Monk

The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made ... And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine.”

-- Paul Krugman for The New York Times

The media makes it sound historic. Liberals are joyous, while Republicans promise the Apocalypse, even if they have to bring it on themselves. Obama and the Democrats managed to resuscitate the bill back from the dead.

Even Obama acknowledges that this bill is not all that the universalists wanted, having gone through the long, torturous route of legislative compromise, but the debate in America on health care, I think, has shifted, and is now on a new plane. It is no longer about whether or not to have universal health care, but how to make it better. Although I'm a little scared by the legislation, I do feel some of the exuberance that another progressive landmark has been reached.

The New York Times published today a strong, provocative editorial by a biographer of Franklin Roosevelt: Jean Edward Smith. She throws her rhetorical weight on behalf of those liberals who urge President Obama to forsake bipartisan consensus and to forge a true program of universal healthcare with a bare liberal majority. She holds up FDR as a model, showing that he did not seek the blessing of Wall Street to pass meaningful financial reform, nor did Roosevelt feel any need to appease the virulent opposition of business interests to pass his calls for minimum wage rates and maximum work hours. You don't have to satisfy the foxes in order to protect the hens. Though, I suspect too much damage has been done to public opinion regarding universal healthcare at this point, so that it may be too late to make such strong moves, and now the game is just about covering one's ass and getting any bill passed, to be able to argue during the campaign season that real progress has been made and it is a success - what they call "politics as usual".

It does seem to me like the conservatives have been playing Obama for a fool, and that he has gladly accepted that role. For instance, it was not many weeks ago when he was insisting that the "public option" (the option to buy health insurance from the government) was vital and necessary to his universal healthcare proposal, but the conservatives got him to renounce that and to accept the idea of "insurance co-ops" (a way for private actors to provide insurance alternatives to the usual insurance businesses), and then the conservatives insisted that these co-ops are unacceptable. I don't know, maybe Obama is satisfied that he has already secured for himself a decent place in history as America's first black president, and it is enough for him just to keep from creating bad scandals and disgracing himself, so that the fight in him is just no longer there, since in his mind he has won already, even if those who were pulling for him are only losing.

This may actually have some interesting personal ramifications for me. I can only find it ruefully amusing that, by the end of all this, not only will I not have healthcare coverage, but I may also be a criminal for failing to buy insurance from a private insurer, since healthcare reform will be largely reduced to government mandates for the people to buy health insurance, which the insurers even love since this means more business is being tossed their way through legal compulsion. Well, if there is one thing the government can do well, it is to punish and break people, and as Obama is learning now, it is much easier to direct that government action against the weakest, powerless people instead of elite interests such as insurers and Wall Street financiers. Maybe this would make for a great anti-poverty program, too: just make it a crime to be poor! See, it's not so hard to make a perfect world. Hasn't the War on Drugs done wonders to end drug abuse and addiction? You just have to dare to dream big dreams, and, yes, we can make change happen - yes, we can!

( Op-Ed )

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Rich Lowry takes on Michael Moore's trumpeting of Cuban healthcare and how it's not all it's cracked up to be:

Cuban health care works only for the select few: if you are a high-ranking member of the party or the military and have access to top-notch clinics; or a health-care tourist who can pay in foreign currency at a special facility catering to foreigners; or a documentarian who can be relied upon to produce a lickspittle film whitewashing the system.

Ordinary Cubans experience the wasteland of the real system. Even aspirin and Pepto-Bismol can be rare, and there's a black market for them. According to a report in the Canadian National Post: "Hospitals are falling apart, surgeons lack basic supplies and must reuse latex gloves. Patients must buy their sutures on the black market and provide bed sheets and food for extended hospital stays."

How could it be any different when Cuba embarked on a campaign of economic self-sabotage with the revolution of 1959? It went from third in per capita food consumption in Latin America to near the bottom, according to a State Department report. Per capita consumption of basic foodstuffs like cereals and meat actually has declined from the 1950s. There are fewer cars (true of no other country in the hemisphere), and development of electrical power has trailed every other Latin American country except Haiti.

... The only reason to fantasize about Cuban health care is to stick a finger in the eye of the Yanquis. For the likes of Michael Moore, the true glory of Cuba is less its health care than the fact that it is an enemy of the United States. That's why romanticizing Cuban medicine isn't just folly, but itself qualifies as a kind of sickness.

I can agree that extolling the virtues of totalitarian Cuba is philosophically and morally dubious. Yet, we do have serious problems with healthcare, and laissez faire is not the model to follow for this kind of good and services, as the market has to be supplemented with more than minimal regulation to ensure an outcome that we can live with.


(Source: Rich Lowery at RealClearPolitics.com)

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