Supporters of Obama's health care reform are "keeping a stiff upper lip" reports The Hill as reaction to three tough days of oral argument and questioning on aspects of President Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The entire health reform effort seems to hang in balance, dangerously. It looks like a very real possibility that Americans who do and will need health care, and who do or will have health conditions -- i.e., pretty much everyone -- will again be excluded from coverage for pre-existing conditions and others priced out of coverage at alarming rates if the unusually conservative and ideological Supreme Court backs the GOP.
It didn't have to be this way. We had the power to make things different. In fact, we still have the power to make things different.
As poorly as the administration calculated, strategized, composed and communicated their reforms, they did what Administrations do. They brought industry to the table, they excluded single payer advocates, they vastly overestimated their ability to bring the other side on board, they vastly underestimated the extreme ideology that opposed reform and they botched the messaging of all of it.
Candidate Barack Obama campaigned on universal coverage. He told would-be supporters that, if he were "starting from scratch," single-payer would be ideal. Indeed, he even understood that the only true reform, that would sufficiently control costs and actually achieve universal coverage, was a single payer, government-sponsored health care system. The evidence is overwhelming that only such a system can achieve those goals.
President Barack Obama however, not only quickly abandoned any thought of a fight for a true universal system, he set his left flank where he wanted to end up: the public option. In addition to current private plans, geographical regions would have another choice, a "public option" which would have the power of the federal government behind it to negotiate down premiums. Absent a single payer system, there could be some real cost savings this way and, some thought, an opening to a future single payer system. Though perhaps this weak option is all one could expect from a centrist administration, it was not what progressives and the Democratic base either really wanted nor should have fought for.
But progressives did fight for the public option. With some notable exceptions, almost exclusively. Instead of being the rallying grassroots campaign and reasonable solution desired by all progressives, universal, single-ayer health care became the pariah of the organized progressives, scoffed at and scorned as unachievable.
It should have come with no surprise that starting where you want to end in a negotiation is a sure way to not get what you want. Progressives could have not only kept their integrity, but they could have provided a left flank as a foil for the administration. Centrist Dems and less-extreme Repubs could have seen a public option as a place to go. The administration should have allowed it, encouraged it, engaged it, used it. Progressives should have fought like hell for it.
No one can say that the outcome then would have been the public option, or wouldn't have. No one knows what the political climate could have been with a strong, organized fight from progressives for Medicare for all. But without a strategy that included such a fight, it could easily have been predicted that public option would not be the outcome.
If we had ended up with a single-payer system, then of course the "individual mandate problem" is non-existent. Even if we had ended up with a "public option," we would not have had this the question before the Supreme Court this spring. Justice Kennedy himself suggested so in his comments that the Individual Mandate problem could be avoided by a tax funded single payer national health service.
So, while progressives, Democrats, Americans who want affordable health care for all of us go forward wringing our hands and "keeping a stiff upper lip," blaming the misinformed conservative ideologues in Congress, in the Supreme Court, in Tea Party get-ups, perhaps we should take a long look in the mirror.
This is a fight for the most basic value a society can have. Will we care for our people or let them become sick, bankrupt, disabled and die unnecessarily because we failed to fight for an affordable quality health care system that covers everyone. Will we slash every other government program virtually out of existence to fund an ever-escalating for-profit insurance system? Isn't it time to fight for Medicare for all?
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A big change is coming. Let's manage that change with education. We'll be actually caring for everyone. That's different, but some Americans have already experienced health care for all. We can learn from them:
http://www.medicareforall.org/pages/Testimonials
A very high percentage of citizens in other free-market countries like it, such as:
http://www.medicareforall.org/pages/Canada
It is time to know the positive (employment opportunities, peace of mind) that will replace the negative (hardships).
http://www.medicareforall.org/pages/Explanation
Start by millions of one-on-one contacts. Did you get the e-mails in the fall of 2011 (Pflouffe) and in early 2012 (Obama) about the key ingredient about how Barack Obama became president? One-on-one contacts were incredibly effective. That was the message from them ... and now from me. Were those contacts full of (negative, reactive) complaining about the current situation? Not so much as being full of (positive, proactive) hope!
- Bob the Health and Health Care Advocate
Some activists for health care for all (that is, single-payer health care, improved Medicare for All) are probably very excited. If I recall correctly from my glances at articles this week, there has been some degree of comment(s) among Supreme Court Justices that referenced health care for all (as noted). At its extreme, a change of direction the U.S. Congress could establish and pass health care for all -- universal health care -- single-payer health care -- IMPROVED Medicare for All.
If anyone is thinking that, I suggest that you come back to reality as I quickly did. If that passage of a law occurred, the details would assuredly NOT be what we want. Somehow, some way, they would mess it up. It certainly would not look like H.R. 676. Fortunately, any "progress" like that is still not possible ... for obvious reasons that have been in place for decades. We must establish the power of the people first so that the American people are mentally prepared for change and so that some of those informed citizens (voters) will establish the political will that the politicians say is missing. Some might call that "fighting". So be it. At the Medicare for All website we word it like this: "Millions of informed citizens communicating: more power than the opposition’s media and lobbyists."
- Bob the Health and Health Care Advocate
http://www.medicareforall.org/pages/Explanation
- Bob the Health and Health Care Advocate