I've become too discouraged, jaded, and cynical on the issue of health care reform to take much joy in this latest, but it does strike a note of delicious irony.
Ready to give up on trying to get even a sliver of bipartisan support, Democrats are beginning to think about going it alone and passing a bill under the reconciliation process, which requires only a simple majority in the Senate, not the 60 vote filibuster-proof majority.
Here's the irony: in order to justify it in a reconciliation bill (meaning it is substantively related to the budget and finances), the bill would have to be "more robust" in terms of saving money than what's been talked about. That is, the justification for this form of bill is that it will save lots of money -- meaning also that it would have to have more clout to change the for-profit balance of our current system of private insurance.
Hence, it could be that we get a more liberal, aka more progressive, public plan -- and perhaps something that actually does save money. The best that we can hope for otherwise is "reform" that primarily benefits insurance companies.
Stranger things have happened.
Ralph
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I'm not sure I understand "reconciliation" yet, but I'm glad to hear you talking about it. The Republican noise machine has made it hard for me to understand what's actually in the proposal itself. Most of the time, we hear people refuting the criticisms of things that aren't even in the bill - death panels, government funding of abortion, Socialism, Marxism, etc.
ReplyDeleteI talked to a friend who is involved in a University Health Care system in another southern State. He told me that his colleagues are planning for how they are going to restructure when the system is reformed - the point being that he assumes that it will be reformed ["It can't continue as it is"]. He [and his State] are as conservative as it gets.
As much as I cringe at the current absurd posturing and debate and at what it's doing to Obama's polls, it does seem to me that there is a fundamental debate. Health Care cannot remain as a "business." The business-i-fi-cation of Medicine has occurred in our lifetime. My own memory of when is the Nixon Era when he slashed funding of medical research. Thereafter, the rise of the hospital corporations, HMOs, big Pharmacy, exclusionary insurance, etc. has made medical care almost unrecognizable.
It seems inevitable to me that we will become a "Social Democracy" like most of Europe and Canada. Inevitable. So, in a way, this debate is warranted because it is a fundamental [and necessary] change in American government.
It is socialism in the final analysis. Medical Care doesn't fit into a free market economic framework, because there really aren't alternatives when you're sick. You're just sick, and at the mercy of wherever you land for care. Whether it's Obamacare or some-other-care, we seemed to have resolved the issue of health care as a right without making the debate formal. What remains is how to do it.
The tragedy of this divisive debate is that it isn't focused on the real issues. It's just political noise. It's not really about Obama, or political ideology, it's about the evolution of our democracy - an evolution in which we are following the other great democracies rather than leading. The reactionary forces at work right now are ultimately doomed, though they can sure make a mess of things in the present.
I agree with many of your points, but I don't think we have resolved the issue of 'health care as a right'. Many conservatives absolutely reject that position. To me, that's where Obama is making his biggest mistake - by continuing to think he can somehow come up with a compromise that will appease people who are both philosophically opposed to the basic liberal premises about healthcare, and adamantly opposed to anything Obama. Instead of asking the left to tone it down so they won't offend conservative Republicans in his attempt to work out a bipartisan compromise(which looks increasingly like a complete capitulation), I'd respect Obama's people more if they had the balls to stand up like Kennedy and say, This is what I believe in. This is what I'm going to fight for, win or lose.
ReplyDeleteI worked hard to elect Obama, but he is beginning to look like the African-American Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who came in with the control of Congress, and then botched the whole thing.
What I don't get is that, yes, both Carter and Obama came into the presidency as Washington outsiders and maybe naive about how the game was played -- along with not wanting to play the old game.
ReplyDeleteBut that's why Obama chose Rahm Emanuel as his CoS. Rahm is a notorious in-fighter. Why is he not managing this better? Is Tom Daschle really running the show behind the scenes?
Were this a debate with people over ideology, I would agree with both of your comments. But I don't think that's what this is about. It's a screaming attack with misinformation, Talking Points, Poison.
ReplyDeleteIt's designed to have us think that Obama's fate will be the same as Carters. If it's working, it's because they're good at it. I'm not willing to drift into a dispair about Obama. I prefer to foment a Fox News, Talk Radio, WSJ, Republican Congressman backlash unlike any they've ever seen. I think it's our job to create a space for Obama to work in. If it's not now, we need to absolutely kick ass in 2010 to make the clowns superfluous. There is a large segment of America that genuinely opposes Obama and the Democratic Agenda, but I refuse to accept that the current manic attacks are coming from those people. This is the same kind of campaign that got Bush elected, and Rahm isn't big enough to stop it.