Obama And Health Care Reform

Resistance to health care reform is cranking up. Shouldn’t surprise us—it’s been shouted down nearly every time it’s been proposed in the last century. There was only one exception—Lyndon Johnson, who created Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s.
Apparently there have been some near riots as Congressmen have attempted to hold “Town Meetings” to explain Obama’s proposals. These have been disruptive to the point no debate or explanation was possible.
Outright lies are being told—that Obama’s plan will call for euthanasia of the elderly (it will pay for hospice care and counseling; my own father went into hospice care at the absolute end of his life—when all systems were failing. It certainly wasn’t euthanasia!).
This is a bald faced lie. As are the assertions that Obama’s plan is like Stalin’s eighty years ago—or Russ Limbaugh’s rant that Obama’s plan is like that of the Nazi’s. When this sort of claptrap starts flying about, you know that some ox with big money is being gored.
The insurance companies—making record profits as more and more Americans get fewer and fewer medical benefits—are obviously behind a good bit of this, just as they were in 1993. They are terrified that some form of governmentally insured health care for Americans might become law. It would certainly hurt their bottom line; some might go out of the health business entirely.
So there’s certainly some involvement by the insurance industry in this. But there are other factors involved, too. There wasn’t this kind of near riot emotionalism involved in 1993. Those against health care are intense, bitter and angry.
It takes more than a few lies from insurance companies to generate this kind of heat. So I’ve spent the day listening to pundits opine on the subject. One disturbing question was raised on MSNBC today: to what extent is resistance to Obama’s proposals racial?
The pundits talked about the kind of people who showed up to disrupt the Town Meetings—white, less well educated, small town folk—screaming, “This isn’t America!” No, much of America has changed a bit since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And, in some insular parts, it hasn’t changed much at all—just become more resentful.
These are, after all, the kinds of people that radically conservative Republicans have courted since the days of Barry Goldwater. As the pundits admitted, no one can prove racism as a motive, but there is ground for thinking it just possible.
Historically, we have to remember which leg of the four-legged Roosevelt coalition Republicans went after in 1952 and on. It was the white southerner who, whether a member of the KKK or not, joined with it in hating the other legs of FDR’s coalition: blacks, Jews and urban Catholics.
I can easily imagine that the sons of the men who marched with the KKK in Michigan or Alabama are not thrilled to see “one of them” in the White House. I know where my own parents would have stood—quietly—on the issue. “One of them” is a phrase I heard used often as a kid.
Then there’s another issue—and this really embarrasses me. I am a practicing Christian and I receive Email from all sorts of Christian groups and “news” disseminators. The hostility with which they uniformly greet the thought of universal health care stuns me.
They write nothing of the millions and millions who have no insurance and no health care. All they do is rant (that’s the only word) about the horrors of having government involved in our health care. There is no hint of love, of compassion or even simple decency.
They seem to be approaching health care the way they have approached the abortion issue—with little to back their position but good old fashioned hatred. To me, on both issues, it seems almost mindless. And decent minded folk react to them the same way on both fronts.
It makes it hard to admit one is a Christian among decent folk with kindly inclinations. I am immediately suspect—and, God help us, with good reason.
I have to add one more thing to this poisonous mix: a very strange disconnect. More than one pundit talked of meetings in which people were asked, “How many want your government to stay out of your health care?” Hands went up almost universally.
“How many of you are on Medicare?” Half to a majority raised their hands. What kind of absurdity is this? I have had more trouble with private insurers than I ever have had with Medicare—or my parents ever had with Medicaid. Huh?
And of course there is fault with the Obama camp. Like Hillary and Bill before them, they violated the KISS principle. “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
Hillary went to Yale Law and Obama went to Harvard Law. The fundamental thing law schools teach you is that law is and should be complex. (If it were too simple, what would happen to fees?) (I attended George Washington U Law for a year myself.)
Well taught at their respective institutions, both came out with enormously complex proposals on health care. One pundit today noted that he asked several well educated, liberal Democratic friends in New York if they understood Obama’s health proposal. None did.
This sort of complexity is catnip to conservative hostiles. But those against health care reform would face an all but insurmountable task opposing an amendment that merely proposed to drop the phrase “over 65” from the original Medicare legislation.
It wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but the ball would be rolling—and the entire package would be simple and clearly understood. Everybody has a grandparent who would testify to the efficacy of Medicare! This could pass—and, subsequently, be built upon.
That, I fear, would be too simplistic a solution for a Harvard man. It was, after all, for the lady from Yale nearly thirty years ago. The only thing it has to recommend it is that it would probably work.
What’s happening now is in danger of not working at all.