Go all out for the public health care option
By David Rolland 07/09/2009
By all accounts and appearances, President Barack Obama is plunging into national healthcare reform with a rear-view mirror affixed to his shoulder. In it, he sees Bill and Hillary Clinton attempting to ram a round single-payer healthcare bill through a square hole in Congress as lawmakers listen to noisy, noncompliant lobbyists.
How else to explain why, as Obama touts the benefits of creating a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, his top adviser, David Axelrod, is telling David Gregory on “Meet the Press” that the administration isn’t going to push the public plan too hard.
While Obama watches the Clintons crash and burn in the mirror, he’s perhaps also hearing the voice of Frank Luntz in his head. Luntz is the slimy Republican political consultant who creates scary catchphrases to kill genuine attempts at policy reform. Luntz recently sent a 28-page memo to Republican lawmakers that tells them how to frighten the public about a government “takeover” of healthcare. Luntz stressing that the public wants reform and trusts Democrats more than Republicans to do it. It’s necessary to erode that trust, he says, by convincing people that the Democrats want to put “bureaucrats” between them and their doctors, which will “delay” treatment. “Delayed care is denied care,” he tells them.
The irony, of course, is that the nightmarish picture already exists — but it’s being perpetrated by the private insurance industry. Denial of care is the modus operandi of insurers whose ultimate goal is profit; the more they can deny treatment, the more money they make for shareholders.
Obama must keep the pressure on for a competitive public plan a necessary incremental change; without it, in our view, there’s little point to reform. It will cover nearly 50 million Americans who currently have no access to care, and it’s the appropriate response to the trend of employers either chipping away at covered treatments or presenting employees with larger premiums — or both.
Obama must hammer home the idea that a government option is right in line with conservative, free-market thinking, with competition and choice as paths to lowered costs and better service. A public plan provides another choice, more competition. If done right, it would serve as a model for how things could be without the pressure to profit.
That, we think, is why there’s a backlash against the public option; the private insurers don’t want us to know there’s another way. And they, along with others in the healthcare sector (doctors, drug makers, etc.), shell out big bucks to make sure their interests are served. These industries spent $484.4 million in lobbying in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But insurers have targeted moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats with larger contributions, and those lawmakers responded by urging Democratic leaders to shelve the public option.
Given the perils of politics, Obama is right to proceed cautiously, but not so cautiously that he undermines reform altogether. And he’s right to learn lessons from the Clinton debacle. But that was 16 years ago, and things have changed. The public has lost a considerable amount of faith in Corporate America and wants a public option by a wide margin.
The president must use the free-market benefits of introducing a government health plan to expose opponents as nothing more than protectors of the status quo and defenders of a system everyone knows has failed.
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