The George Washington University College Democrats
Ideology: Liberal | Writing from: Washington, D.C.
“If this bill becomes law, the lash of the dictator will be felt.” The lash of the dictator!
“If you don’t [stop this bill], 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.” The horror! Obamacare will surely be the death of free America.
Although all too familiar today, these quotes actually have nothing to do with President Obama’s plans for healthcare reform. The first one was a warning from a New York congressman about what would happen if the Social Security Act of 1935 passed. The second was Ronald Reagan in 1961 cautioning against the creation of Medicare. Needless to say, neither of these alarmist predictions came true. In fact, both programs have been wildly successful. Social Security has dramatically reduced the poverty rate among seniors, while Medicare continues to provide highly-rated insurance – and there has been no fascist/socialist/communist/jihadist takeover of the federal government.
Many conservatives know that government-run programs will not lead to an era of darkness in our country. Their language simply reflects a politically motivated cynicism that has permeated their policy debates, primarily since Bill Kristol penned an infamous memo in 1993 designed to “kill” President Clinton’s health care initiative. In it, Kristol wrote the following:
Simple, green-eyeshades criticism of the plan … only wins concessions, not surrender. … Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted.
Why such strident opposition? Kristol feared that Clinton’s plan would be a political nightmare for Republicans:
It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.
In other words, Kristol’s memo—which was hugely influential on Republicans’ strategy—was pure politics. They conceded that the plan would be popular in the long run if it passed, so they decided to deny tens of millions of Americans health insurance and stop the bill in its tracks.
Republicans have all but admitted that they’re following the same strategy this time. Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl said his party wouldn’t even support a deficit-neutral, public option-free bill of any sort. President Obama’s health care initiative has been tarred by Republicans as “socialism” or a “government takeover of medicine,” just as proposals by numerous past presidents have been.
But even notwithstanding the long history of conservative sensationalism surrounding the issue, no reading of the president’s agenda should lead anyone to believe that Coke and Pepsi will be replaced by U.S. government-brand cola. There is no provision for “death panels,” nor anything remotely similar, in any proposal offered. Illegal immigrants cannot, despite Congressman Joe Wilson’s shouts to the contrary, buy coverage under the plan. Obama’s proposed public option is just that—a purely optional insurance plan meant to compete with private insurance. And nobody will have to switch from private insurance plans to a public one if they don’t want to.
What Obama’s plan would do is cover all Americans and lower costs in the long run. Insuring all Americans in and of itself will help lower costs by expanding access to preventive care and eliminating the need for private insurers to jack up premiums to cover uncompensated care. The federal government would also reimburse catastrophic coverage, removing this burden from private insurers and lowering premiums in the process. In addition, the government would invest in cost-saving measures such as digitizing records, which would help reduce the exorbitant overhead costs that plague private insurers. The plan would also provide tax credits to small businesses so that they could more easily cover their employees. And it would end the discriminatory practices in which private insurers deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. These are practical solutions that are designed only to meet President Obama’s stated goals—universal access to quality, affordable coverage.
Enough examples of successful public programs exist to provide Americans with the faith necessary to support their government and its institutions in improving the health care market. The United States will not become a Maoist nightmare. Reform is urgently needed in this country, and we shouldn’t let cynical straw man appeals derail us from working together to construct the best possible remedy for our problems. The time has come for this country to join the rest of the modern world and ensure that all of its citizens had access to quality, affordable health insurance. President Obama and congressional Democrats have demonstrated their eagerness to work with Republicans to find a consensus package that would do that. If Republicans really do want to help insure all Americans and lower health care costs like they claim, it’s time they put down the knife and get to work.
1) Social Security and Medicare have been “wildly successful?” If by “wildly successful” you mean “nearly bankrupt,” then yes, I suppose they are.
2) Re: death panels, I wrote an article about those recently (link here: http://thepoliticizer.com/2009/10/16/jacobs-palin-right-left-wrong-on-healthcare/). Even one of Obama’s top economic advisors, Robert Reich, openly admitted: “If you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.” And who is “we?” The government.
3) Re: coverage for illegals, how do you know that illegals won’t be covered, other than that the president simply said in a speech that they wouldn’t be. It’s hard for Democrats to say there will be no coverage for illegal aliens when they’ve specifically blocked amendments that would make that clear.
4) Also covered in the article I wrote is the Republican health care plan. I suggest the Democrats (both nationally and at GW) take a look at the plan, which would provide affordable, high quality care for all Americans without getting the government involved in yet another major industry (and no, there aren’t a ton of successful big government programs).
Alec, the funding issue is separate from the effectiveness of the programs themselves. Seniors rate Medicare higher than private insurance — which by the way, isn’t in great financial shape either. Both the Medicare and Social Security trust funds could be made solvent with very easy fixes and without diminishing benefits.
Alec,
I believe Dan R responded well to your first point, so I would like to respond to your others.
Regarding “death panels,” that slur has been tossed around because some Americans are afraid that government bureaucrats will be sitting at a table arbitrarily deciding who gets what care, based on financial responsibilities and other concerns. While this certainly may upset many, if not most Americans, the truth is that I bet you would be hard pressed to find anyone in this country willing to pay an arm and a leg for someone else’s extraordinarily expensive procedure. We all would like to pay whatever the price to keep ourselves and our loved ones alive for as long as possible, and certainly this is a noble human desire. But none of us get out of here alive, and this is a sad truth we cannot escape. At some point, a brand new experimental procedure that costs over a million dollars and might keep a 100 year old man alive for another 3 months begins to push us to ask whether it’s really worth it. From a societal perspective, an unrelated family across the country would probably not take too kindly to their taxpayer dollars being spent on procedures that hardly procure a significant success. But don’t start thinking that this is why we can’t have taxpayer dollars funding public health care – right now our taxes are funding insurance companies’ profits rather than the procedures we want our citizens to have. These subsidies need to go, and instead the money should be spent on creating a public plan with government oversight that has fewer restrictions on who gets care than we do today. Yes, even those with health care today have restrictions on the care they receive. Within the last few weeks alone, two children, a new-born baby and a toddler, were denied health care coverage because the baby was too big and the toddler was too small. Also, a mother from Missouri who gave a kidney to her ailing son when his failed was denied coverage for the operation on the grounds that her kidney, not her son’s ailment, was a pre-existing condition. This is an example of the ridiculous behavior we allow our insurance companies to get away with, and they simply will not be honest brokers until they face true competition from a public plan that respects the people it provides for. If you’re afraid of death panels in our health care system, look no further than our insurance companies – death through denied coverage, and death through debt.
Regarding coverage for illegal aliens, this is an argument that simply doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, in my opinion. Whenever someone says that illegals would be covered under a public plan, I wonder how they would sign up. How would a US citizen sign up for the plan anyway? Most likely they would have to register with the government, provide ID, maybe a social security number, permanent address, etc. And when I think of how one signs up for care from an insurance company, I can’t think of any significant differences. Once again, one would need to prove one’s citizenship, provide ID, contact information, social security, etc. I know, because I have a private health care plan myself. So I cannot think of any significant differences between how one would register with the public plan versus how one would register with the private plan, save going through your employer, who provides most of that information for you. But here, illegals who are employed in the US can just as easily trick the companies as they could the pubic plan, if they hide behind the employer. So can the government guarantee that no illegals would be covered under the plan? Probably not, but neither can the companies, so what’s the complaint really about? Furthermore, we already pay for the health of illegals through the expensive costs of treatment in emergency rooms. Illegals who aren’t covered wind up getting sicker than the rest of us because they can’t seek early care. They wind up visiting the ER when their condition gets far worse, and therefore far more expensive to treat. I’m not sure if there have been any studies done on the matter, but I would like to see if it’s possible we could actually save money by providing preventive, cheap care to illegals rather than covering the bills when they get tremendously sick.
Finally, regarding the Republican plan, I tried clicking on your link, but there was an Error 404 with the page, so I couldn’t find the proposal you mentioned unfortunately. If you could send an operable link, that would be great. However, while I’m sure that Republicans have a couple ideas that they want to try with the health care system, one cannot deny that since the beginning of this debate early in the summer, the Republican establishment has not centered their focus on crafting their own version of health care reform, but rather they have attacked, smeared, and lampooned every Democratic idea that makes its way into debate. From the public option, to co-ops, to subsidies for families and stricter regulation, no Democratic idea is any good for the Republicans on Capitol Hill. I have not heard of, read of, nor seen any firm proposal by any Republican or any kind when it comes to health care reform. If there truly is one out there, then I’d love to look at it and see what they really think. But at the moment, I’m quite disillusioned with the Republicans and their brand of politics. It seems that their ideology is defined simply as the opposite of what Obama wants. The most blatant example of this would be the cheers conservative leaders such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh gave to the Olympic Committee’s decision to award the games to Rio. They proved that they hate Obama more than they love America, and they would rather see the President, and to an extent America, fail, rather than acknowledge any success Obama may encounter.
Before I go, I would like to say that there is an ever-widening difference between many Americans these days – some are far too distrusting of the government, while some invest far too much in its power and control. I will state my position – that government is neither to be feared nor trusted, but respected and wielded appropriately. Government does have the ability to generate very positive progress and prosperity, but it also has the ability to dismantle entire societies. The nature of government is directly related to the nature of the men who command government, and this is why we have elections of men to seats of power. Government is never the entire solution nor the entire problem of any issue, but rather it is sometimes part of one and part of the other. We should use reason to discern when it can actually help make progress on a given issue. I, for one, have decided that our government can better serve our people and their right for responsible health care than the companies that seek to profit off of those they deny coverage to.
Attacking the opposition as fear-mongers does not prove that the Democrats healthcare plan is better than the alternative. Yes, we need healthcare reform, no, government is not always the answer. There are solutions that haven’t even been looked at by the members of Congress pushing reform. Check out mine and Alec’s articles on healthcare reform and also Cynthia’s on tort reform for more info.
The link: http://thepoliticizer.com/2009/10/16/jacobs-palin-right-left-wrong-on-healthcare/
1) It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s worth it for that 100-year old man to get the procedure, and it doesn’t matter if society thinks it’s worth it. It should be up to the person. They should be the ones making decisions about their lives, not you or the government. Under the public plan, he would die. Insurance companies don’t need a government plan to provide competition, they need to compete with each other. By lifting the ban on purchasing insurance across state lines (discussed in the article linked to above), people would have 1300 insurance companies to choose from, rather than the few that they can choose from in their respective states. This makes the companies provide cheaper, higher quality, and more honest insurance.
2) How would an illegal immigrant get health care? The same way they manage to vote, attend public schools without paying taxes, get hired, etc., etc. All of those things require a social security number or government identification, and yet they’re able to figure out a way to do all of those things.
Your main point about illegal immigrants is that they already give them health care, so why not cover them under the public plan? That’s hard to argue with, as you’re simply accepting that nothing can be done about this without trying to do anything about it.
But would it really hurt to add a sentence or two saying that illegals won’t be covered by the public option? If the Democrats are so insistent that illegals won’t be covered, they could at least appease the other side by adding a section, rather than making promises that illegals won’t be covered while simultaneously rejecting amendments that would establish that.
Dan R and Mark A said everything that needs to be said. Thanks for the input!
Also, Om, be on the lookout for my response to Cynthia’s article. It should be up this weekend.
I’m different than Mark A.
All the talk about death panels and rationing is silly. Does it really matter if somebody is denied coverage by a MedPac instead of an insurance company? And, also, aren’t all seniors already subjected to government death panels since they are already on Medicare? It isn’t like 1) a public option makes Medicare Part C disappear and 2) that many seniors use it anyway. A full third of this country is on government insurance plans (Medicare, Medicaid, Military).
“What Obama’s plan would do is cover all Americans and lower costs in the long run. Insuring all Americans in and of itself will help lower costs by expanding access to preventive care and eliminating the need for private insurers to jack up premiums to cover uncompensated care.”
Both of these statements are false.
The CBO has already made two points resoundingly clear:
1. Nothing yet proposed will reduce the cost of health care in the long run. I’d argue there’s a good reason for this.
Having publically funded health care will merely shift demand outward without any change in supply. Therefore, prices can go only up, not down.
2. The CBO has already shown that preventative medicine won’t save us a dime at the macro level, and in fact will cost us more.
Preventative medicine isn’t cheap. It also has negative net present value no matter how you try to spin it.
If you want to live in an egalitarian utopia, fine, but at least be honest enough to admit it. Trying to sell your egalitarian utopia as objectively superior will is destined to fail.
All the debates we hear are to completely focused on insurance providers instead of at the basic level the actual healthcare. If we want to make healthcare cheaper we really have to look at the inputs (doctors, drugs, ect.) and see how we can reduce those costs. A public option will not make healthcare any cheaper. I think everything else I have to say has either been said in other articles or by Alec and Tim.