Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/health/page/16/)
About health and the struggle for universal health care.
The American Revolution is not over. The principles, morals and manners of a representative democracy, of a republic,require an insistence that our representatives act in accordance with the public good. It requires manners based on a heart of love.
Lauren Reichelt, an expert on health care, has taken my blog concerning the health care debate to task on several grounds. First, she has criticized me because I am not familiar with the details of the six bills currently circulating, but instead have focused on what I called the meaning of the legislation. Second, she criticizes me for confusing cost reduction and spending reduction. Finally, she criticizes me because various arguments that I made seem to echo right wing arguments. I would like to respond all three of these criticisms.
First, although the details of the bill are not yet known, its essential content is clear, and has been clear for months; long before the congressional antics the basic ideas were worked out by the administration along with insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies, large corporations and other “players.”
Earth Day 1970 found me protesting for greater environmental protections. But for many years afterwards, I figured that the issue was a no-brainer. You just don’t destroy the biosphere, the food and shelter your species depends on for survival. I put my efforts into the women’s movement instead, because there seemed to be a lot of inertia about women’s rights and society was crying out for greater gender equality. In retrospect, I was right about my second assumption — there was a lot of inertia concerning women’s rights — but I was wrong about my first — environmental action wasn’t a no-brainer after all.
This is great. I wish I had time right now to listen to more of these stories. Let it load, click on the tiny faces on the wall and a video pops up and people tell their health care stories. From the folks who launched the site today:
Read through the stories, add your name to the wall of supporters and then forward the site to your family and friends. We need you to help us spread the word.
I have joined this blog because I want to encourage the development of an independent left. For that to happen, we need to get beyond Obama, and to do that we need to understand his limitations. I welcome comments and further discussion. Today I will take up health care. Universal health care has long been the central plank of a progressive or left platform, and at first glance it would appear that Obama is on the verge of achieving this.
It’s been interesting to hear my readers’ theories about why women have experienced a decline in happiness in the last 40 years. (Go look at the responses to my first post on this topic). As I said, everyone seems to have their own hypothesis why this might be so. But even though I talked about my own conjectures two days ago, I felt that something was a little off. So I went back to the General Social Survey (GSS) study that everybody’s citing.
Some days I really don’t want to read my newspaper. Today was one of them. It wasn’t the hydrogen peroxide bomb or Obama’s waffling on the Patriot Act. It wasn’t the Palestinians and the Israelis, who still aren’t negotiating. And it wasn’t the ongoing court battle over a new Wisconsin law granting some rights to domestic partners.
President Obama told Congress he would not sign a health care bill that added any amount to the national debt — a criterion he does not use when considering escalating war in Afghanistan or bailouts to banks. In a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argues that there is no way to meet that criterion unless health care reform includes eliminating the profit motive from medicine, including licensing doctors so that they get a fixed salary each year rather than, as now, making profits from prescribing more tests, procedures and visits that increase their incomes. He writes:
There are two interrelated critical issues in health reform right now: how to extend and improve insurance coverage, and how to control the unsustainable rise in health care expenditures. Virtually all of the current legislative attention is focused on the first issue but, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, none of the proposals now on the table offers any credible solution for the control of rising costs. Without control of health cost inflation, the present system will not be viable much longer.
Imagine that government services were designed and delivered by people who really care. Wouldn’t that have been so attractive we would have had universal healthcare by now? But what does it mean to really care for the people who receive government services? My friend Chase knows what it means for her in her office. She is a member of the covenant group my wife and I joined at our Unitarian Universalist Church.