By Charlie Meyer:
Was the Health Care Bill passed by the Senate a "WIN" for President Obama?
As a refugee from “The Land Inside the Beltway”, I hasten to remind folks that the weight-challenged female person hasn’t sung, and, in fact, the lyrics haven’t been decided yet. I was a budget guy there, and thus had visceral awareness of the Congressional process. If you thought the wheeling, dealing, and politics ended with last week’s Senate vote, I’d suggest a refresher in American civics. The legislative process isn’t tidy or efficient, but there isn’t a better method out there, if one values a free democracy.
The President did manage to get health care bills passed in both the House and the Senate. I can’t recall health care reform ever getting this far before. Reconciling the quite different House and Senate bills is no small task. If Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman, neither of them wimps, couldn’t even get a bill past the various nay-sayer lobbies, then President Obama getting bills out of both houses is a “winning” play, but the game is not over yet. We are closer than ever to providing health care to nearly all Americans, but expect the rhetoric and vitriol to ratchet up. Expect more nonsense from that overblown wacky woman with Acute Slurpee Brain Freeze from Wasilla; fifty-odd years ago, it was a bad actor from California spreading doom and gloom on behalf of a less progressive American Medical Association to torpedo a previous attempt to fix health care. A land of opportunity: even that bad actor could be elected President, as we found nearly thirty years ago. It is high time we fix our broken health care system for all Americans. We have never been closer, but we’re not there yet.
To the “I made my pile, up yours” crowd: You’re already paying a huge price for the millions of uninsured and underinsured. When your only source of medical care is the Emergency Room in extremis, the costs of health care rise exponentially. We don’t have “debtors prisons” in this country (much to the dismay of the nation’s credit companies and their GOP shills.) The Emergency Room isn’t generally going to turn you away to die in the parking lot if you don’t have an insurance card. In that way, perhaps we are lucky and more civilized than some Third World medical economies. You’ll be sued, and hounded by debt collectors until the cows come home, but you can’t be tossed into the pokey for an unpaid hospital bill. Never mind one place in the country with free, universal health care: prisons. Watch your dreams of retirement vaporize when that heart attack forces you to drain your IRA to keep the medical providers’ attorneys (the ones providers try to hook their sisters up with) at bay. To those of you with health insurance, you’re but an insurer’s capricious, profitable denial away from the uninsured. Ignorance is not bliss.
Curing the ills of America’s health care mess isn’t a single-variable equation. Living in a First World free society isn’t easy. We shouldn’t be a “nation” only when there’s a war. You just can’t pick one-liners for your Tea Party/Town Hall mob sign: for example, Tort Reform alone won’t cure our health care ills. Nor will the drug industry’s sneaky health care “reform” ads cover their attempts to subvert the Constitution’s limits on patent protection to further line their pockets at our expense. Imagine the logic of an industry that profits by not paying for care; I don’t see one redeeming quality to health insurers and their afterbirth: the Health Mangling Organization. Most of the rest of the First World has some form of universal coverage; they’re not exactly dropping like flies. You might miss that if your television is stuck on the F-word News Channel.
Ask almost any clergy person of your choosing, and they'll probably warn you that envy and coveting tends to consume you. Other than perhaps a British Racing Green Porsche Targa, I find myself "coveting" very little materially. I'm not losing any sleep because others may have one. It keeps life simpler, which was a key selling point to those of us who aren't here in these mountains just because they was born here. I frankly don't envy that big, fancy Escalade, McMansion, ATV, Media Room, or whatever toy trips others' triggers, but "your mileage may vary." The three magic tenets in the Declaration of Independence: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," are in the order of their importance. You really can't be free, or pursue happiness, if you don't have life. Sixty- odd years ago, in the depths of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt intoned the aspiration of a nation: "Freedom From Fear." I don't think I had the only parents that feared being a "burden" on their children in their twilight years. The common denominator is life, without which, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. Our forefathers banded together as a nation for the common good; let's not forget that, inDUHviduals. Health and life are the foundation for everything else; wanting it isn't really "coveting.” The current health care mess misses that in it's misguided rush for the almighty dollar. For all those slinging Scripture while standing in the way of meaningful health care reform, why is it I never hear “your brother’s keeper” when it comes to health care. Is it “window dressing,” like that Sunday suit?
Decades ago, an automotive filter manufacturer had commercials warning us “you can pay me now, or pay me later.” The spiraling costs and disproportionate fiscal nightmare of our health care system will only get worse if we keep sticking our heads in the Republican sand. Health care reform can’t come too soon.
By Stephen Smoot:
“The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that "one more such victory would utterly undo him." For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits."
This report comes from the historical writings of Plutarch. King Pyrrhus of Epirus battled the Republic of Rome twice. He won at Heraclea in 280 and again at Asculum in 279 BC. These battles against the Roman Republicans cost him dearly in resources and reputation. His country ended up in Roman hands within a century. From that point on, Pyrrhus’s victory is remembered every time the losses of a victory contribute to eventual defeat. Obama has shoved his health care deform plan through the Senate, but what has this apparent victory cost him?
Every president comes into office that intangible resource of “political capital.” That is, a certain storehouse of influence over national politics that comes from his position as the choice of the people.
A year ago Obama had plenty. Even many conservatives conceded that he needed at least some benefit of the doubt. Over his first year of office, the health care debacle revealed many troubling characteristics of the man himself and his political allies.
First of all the administration and congressional leaders mocked their own calls for transparency in the process of lawmaking. Instead of giving the public (and Congress) a seventy-two hour period to read and digest major legislation (as promised) Democrats repeatedly tried to shove thousand page bills into major votes. The only people reading these bills were analysts with conservative think tanks and that even required entire teams of people. When Democrats like Heath Schuler, representing North Carolina’s 11th District, complained, Pelosi started scrounging around to find a primary opponent to oust him. Next came the Orwellian request by the White House for people to turn in their neighbors for “fishy” opinions on health care legislation.
The legislation itself has enough to frighten good citizens who believe in natural rights and fear massive indebtedness. Proposals for deform include a legal requirement to purchase health care. There is something scary about the government forcing people to purchase a commodity on pain of fines or jail. And no, auto insurance is not the same because no one is compelled to drive. The proposals will also raise taxes on the middle class and small business, not to mention the wealthy and large corporations. Where do left wing Democrats think jobs come from? They come from capitalists both large and small, not the jobs fairy. Now add to this the fact that the left also wants to use taxpayer money to fund abortions and one sees the rift between economic conservatives and social conservatives closing again. Obama backs the most radical proposals and unifies his opposition.
The proposed taxes, as high as they will be, still cannot cover the massive debt that this plan will incur. Obama and Congress have already sunk the United States so deep that nations from whom we borrow are advising that they will stop lending. Our national bond rating dropped slightly due to the huge Obama debts. And he wants to spend how many "trillions" on this program of economic socialization?
Americans made up their mind. Support for Obama’s health care ideas dropped into the 30s. Support for him personally fell to under 50% in several polls. Meanwhile the push to transform and socialize such a large segment of the American economy while raising debts has not gone without resistance. Obama’s election harmed the Republicans initially. As his administration started using heavy handed means to achieve results, it started alienating Democrats, revealing fissures within that party. Only the ideological libertarians advanced their cause in the past year.
Republicans, by pragmatism or principle, more tightly embrace the smaller government with limited powers concept of federal authority than at any time since Reagan’s presidency. An army of protesters with intimate knowledge of the constitutionalism of James Madison mobilized to challenge left wing economic and social policies at every turn. The tea party movement, if it can tie itself comfortably with the GOP, can help launch its own revolution of change. This one would come from American instead of Eurosocialist traditions.
Obama’s success in ramming an unwanted program of socialism through the Senate looks like a win for him in the short term. Certainly a fawning media will portray it as such. The fact that such overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate had so much trouble reveals the president and his left wing friends’ political weakness. Health care deform proposals gave conservatives of all stripes and libertarians an issue to unify their efforts in 2010 and 2012. The next Congress most likely will fall under the control of libertarian Republicans with a political mandate to slash federal spending and power. Obama’s temporary win this month will result in not only electoral victories, but also structural changes to strip away powers from federal authority and return America’s system back to the proper balance created by the Founding Fathers. Like King Pyrrhus, Obama made the mistake of underestimating his own strength when engaging formidable opposition. Also l! ike that ill-fated autocrat, his undoing will come at the hands of a true Republic devoted to principle.
