Historic Achievement For A More Perfect Union
President Obama speaking on passage of Historic Health Reform Bill
“Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks in opposition to this flawed health care bill”….We heard this canned statement over and over and over again tonight. We heard about the “Cornhusker kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Gator aid. We heard that this bill, if it passes, will make Americans less free. We heard that members of the military would loose their health coverage, that abortions would be paid for, that Medicare would be slashed. We heard from John Boehner that this was not the time to create bureaucracies, that there was no transparency, that there was not time to read the bill, that the people do not want this bill. His remarks continued to accent his distress over the process. If I had not been watching and only listening to his remarks over the radio, one would certainly have gotten the distinct impression that he was a very, very angry man. The tone and inflections in his voice gave one to believe that John Boehner just might be a little bit concerned that history was about to pass him by.
Health reform has been talked about and debated dating back to Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party which called for health insurance for industry. In his first term, President Roosevelt appointed a committee which was to report a program that addressed old-age and unemployment issues, medical care and health insurance. President Truman proposed a single insurance system that would cover all Americans with public subsidies to pay for the poor.
During nearly every Presidential election cycle since those days, every candidate has campaigned on the slogan of “health care for all”. At the end of that cycle, nothing gets done and the cycle continues. We immediately resort back to the status quo. The numbers of uninsured rise, the cost of insurance premiums skyrocket, rescissions continue, out of pocket expenses increase, denials for pre-existing conditions fall off the scales and even children are dropped from coverage.
Well, the time for change is long overdue. Republicans, for too long, have played politics with the lives of all Americans. At every turn, they have denied, delayed, obstructed, lied outright and instilled fear in the hearts and minds of the populace. As Speaker Pelosi said tonight, “all politics are personal”. After tonight, there will be no more politics of fear, no more politics of intimidation, no more threats of personal destruction. All of the talk about process, and all of the whining from republicans with bruised egos, don’t mean a heck of a lot now. What matters to those with no insurance, to those who are uninsured and those who have been bankrupted or lost their homes because of medical bills, simply stated, are results.
Many had given up on health reform with the Senate election results in Massachusetts earlier this year. Many have talked wildly about the upcoming November elections. The insurance companies became emboldened and Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. John Boehner actually began to believe their own words. Their repeated echo’s of “No” with the brazen 30-60% premium increases by Anthem and other insurers, re-awakened a cautious Democratic party. I want to personally thank Sen McConnell, Rep. Boehner and the insurance companies for their inadvertent contributions to the cause of health care reform.
In November 2008, America elected a President who said that he would get health reform done. For this President, it was not just a “slogan”. He took flack from all sides…Republicans and Democrats alike. With a determined Speaker of the House in Nancy Pelosi, President Obama and the U.S. House of Representatives delivered for the good of the American people.
When the sun rises in the east tomorrow, the earth will still be turning on it‘s axis, the American economy will not have collapsed, America will still be free, and there will be no Waterloo….the only thing that will be different tomorrow is that historic health reform for all Americans was passed tonight. History is now on the side of the American people.
Health Care and Freedom
Rep Marsha Blackburn, (R-TN) argues that health reform will make Americans "less free".
“Today is the death of freedom as a cause for celebration,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn just said as she opened the House Republicans’ argument against the health-care bill. Her stem-winder was quick and clean. This bill, she argued, will make Americas less free.
There is a tendency to think this sort of inane hyperbole an innovation of our polarized age. But it isn’t. When Medicare was being considered, the American Medical Association hired Ronald Reagan to record a record housewives could play for their friends. It was called Operation: Coffee Cup, and you can read the text here.
Reagan was a more graceful speaker than Blackburn, but his point was much the same. Kill the bill. “If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it,” he said, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
Well, the bill passed. And moments ago, Rep. Paul Ryan was on the floor of the House, bellowing against Democrats who would dare propose “across-the-board cuts to Medicare.” This is breathless opportunism from Ryan — he has proposed far deeper across-the-board cuts to Medicare, and is making arguments against the Democrats’ bill that would be far more potent and accurate if aimed at his own — but leave that aside for a moment. The GOP’s embrace of the program that Ronald Reagan fought, and that Newt Gingrich sought to let “whither on the vine,” is based on the lived experience seniors have had with the bill: It has made them more, rather than less, free.
Blackburn’s introduction aside, people do not “celebrate” the freedom to not be able to afford lifesaving medical care. They don’t want the freedom to weigh whether to pay rent or take their feverish child to the emergency room. They don’t like the freedom to lose their job and then be told by insurers that they’re ineligible for coverage because they were born with a heart arrhythmia.
When faced with the passage of programs that would deliver people from these awful circumstances, the Republicans adopt a very narrow and cruel definition of the word “freedom.” But when faced with the existence of programs like Medicare, and the recognition that their constituents depend on those programs to live lives free of unnecessary fear and illness, they abandon their earlier beliefs, forget their dire warnings and, when convenient, defend these government protections aggressively. There’s nothing much to be done about that. It is, after all, a free country. But Americans should feel free to ignore these discredited hysterics.
By: Ezra Klein-Washington Post | March 21, 2010; 3:02 PM ET
Who Does Health-care Reform Help?
Jon Cohn spent part of Saturday wandering through the patches of protesters on Capitol Hill. What surprised him, however, was that the protests seemed less about health-care reform than about redistribution itself. To the protesters, Jon says, health-care reform is “about having their money taken for the sake of somebody else’s security. When they hear stories of people left bankrupt or sick because of uninsurance, they are more likely to see a lack of personal responsibility and virtue than a lack of good fortune.”
I see this a lot in my inbox, too. So it’s worth taking a moment to talk about whom health-care reform is really meant to help. There are three major subsidies operating in the health-care system. The first, and most obvious, is Medicare, which covers the elderly. Then there’s Medicaid, which covers some of the very poor. But then there’s the one that people normally forget: The tax break for employer-sponsored health-care insurance. At $250 billion a year, it’s much more expensive than health-care reform, and it subsidizes people with good jobs that offer health-care benefits.
Health-care reform is focused on another group: the working class. People with jobs, but not jobs that are good enough to offer them health-care benefits. People with paychecks, but who aren’t making quite enough money to bear the cost of insurance. People who’re buying insurance on their own, which means they don’t get the good deals that big employers get, and they don’t get a giant tax break to help them out. But these aren’t lazy people, or layabouts. These are people who’ve been left behind in the system. We spend a lot more money to give a lot more help to a lot of folks who need it less than this group does.
That accounts, at least, for the spending side of health-care reform. The new rules on insurers go to help another group: People with bad luck. A preexisting condition is not the fault of the individual. What it means is that they got sick or injured at some point in the past, they get their insurance on their own rather than as part of a bigger group (like an employer’s pool, or Medicare), and they’re not being fraudulent in their dealings with the insurer. When someone who has coverage and then gets sick finds their policy rescinded, that’s also usually not their fault. They had the bad luck to get sick, and the bad luck to have an insurer looking for a loophole to deny them coverage, and then the bad luck to have their insurer actually find one.
These are the folks health-care reform is meant to help. The fact that they can’t afford insurance, though, isn’t evidence of some abdication of personal responsibility. It is evidence that they’re not old, or very poor, or employed by a large corporation that offers health-care insurance. Sickness and health might be capricious, but access to health care doesn’t have to be. It isn’t in other countries, and if Democrats win the vote tonight, it won’t be in ours, either.
By: Ezra Klein | March 21, 2010; 12:18 PM ET
Closing Arguments-The Day of Reckoning
President Obama making the final arguments for Health Reform
My Saturday began on the West lawn of Capitol Hill, where conservative activists were mounting one final, desperate effort to block health care reform. They came by the thousands, carrying flags and pushing strollers, in a demonstration of genuine grassroots fervor. They chanted “Kill the Bill,” over and over again, in a vaguely menacing tone that, perhaps, foretold a bit of ugliness to come.
But the most remarkable thing about the demonstration was how little it had to do with health care. The signs said “Stop socialism,” “A government of laws, not men,” “Respect our constitution–preserve our republic.” Nobody talked about death panels. Instead, one speaker–a Chicago radio host, I believe–attacked the First Lady’s obesity initiative. “Michelle, keep your hands off my kids’ lunchbox!” Yet another protest sign seemed to capture the mood perfectly: “This isn’t about health care. This is about control.”
A few hours later, inside the Capitol complex, President Obama urged House Democrats to do precisely what the protesters feared: Pass health care reform. It was not the first time he’d given such a speech. Just before the House voted on its initial reform bill in November, he’d come to Capitol Hill. And, broadly speaking, his intent had been the same: To embolden the Democrats by making them enthusiastic about the cause, demonstrating his own commitment to it, and making clear the political virtues of success.
But, like the protesters, this time Obama seemed to dwell less on health care and more on the significance of the moment. He invoked Lincoln, and the importance of fighting for principle. And then he invoked the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society, reminding members that their purpose in office was not to win elections–it was to make life better for their constituents. His closing argument was not about policy or politics. It was about posterity. And it was good.
For the last week or so, ever since it’s become apparent a climactic vote on health care was approaching, I’ve also been thinking about closing arguments. For most of the past year–and, really, it’s been far more than a year–the argument has been most practical. What would the bill do? What wouldn’t it do? And it’s easy enough to make the case for reform on those grounds.
As readers of this space know, I like to think of reform as achieving three broad goals: Making sure anybody can get an affordable insurance policy, shoring up everybody’s coverage so that it provides real economic security, and transforming medical care in order to make it both more effective and less expensive. Those arguments got a lot stronger this week, when the Congressional Budget Office determined that the final reform package–including both the Senate’s health care bill and the proposed amendments to it–would provide coverage to 32 million additional people, strengthen the baseline for coverage, and reduce the federal deficit over time.
But there’s another argument for health care reform, one that is at once more subtle and more sweeping. The disturbing part of our health care system is the financial and physical suffering it causes. But the unjust part of our health care system is the way it distributes that suffering. There are things all of us can do to stay healthy–we can eat right, we can exercise, we can avoid excessive risks. But even when we do the right things, we remain vulnerable.
You can have the perfect diet, jog three miles every day, and wake up one morning to discover you have cancer. So now you face mortal peril. And if, on top of everything else, you can’t pay your medical bills, you face financial ruin, as well.
Chance, of course, is part of life. Americans, in particular, seem to accept that. But every now and then, we have decided that need for such expansion–that there was, even now, the kind of common vulnerability to chance that required the sorts of initiatives we had enacted in the past. It happened with the New Deal, when we created the modern welfare state, and then again with the Great Society, when we expanded it.
The signature programs of these eras, Social Security and Medicare, work because they address a vulnerability we all share. Everybody is at risk of getting old; and everybody is at risk of misfortune, physical and financial, when that happens. To protect against that misfortune–to insure against that misfortune–all of us contribute. We all give, in the form of financial contributions; and we all get, in the form of financial security. Together, quite literally, we are stronger than when we are apart.
The conservatives protesting on the Capitol lawn Saturday see things differently. Health care reform isn’t about contributing money for the sake of their own security; it’s about having their money taken for the sake of somebody else’s security. When they hear stories of people left bankrupt or sick because of uninsurance, they are more likely to see a lack of personal responsibility and virtue than a lack of good fortune. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has observed, theirs is an extreme version of a view common (although surely not universal) on the right: That individuals can fend for themselves, as long as they are responsible and as long as the government gets out of the way.
There’s obviously a balance to be struck between these two world views. But, broadly speaking, conservative ideas about responsibility and vulnerability have dominated political discussion for most of the last four decades. That will change on Sunday, if health care reform passes. The bill before Congress may be flawed. And the process that produced it may be severely flawed. But it is, nevertheless, an expression of the idea that we–as as society–are not prepared to let people continue to suffer such dire consequences just because they’re unlucky.
A few hours after Obama was speaking, the Capitol had nearly cleared out. Leadership staff were meeting in House Speaker Pelosi’s office while a few stray congressmen were giving floor speeches to a nearly empty chamber. By and large, though, members had scattered–a tell-tale sign that Pelosi was confident. If she’d still needed to do serious arm-twisting, she’d have held a series of votes to keep members on the Hill.
I walked the length of the building and then out to the east lawn where the conservative protesters, who spent the day visiting (and, on a few occasions, haranguing) House Democrats, had reconvened. The crowd was more subdued now. It was smaller, too–hundreds instead of thousands. The setting sun behind the capitol dome cast a long shadow over them, as night approached. But a new dawn would come soon enough. And with it, perhaps, a new era.
By: Jonathan Cohn-Senior Editor-The New Republic-March 21, 2010
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