Tuesday, March 16, 2010

"Health Care - The President's Last Hurrah"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day
“Health Care – The President’s Last Hurrah?”
March 16, 2010

Common to most successful Presidents is a sense of humor – think Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. On the other hand, consider those where humor appeared absent – Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. A question: within which group does President Obama reside? He is a serious and obviously intelligent man, but his singular focus on being a transformational President is risking not only his passionate desire to remake our health care system, but the economy which requires his full attention.

While the odds of health care reform passing are said to be only 40%, I find it hard to believe that the President’s own Party will turn on the man who lead them to victory sixteen months ago and will deliver him a defeat that could well destroy his Presidency and all of this within fourteen months of his inauguration! It is possible the bill fails, but I think unlikely – as much as I disagree with the content of the proposed plan and I hope that it fails. The slight of hand, for example, in taking $500 billion from Medicare while not taking it, is worthy of David Blaine.

Each day, as he repeatedly slips his oar into the maelstrom of the Beltway – and out-of-town – health care politics, he becomes increasingly the victor, or victim, of the health care bill’s successful passage, or defeat.

It needn’t have come to this. Mr. Obama campaigned as a center-left candidate whose vision included transforming the way we are viewed in the world and to bring bi-partisanship to Washington. In the first instance, he has succeeded, at least to an extent. In the second, he has not. Despite having spent a few years in Washington (he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004), he misread the intense partisan feelings in that city. So, instead of master-minding the process from the White House – after all we are talking of sixteen percent of our economy – where he could have gathered both Democrats and Republicans and hammered out a deal that neither may have preferred, but that both could have lived with, he chose to put the process into the hands of two of Washington’s most strident political partisans – Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It was like tossing a side of beef to a pack of lions and then asking a Labrador to retrieve it.

Clive Crook, a fan of both Mr. Obama and his proposed health care plan, wrote in yesterday’s Financial Times, the debate is now “…in the realm of surreal farce…All that is missing is a speech in favor of the plan by Groucho Marx.”

Representative Paul Ryan (Republican from Wisconsin) has laid out a cogent, practical alternative health care proposal, while exposing financial weaknesses in the Democrats plan, but instead of the American people being able to witness a debate based on each plan’s merits, Ryan has been marginalized by the President and Congressional Democrats and ignored by the Press.

There is no one I am aware of who does not want to reform both the health care system and the insurance industry which serves it. The system leaves too many people uncovered; too often those with pre-existing conditions have difficulty getting coverage; many doctors (especially those considered “gatekeepers” are overworked and underpaid; incentives to doctors are too often based on prescriptions, rather than results. There have been many suggestions as to how to address these problems, ranging from a government-run insurance plan to increasing competition among private insurance companies. Some proposals are common to both parties, so should be easy to resolve, others are not.

For example, most agree that medical research in the U.S. is among the best in the world and must be encouraged. All agree that electronic records are important in terms of improving health care and in reducing costs; on the other hand tort reform is a sensitive issue, but resolution should be able to be found.

But the President’s traveling around the country speaking to hand picked audiences, so that his words can be beamed back for the evening news, only deepens the divide. It appears it is too late for any resolution to be bi-partisan. Increasingly, the President seems desperate (and humorless) – desperate to pass a bill, any bill, regardless of its distinctions, because he has committed his soul, so that now – consequences be damned – this may be his last hurrah.

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