Posted by
Michael Goodell on Monday, August 24, 2009 3:14:21 PM
Twice in the last seventeen years the American people have reached a consensus that there is something wrong with the way we provide and pay for medical care in this country. In both cases, Hillary Clinton’s bid to overhaul health care in the early nineties, and President Barack Obama’s attempt to socialize the medical industry today, the opportunity to achieve necessary reform was squandered through the act of overreaching.
There are two sides to the health care debate. Obamacare opponents maintain the private sector serves as an incubator that produces dramatic improvements in the treatment of injury and disease. Supporters assert that the cost of medical care has outstripped the means of a large and growing percentage of Americans. For many, not just care itself, but even insurance is too expensive.
Both sides are correct. At the top end of the medical pyramid miraculous inventions and new pharmaceutical discoveries are saving lives. At the bottom of the pyramid the system is a wreck. Obviously, the solution should lie in fixing what is broken without endangering what works better in the United States than anywhere else in the world.
Americans, regardless where they fall on the political spectrum, are generally generous, caring people. They don’t like to see people unable to receive the medical care they need. They acknowledge that a single mother of two making $15 an hour working for a company that doesn’t provide health insurance is incapable of finding affordable insurance. They agree that this is wrong, and they want to see it fixed.
That doesn’t mean they want to give up their personal doctor, their own health insurance, or the right to decide what kind of medical care they wish to receive. Yet this is exactly what both ambitious plans threatened to do. Confronted with a problem, both Clinton and Obama sought to remake American medical care from top to bottom.
At least Clinton bothered to attend her own lengthy, swollen and interminable hearings. Obama, on the other hand, had an idea, and turned it over to Congress to flesh it out. And flesh it out they did, producing another thousand plus page document. Obama wanted to extend access to medical care to everybody in the country while dramatically reducing its cost. A noble goal, to which no one should be opposed. That it may well be impossible to achieve is another matter, but the goal is praiseworthy.
Certainly nothing about the bill currently festering in the House of Representatives is in accordance with that goal. Even the Congressional Budget Office has acknowledged that the plan will dramatically increase costs rather than lowering them. With a price tag in excess of one trillion dollars, what is known as Obamacare is destined to fail, and fail tragically.
An unwillingness to seek a bipartisan solution, a kneejerk recourse to name-calling in response to public resistance, and a White House led bid to induce Americans to spy on each other, have pretty much spelled doom to the latest overreach on health care reform.
In one way this is fortunate, as the unwieldy, bureaucrat-encrusted, federal government empowering bill would have been a disaster. It could very well have bankrupted the nation. In another way it is unfortunate because Representatives, Senators and even Presidents are faithful adherents to the once-burned-twice-shy philosophy of governance. If they can’t transform health care from top to bottom, if they can’t ensure total government control of medical care, they won’t be willing to do anything.
Which is a tragedy for the single mother of two, the young family, and their aging parents. Those who need help the most will find their interests have been sacrificed, once again, in the interest of partisan politics.
Instead of pursuing incremental reform, those driving this debate have assumed an all-or-nothing position. They won’t get it all, which means the American people will get nothing.