Time to Fight
by: Lauren Reichelt on December 16th, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I’ve been reading various healthcare diaries from around Left Blogistan searching for a strategy to salvage healthcare reform. The most interesting so far are a pair dealing with polls that surfaced on Daily Kos.
fladem writes about the sudden collapse in support for health care reform as measured in the recent WSJ/NBC poll.
The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll coming out later today will show opposition to the health care bill growing — mainly from disappointed liberals, who are very much disappointed to see the public option getting thrown out.
The poll has 47% saying the Obama health care plan is a bad idea, to only 32% who say it’s a good idea…45% say it is not acceptable for a plan to not include a public option. But, 58% would find inclusion of a Medicare Buy in acceptable.
Daily Kos diarist arodb writes about a recent WaPo/ABC poll taken after the defeat of a proposal allowing the re-importation of drugs.
This poll also finds a significant drop in support for health care reform in response to the defeat of an amendment which would have benefited the American people.
But Obama and the Democrats have had decidedly less success convincing the public that their health proposals will bring positive change. More than half of those polled, 53 percent, see higher costs for themselves if the proposed changes go into effect than if the current system remains intact.
It looks to me as if the public is getting smarter and is becoming less willing to have smoke blown in their collective face. Chris Bowers at Open Left urges us to swallow our bitterness and help Obama to pass his sham of a bill.
I strongly disagree.
I believe that if Obama and Emanuel believe we progressives will stand our ground and if they begin to fear their ability to pass a bill will become endangered, they will find a new solution. In all likelihood, Lieberman will be thrown to the political lions, and progressive features will find their way into health care reform in some way, shape or form. But this won’t happen if we blink.
Keep Harry Reid’s phone lines tied up: 202-224-3542 in DC; 702-388-5030 in Las Vegas.
Call the White House comment line: 202-456-1111. Be as vituperative as you like.
And of course call your senator and urge him/her to stand up for the voters. The Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.
The White House cannot afford to fail. They will pass something. If they sense that plummeting support from the “democratic wing of the democratic party” threatens their bill, Gibbs will stop calling Howard Dean “dangerously irrational” and a means will be found to reinsert an element of reform back into the health care reform bill.
They are not really being held hostage by Lieberman. He is simply their easily sacrificed fall guy who is allowing them to pander to corporate interests while claiming they have no other choice.
Fall guys are dispensible. And I, for one, will be delighted to see this one go.
There are a number of good items in the current “version” of the yet-to-be Senate bill, and indivually they are worth salvaging. Where the bill turns from a positive to a negative is the inclusion of individual mandates and the exclusion of sufficient financial relief for huge swaths of the un- or underinsured either to pay the required premiums or to escape bankrutcy when the insurance refuses to pay for required care.
The President created this situation by his hands-off approach, hoping to be able to save his deals with the drug companies and get the least bill possible. He encouraged appeasement and capitulation even as more and more of what was good in the Senate HELP version was watered down or taken out, with Reid carrying his water. Obama said this was his top priority then showed no interest in focusing his words or his White House on achieving anything more than marginal insurance reform. He made one very big miscalculation though, when he forgot or chose to ignore the very people who went to the polls for him.
It’s time for Mr. Obama to get his hands dirty, to stop declaring victory and join his base in the trenches. If Obama wants health care reform, he’ll stop cutting deals and start leading.
I believe it has become extremely dangerous to draw any conclusions from ‘information’ taken from Rupert Murdock’s WSJ/NBC poll.
If we are truly in the trenches then we can see that the Big Pharm ahs pralyzed the public option. we need to apss something that can be comprehensive enough to begin the onerous work of reform adn not permit the notion to continue that health care is an isuue that cannot be passed in congress. this is the first eyar and to apss a bill that can be finetunes with support from folks who are voters and are stakeholders is very very critical.
we don’t live in much of a democracy–that is why joe liebermann is such a threat, that is why the folks who are paid off and determined to keep their perks at any cost, even the lives of the unisured and the sick is so succcessful.
there is such fear that the governm,ent will balance this bill and impoverish people rather than a step up to share sanely so that those who are now being ruined for life because of the illnesses that we are creating as part of our socially darwinistic social consciencelessness and the impact of getting sick on earning a living.
we must pass something to make a substantial diffference. to forbid people from being unisured because they become sick also defeats the industry insureres who discontinue any isnurance bcause honest people use it due to msifortune, while allowing the black market mafia whiote collar incursion to wreak fraud inthe billions nationally as a new cash cow.
we nNEED to apss a health care bill to support our president in his work, and though i amsickened by the ppower of Big pharm, i f we abandion a bill that can bring all the issues to the table and mandate incremental change, the changes we want can be implemented once we sign on to the idea that healh care is not some sacred cow. if we do it alter in obama’s presidency we may find we cut off our nose to spite our face. there is no guarantee of a future for anyone ever–
and also it takes time to make changes evealuate needs and correct course.
i respect and admire Howard dean, I am sickened by the mishegas here…but we are shortsighted and foolsih if we do not look at the real causes of teh probelms we are experienceing_-too many people do not belive that ehalth care can be achieved without an onerous burden on earners. that is just not rue, with or without the war.
in fact the sisues about the war were raised far more strongly by well to do so called liberals who iobjected to paying for ehalth care AND a war.
shabby to piss on a bill that can begin to bring us together across party lines and the objections legitimate or not of the Big Pharm paid off congress people and the naysayers and Obama obstructionists like Joe Lieberman in the Democratic party.
if this were easy we would already have the perfect bill. this isn’t a talk alot end run around reality like the Clinton era. we have degenerated badly becasue of that apporach and the enabling of the uberrich by Bush as well. really it seems to me that if you are working with an autistic kid you nurture every nmove in the direction of healthy growth–this is not a step backwards, even if it is a baby step it is a critical step and every journey begins with a single step.
if we allow the right wing reactionary stronghold of the uber rich in America of all the parties tomdefeat us here, we lose the capacity to move forward, all the while the right is planning to utilize our isarray and lack of progress to move their negative agenda forward.
we can make a hue and cry when we have a bill.what is this notion that we have a country that at present is able to see the risks and the benefitsd clearly, given the self-interest and powerful sway of the oligarchy over the media?
i think we need to sretngthen good not help to defeat it because it isn’t fully blossumed, only a bud
Obama’s first mistake was to confuse our health CARE system with the lack of ANY health care insurance SYSTEM. At least in Minnesota, where for-profit health care insurance companies are banned from doing business (despite the fact that the biggest one has its headquarters here), we have a pretty good health care system. If other states don’t, let them copy what Minnesota has done.
But here, as elsewhere, there is nothing remotely resembling a health care insurance SYSTEM, but only a hodge-podge of plans which leave a lot of people without access to health care. Of course, we’re not so heartless as to ignore them, but if you’re uninsured, you have access only to emergency room care – which is both the most expensive and the worst kind of health care. There is needless suffering and torture – sometimes premature death – because of this. And we end up funding it with a regressive property tax, instead of with taxes which bear some resemblance to the ability to pay, even though the post-1980 federal income tax is much less progressive than it used to be in Minnesota in the days when liberal Republican governors and conservative rural legislators, who nevertheless supported progressive taxation, governed the state most of the time.
It’s time to reintroduce Nixon’s universal health care insurance plan. Yes, it would have been privately operated, but at least we would have a system including everyone, without the ridiculous concept of “mandating” health care insurance, instead of enabling people to get it. Don’t let your perception of Nixon as a person interfere with the realization that he offered some good proposals – which the Democrats blocked because they weren’t about to let him get any credit for SOLVING a major problem, instead of merely tinkering with it, as Congress usually does, regardless of which party “controls” Congress.
His negative income tax, adjusted for inflation, with monthly instead of annual payments, would be a much more cost-efficient and targeted way of helping those who really need help, while at the same time stimulating the economy much more than the corporate bailouts or the sector-by-sector approach, which leaves many unemployed workers still looking for jobs because their skills don’t match.
Harold Stassen and I figuratively shared the telephone booth in which the 1956 dump-Nixon convention was held.
But during his first term in office, Nixon’s proposals were as good as – indeed better than – what I would have expected of Rockefeller, Scranton or Humphrey.
I don’t hold grudges against politicians who have changed for the better. Who the initiator is is irrelevant to the merits of public policy ideas – even if the proposals are not based on political principles, as may well have been the case.