(From the Monkey Cage)
Sometimes you just have to gut it out. Having watched the Teddy Kennedy autobio on HBO and heard his words about the necessity of universal health care thirty years ago, how can we still allow the rich to determine what health care the rest of us get? Forty-million people who can't get mammograms or flu shots or a chest x-ray is a disgrace.
LBJ vs. Obama
LBJ approval in July 1965, on the eve of Medicare: 66%
Obama approval now: 57%.
17 comments:
Amen. It's going to happen. It has to happen.
If not now, when? It should have happened during the Clinton years.
Yes, but President Clinton's health care task force kept its negotiations too secret, and the GOP demonized Hillary Clinton in order to kill health care reform during the 1990s. By contrast, President Obama has left most of the details of health care reform to Congress, and so has allowed the process to be more open and collegial. Furthermore, I heard that as much money is being spent in support of health care reform this year as was spent opposing health care reform during the Clinton administration. All of that, plus Obama's willingness to twist arms in order to get results, is good news for the president's reform agenda. Now, if only a few recalcitrant, conservative Democrats would fall in line, this thing could be done. It's about time the United States stop overspending on health care for fewer and fewer benefits.
Republicans who seek to derail this process are thinking only of themselves; they don't want to see Democrats succeed at such a large and popular endeavor. The GOP would sacrifice the welfare of the nation to improve (perhaps) its only political fortunes. Shameless!
Cheers,
Jeff
Particularly galling when almost every other country is able to provide it and even states like Oregon and Massachusetts.
Really this should have happened during the 50s-- Ike should have pushed it as part of making America strong and defending Democracy-- which is how he got funding for schools, highways, infrastructure and what not.
The reality is that it is going to happen, so let's get it over with. I don't like a lot of what is going on with they way the reform is going, I'm nervous that the health care industry is not fighting tooth and nail to keep their cash cow.
I also think that as a nation we need to realize that it is not as simple as reforming health care, there are going to have to be other major cultural reforms in education, public health policy, how we fund research, the criminal justice system and just about every facet of our government to make this work.
And it's not only the rich people that are holding this back, by in large it is the masses who aspire to wealth (even though most of them will never get there) who live by the mantra "I just want more say in where my money is going".
Arghhhhh-- don't get me started. I will say in closing I have to almost hang my head in shame when I try to explain our health care system to my friends in Sweden and Finland.
The insurance lobby is possibly the most powerful lobby in the US. They are the stumbling block that must be overcome. Please be sure to email your representatives on the matter of health care, i.e., insurance reform.
Once's its part of our life, we will wonder why we dallied so long, why we didn't prioritize the most important thing of all.
While I might agree that the American health care system needs some sort of remediation and regulation, I vigorously disagree that the federal government is appropriately suited to either design or manage any kind of a nationwide system. In fact, I can think of very little that the federal government manages efficiently (either financially or operationally), and I doubt that Americans really want an expansion of the kind of inefficiency and corruption that is nearly epidemic in Medicare, Medicaid, and--to a lesser extent--the VA system.
Universal health care is affordable and will be profitable for the providers. The stick in the mud is the big dogs won't begetting mutli-million dollar bonuses anymore.
Look up and find out what the head of MI BC/BS got last year as head of a nonprofit medical provider in bonuses.
Personally but I can't back it up with numbers I think Medicare should be extended to every man woman and child in America. I pay about a $100 a month for A&B and about $150 for my wife and a supplemental plan that coordinates with Medicare and covers drugs.
Also all of the drug companies make the lions share of their profits from Americans because they are capped everywhere else in the world.
It will be interesting to see what the billions all these companies spend on lobbyists buys them
The government has run the Social Security system effectively since the thirties. People have received their checks ever since. Medicare would work better if it were better financed and had more oversight. We have to pay for certain things through taxes if we want to have them. Other countries seem to recognize this and trade higher taxes for more help.
It is just wrong that so many people are without medical coverage. Christine won't mind me saying that paying for their medical expenses has put them in debt despite two parents with good jobs.
It's a hard time to put this into effect but it's always been.
Let me approach the issue from a different angle. A systemic problem in two related businesses (i.e., health providers and health insurers) is not likely to be solved by political intervention. In fact, neither Democrats nor Republicans because of their ideology are likely to do anything other than make matters worse (in my humble opinion). Therefore, if anything is to be done, the extent of government involvement ought to be limited to statutory regulation of the businesses (though that must be severely limited to the extent that the government ought not to do extensive, invasive surgery when a simple Bandaid might suffice.
If, however, you are enamored of Progressivism, then I am unlikely to dissuade you from your ideological point of view. As for myself, something of a libertarian, I rather resent government involvement in anything, and I can produce thousands of examples that show the disastrous effects of government involvement in and control of society and culture.
While I might agree that American health care and health insurance industries are problematic, I would be one of the last people on the face of the earth to think that any government is likely to make improvements except that those "improvements" lead to further deterioration of what all Americans regard as the best of the "American way of life"--and I think Progressives, Conservatives, Libertarians, and others (if being objective) would acknowledge the importance of the "American way of life."
If, however, the "American way of life" is viewed by some as objectionable because of their ideology, then there is nothing that an objective libertarian could say that would advance the discussion in any meaningful and constructive way.
I guess we're polar opposites in the usefulness of government, but we both love good books and many other things and that's what this blog is basically about. Thanks for your thoughtful viewpoint.
The USA is pretty much the only industrialized country tha doesn't have universal health care.
But it's also the first country to have signifacant segments of its population to come from very different roots - the USA was really the world's first non-homogenous country. (this is something other countries like the UK and France and Germany have had to deal with recently and they're no better at than the USA is).
The reason I bring this up is because for smaller European countries that have until recently been mostly of the same ethnic background it was easier to get across a feeling that, "we're all in this together."
It's unlikely that if it didn't already exist the idea of universal health care would be an easy sell in many countries. Certainly if we didn't already have it in Canada there is no way we could bring it in now.
The idea that the government is made up of people, "just like us," and is, in fact, our representatives and our "civil servants," is much tougher these days than it was for homogenous societies.
But that's the challenge of the modern world, so we better figure out how to do it.
There's a difference between the freedom to choose one's healthcare course, and the "freedom" to not have any, or any good, choices.
There's very little that large cumbersome corporations do better than government bureaucracy does, which is no credit to government bureaucracy. Except that they reward the people holding the pursestrings even more ridiculously than most politicians rig the graft. The Reagan Admin was a turning point...where there was an attempt to pass off as much of the government as could be gotten away with to private contractors, who (of course) are that much more likely to kick back to political campaigns to get those contracts. That way lies Space Shuttle Columbian and KBR/Halliburton.
The American Way of Life is not defined by overflowing emergency rooms at the more public hospitals. Or, if it is, I think it's time for a change. And the Clintons, if they didn't intentionally torpedo healtchare reform (and I believe they did--I doubt they were so stupid to do what they did w/o realizing the consequences), sure did a wonderful job of unintetionally doing so.
And Massachusetts doesn't provide healthcare...it makes everyone pay insureance companies (the auto insurance model). Close to the worst of all worlds.
Or get over the notion that people who are somehow similar in look or churchgoing are more deserving of aid than those who aren't. But the US wasn't the first deeply diverse country, or even the first to not be a no-bones-about-it empire (as in the Chinese, and the Roman, and its vestiges, or the Russian or Ottoman)--see, among the vestiges of the Roman, Switzerland.
I think that there's an unfortunate confluence of worship of the wealthy in the US generally and the notion that anyone who isn't at least well-enough-off simply isn't trying, whether that has any bearing on reality or not. In countries where no matter how you strove, frequently/usually you were utterly screwed, helped force a slightly more realistic view of both these matters.
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