the other Democratic candidates of faking it on healthcare reform.

“One of the greatest hoaxes of this campaign — everyone’s for universal healthcare,” Kucinich said. “It’s like a mantra. But when you get into the details, you find out that all the other candidates are talking about maintaining the existing for-profit system.”

Jackson goes onto explain why the rest of the candidates seem willing only to nibble around the edges — if at all.

The hold of the healthcare industry on the top candidates is already apparent. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top recipient of campaign contributions so far from the pharmaceutical and health products industry is Republican Mitt Romney ($228,260). But the next two are Democrats Barack Obama ($161,124) and Hillary Clinton ($146,000). The top recipient of contributions from health professionals is Clinton ($990,611). Romney is second at $806,837, and Obama third at $748,637.

The top recipient of cash from the insurance industry, which includes health insurers, is another Democrat, Connecticut’s Christopher Dodd, at $605,950. Romney and Republican Rudolph Giuliani are second and third, with Clinton and Obama fourth and fifth. Even though Obama is in fifth place, he still has collected $269,750 from insurance companies.

In a category that is relatively small in money thus far, but huge in terms of healthcare morality, Democratic presidential candidates occupy four of the top six spots in receiving money from death-dealing tobacco companies. After Giuliani’s $69,500 from tobacco companies, Dodd has received $45,400, Clinton $32,300, Romney $31,400, Obama $7,885, and Democrat Joe Biden, $4,000.

When the top Democratic candidates take tobacco contributions, it is hard to see them truly believing, as Kucinich says, that healthcare “is the single-most important domestic issue. . . a defining issue in the presidential race.”

The top recipient from lobbyists by far is Clinton at $406,300. She is still so badly smoldering from the torching of her healthcare efforts as first lady that she recently asserted to the National Association of Black Journalists, “I have never advocated socialized medicine. That has been a right-wing attack on me for 15 years.”

Her comment is telling, of course. True liberals would not fight a right-wing attack by retreating, as Clinton does, they would follow Kucinich’s lead and fight for real reform.

That assumes they believe in universal health care and are not behold to the folks with the cash.

Here are my two most recent columns on health care from The Progressive Populist — here and here — and a link to a radio interview I did on America’s Work Force Radio (click on Archived shows, go to August and click on the show for the 8th).

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