PROGRESS

Fantastic! Triple high fives to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Hail to Harry Reid, too.

Kudos to our Bay Area Democratic congressional delegation which has been out front on the battle for years – Anna Eshoo, Jackie Speier, Barbara Lee, Pete Stark, Mike Honda, Zoe Lofgren, George Miller, Lynn Woolsey and John Garamendi.

Thank you United States Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer!

A political war as bloody and monumental as the Battle of Gettysburg has been waged and won.

It’s about time Democratic leaders ignored GOP obstructionism and rejected the fiction of “post partisanship.” Health care reform is finally here.

It should have been here long ago.

Despite being the wealthiest country on earth, our embarrassing Rube Goldberg device of a health care system is ranked 37th in the world.

We are eating up a greater percentage of our GDP on health costs than Germany, France, Great Britain or Japan – all countries that have universal care. In fact, we are the only industrialized nation without universal coverage.

The health care victory was vital for Democrats. The core message of the Democratic Party is an unremitting commitment to drive progress for the average citizen. But what is “progress” for a family if they have no health care for their children?

How can we justify workers who are on a payroll but lack health insurance? What kind of society prices health care so high for workers in their 50s that employers are incentivized to jettison them in favor of younger workers with cheaper premiums?
How can we say it’s OK for a woman with a history of past illness to be denied coverage?

These injustices have been a part of American reality for so long that we are inured to their backwardness, their primitiveness, their barbarism. Read More »

Get Health Care Done

Health care reform must pass, even in light of the changed political calculus on Capitol Hill. There’s too much riding on it for it to fail.

A generation of idealists inspired by Barack Obama in 2008 now teeters on the brink of disenchantment. Where Candidate Obama made millions of people believe that government could drive positive change, President Obama risks alienating those who believed in him. If he fails to achieve real results, Americans’ enthusiasm for civic engagement and trust in their institutions may be lost for a generation.

That’s why Obama can’t afford to let health care reform die on the operating table.

Every Democrat who believes in the power of government to improve society has a vested interest in the revival and passage of health care reform before the 2010 election cycle begins in earnest.

Let’s review the case for a cure:

Our broken health care system ranks 37th in the world. More than 45 million Americans are uninsured. Those have insurance rely almost exclusively on employer-provided coverage, which is unfair to both employees and businesses. We are the sole industrialized nation without universal health insurance yet our percentage of GDP expended on health care is far above nations like France, Germany and Japan.

Experts warn that our present rate of spending on health care is untenable. And yet, after a year of careful crafting in the Senate and House, health care reform has been stopped at the goal line.

How can the White House, Senate and House lay such an embarrassing egg after a year of concerted focus? Read More »

Kennedy Fatigue

An electoral earthquake shook Massachusetts last Tuesday. When the dust settled, the U.S. Senate seat held for 40 years by Ted Kennedy had fallen to Republican upstart Scott Brown, the Democrats’ 60-seat majority in the Senate had crumbled and the Democratic to-do list was in ruins.

Martha Coakley’s loss was a severe blow to President Obama.

Everyone has their reasons why it happened. Obama’s miscalculation. The economy. Health care overreach. Coakley’s listless campaign. Scott Brown’s truck:

I wonder, however, if the loss wasn’t a final repudiation of Kennedy’s big government vision by his former constituents. Read More »

Save the Public Option

The conservative right’s anti-federal government drumbeat continues, this time to oppose health care reform.

I’ve seen the attack so many times before: “Government can’t do anything right.”

I’m amazed it keeps working.

Last weekend, word came from the White House that President Obama was bending to the criticism and was now willing to sacrifice one of the central tenets of health care  reform, the so-called “public option.”

This would be a terrible mistake.

The public option simply refers to a government-run health insurance plan that would compete in the open market with private insurers. The added competition would help to lower overall prices and guarantee accessibility to those who have been shut out by private insurers.

Despite the profoundly positive role our government has played in creating a better life for Americans, anti-government sentiment remains deeply ingrained in the national psyche. Consider the reforms generated by the New Deal that have improved the lives of successive generations.

Social Security and Medicare, universities and colleges, home loan programs, public parks and recreation facilities, regulation of natural resources, creation of roads, highways and public transportation systems – even our armed services, which are the most powerful in the world.

Still, there is a suspicion that government misspends tax dollars and operates inefficiently because it does not run on the profit motive. Read More »

Obama’s Health Crisis

Why are so many health insurance companies and Republican power brokers trying to kill health care reform on its way to the operating table?
They’re hoping history will repeat itself.

When Bill and Hillary Clinton tackled health care reform in 1993, Republicans and their insurance industry allies demonized the effort and rode the negative public sentiment to unprecedented electoral gains in the next election.

I experienced the electoral tsunami first-hand while managing Kathleen Brown’s ill fated 1994 campaign for California governor. She, along with every other Democratic gubernatorial challenger, went down in defeat.

The Republicans racked up 54 seats in the House of Representatives, taking control of the chamber for the first time in four decades. They also claimed the Senate, taking eight Democratic seats. Out of 177 incumbent Republican governors, senators or members of Congress, none lost. To top it off, the GOP also took control of 15 state legislative chambers.

The seeds of the Democrats’ 1994 defeat were planted during the health care battle of 1993, when a huge TV campaign financed by the Health Insurance Association of America frightened middle-class policyholders into believing that President Clinton’s reform proposals would raise taxes, increase bureaucracy and reduce patient choice.

Sound familiar? Read More »

The Cure

Nationalize bankrupt banks? Hell, let’s nationalize our bankrupt health care system.

Everyone I know has a horror story: The insured, employed single mother who must choose whether to pay for her two children’s health policies or the rent on a two bedroom apartment; the recently laid off Mervyn’s employee who cannot afford her COBRA, the 50-year-old freelance accountant with a successful practice who can’t find affordable coverage; the unemployed journalist with five kids and no health coverage; the older worker who was furloughed because his coverage was three times the cost of a younger co-worker with a fraction of the experience.

Inequity and iniquity abound.

The sole industrialized nation without universal health coverage? How does that make sense when American taxpayers are bailing out the financial system, the auto industry and are being called upon to rescue free market capitalism from the abyss?

I will dispense with the usual grim statistics – like 49 million uninsured Americans – (as if proof is still needed to justify jettisoning America’s terminally ill health care system). What are we afraid of? If capitalists can’t run our financial system, how can they manage our health care system? Read More »