President Obama is back in Washington and the healthcare debate is still raging. Yesterday, the President seemed to jettison the public plan and the White House announced that in the next two weeks, he will make a major policy address on healthcare. Here are five vital points that the President must make in his speech and Democrats must adopt if we're going to pass meaningful healthcare reform this year.
1. The President Must State That a Mandate For Universal Coverage is Non-Negotiable
More than anything else that has been proposed, creating a mandate for every American to have some form of healthcare coverage is the key to a fairer, more efficient healthcare system. Having a mandate is also vital to keeping the insurance industry at the negotiating table and giving the President the leverage to make other large-scale changes to the health insurance market. The President must acknowledge that he has learned from Hillary Clinton's campaign the necessity of an insurance mandate and that in no way, shape or form will he sign legislation that does not guarantee every American healthcare coverage.
2. The President Must Take Ownership of a Plan
No more dueling Senate and House bills. The President must outline his plan and his vision for healthcare reform in explicit detail. He needs to be the leader on healthcare reform. One main reason the Democrats lost the healthcare debate in August was because there wasn't a single policy to defend. Every idea that was ever proposed by a Democrat, ranging from single-payer plans, to insurance co-operatives, to the public plan got lumped together and attacked. Without a clear, well-defined policy in place, Americans got scared of the vagueness. There was nothing explicit to defend other than reform itself, and Democrats were left running to plug holes in a leaky dam.
3. The President Must Remind Americans Why Healthcare Reform is Important
With all the talk of whether or not to include a public plan, death panels and socialized medicine, Americans lost sight of why healthcare reform was vital in the first place. President Obama needs to paint a vivid, emotive picture of the need for healthcare reform.
Republicans seized on the most emotional aspects of healthcare reform, like rationing and end of life care, and a single Facebook post from Sarah Palin in many ways defined the August debate. Instead of fighting fire with fire, Democrats tried to fight fire with statistics. And they lost. Democrats need to stop slinging statistics and start pumping up the emotion. President Obama and Democrats must be explicit and say that it's not ok and it's not the American way to leave citizens to die without health insurance coverage. The President needs to say that opposing reform means opposing small businesses and the self-employed, since right now, they're the ones paying the highest insurance premiums. The President needs to say that ignoring healthcare means placing an anchor on American-made products that we're trying to sell overseas.
4. The President Must Call Out His Detractors
Republicans who are opposed to improving healthcare and providing health insurance to those without it are thwarting reform without offering alternatives. By attacking Democrats' efforts at reform without offering solutions of their own, they have highlighted that they think things are fine just the way they are. It's time to call them out on it. The President must say that he likes a healthy debate and knows that on an issue as complex as healthcare, there are going to be ideological differences. Nevertheless, he must make it crystal clear that ideological entrenchment and attacking healthcare for political gain is tantamount to inactivity and cowardice. If Republicans want to block the President's plans for healthcare reform, Democrats must demand in every interview, town hall and speech that their opponents offer a plan to fix what's wrong with healthcare that offers more than tort reform and vague references to cost-cutting.
5. Healthcare is More Important than Re-election
Healthcare reform is imperative. Sixty-three percent of personal bankruptcies are fueled by high medical bills, 18,000 Americans die each year because they don't have insurance coverage and ignoring healthcare will cripple American businesses. More than all that, ignoring the shortcomings of the US healthcare system and turning a blind eye to those lacking sufficient coverage is just plain wrong. The President must go out on a limb and state that for him, healthcare reform is more important than re-election. He must state that issues like healthcare reform are precisely why he ran for President and he will not ignore them for political expediency. A pledge of support and display of courage will do more than anything else to illustrate why healthcare reform is imperative, and create momentum to pass meaningful legislation. Of course, the President could try for healthcare reform and fail, but that is a risk that every great leader needs to be willing to take.
Thanks HP
The president needs to start practicing marketing 101. First get rid of all the so called "experts" that couldn't sell a heater to an Eskimo and hire some salespeople to take their place. My method of teaching inexperienced salespeople how to get past objections to buying whatever I'm selling can easily be applied to any product including Universal health care. It goes like this:
Feature
Benefit
Advantage
Close
Using this outline for everything you talk about to a potential buyer, in this case a consumer (voter) who is not sold on Universal health care, you can respond to ANY objection in mid conversation without the need to have complete and total knowledge of the product you're selling. (Best left to engineers, scientists, inventors, etc.)
Secondly, using this system, you gain CONTROL of the conversation in an easy, relaxing, and unthreatening manner that allows you to RELABEL the objections you’re experiencing to more consumer friendly titles and eliminate FEAR labels like “Death Panels,” with friendly labels like “Life Counseling.”
Using this technique and applying it to the health care debate (fear) will go a long way to explaining the WHY of health care reform.
So using the points in Coopers article the outline of your argument (sales pitch) would go something like this:
Objection for point #1 in the article: No Mandates for the Uninsured
Feature: (Universal Coverage) If we implement “Nation Wide Coverage” (Relabeled from “Universal Healthcare” or “Public Plan”) that covers all of our citizens,
Just how does another MILLION health-care related bankruptcies over 4 years help OUR country, OUR economy, the uninsured or ANYTHING ...other than the industry profit margins? THIS blatant giveaway by CONgress sells out the very lives and well being of OUR citizens for many years, stripping great numbers of them every bit of their respect, dignity and money.
It's NOT even SANE and deserves veto!
Better yet, Medicare or CONgress' Health Care Plan available through EVERY employer 'immediately', but ONLY IF YOU WANT IT, or you can keep your current insurance plan. End of story.
No bill has universal coverage and the President has never called for Universal Coverage so what is to negotiate? The reality, which a British person would not be attuned to, are that the bills are intended to capture more clients for private Ins. Cos. by using state powers.
"2. The President Must Take Ownership of a Plan"
Ask yourself why he hasn't already? Yet he will lecture about doctors' decision making. The reason is that if he takes ownership of a plan he has to "show his cards" on the public option. If no public option, loses faith with voters. If has one, no ins. co. money for his next campaign. He will not take ownership, but give some guidelines about his feelings a little more than before.
"5. Healthcare is More Important than Re-election"
He is a Chicago politician. It's not.
Correction, he may have done so in the campaign, he has not recently.
Nothing was done about Wall Street. Nothing will be done, and the president signaled that in his Wall Street speech where he urged "innovation"--even more exotic paper practices.
The health industry controls this bill. Do you hear any of them complaining? This bill is for them in all respects. The administration used the ruse of the bill to confirm Bush policies on non-negotiation on drug prices too.
That is how the President is "dealing with both."
He could explain what "end of Life" counseling means.
He could explain his deal with "Big Pharma."
I'll take a breath and list some more. . . .
Dear Sir you either did not read the study or purposely misrepresent it. 63% refer not to the people who went bankrupt because of the high medical bills but to people who went bankrupt while having medical issues. It includes people who went bankrupt because they could not work due to the being sick. It includes people who had $100,000 in credit card debt BEFORE geting sick. The percentage of the bankruptcies to the high medical bills is in mid twenties...
It's funny how in your bizzarro Rushpublican world nothing is ever as bad as claimed, everything is just peachy-keen. Facts, statistics and reality be damned, you've got yours and the heck with the other guy. In your little rose-colored neo-con world, Hurricane Katrina was just a small sprinkling of rain, torture is just a light tickling and Iraq is just a trifling little dust-up with only a few bloody noses and nobody in the U.S. ever gets sick. Must be nice to live in such a world so disconnected from reality. Enjoy your stay while you can.
http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0002-9343/PIIS0002934309004045.pdf