|  Candace Talmadge Read Candace's bio and previous columns
June 26, 2009
Will Democrats Let Dream of
‘Bipartisanship’ Kill Real Health Care Reform?
Is health care reform about
to go down in flames again?
If this rare opportunity is
incinerated, we won’t have the Republicans to thank. Were the GOP still in
the majority, health care reform would not even be on the table, to use a
favorite Capitol Hill phrase.
Instead, we are staring at
an ugly place setting – a Democratic debacle in the Senate. The entire mess
is made far worse by the Obama Administration’s obsession with
bipartisanship, which the GOP minority is only too eager to manipulate to
help defeat real reform.
And so we hear absurd talk
from Democrats about regional health cooperatives, or state-run health care
insurance platforms, or “trigger” legislation that would go into effect only
after a number of years if/when the private insurance industry fails to
deliver on its pledges.
Utter rubbish! There won’t
be any real reform on the table unless and until the legislation that lands
on President Obama’s desk at least includes health insurance that does not
make profit the foundation of its financing mechanism.
This is known as the public
insurance option, the one Obama promised during his run for president. So
where is it? Americans overwhelmingly support it and it’s all but MIA, at
least in the Senate. And we will not obtain health care reform if the upper
half of Congress doesn’t get its act together, pronto.
According to the Employee
Benefit Research Institute, 83 percent of 1,000 U.S. adults aged 18 and
older polled for its 2009 Health Confidence Survey support a public
insurance option. EBRI is no fringe group. It is a nonpartisan non-profit
that researches employment benefits and related public policies. Deadly dull
stuff that is critically important to everyone who works for a living.
Even more interesting, a
higher proportion of respondents to this EBRI survey, 88 percent, support a
national health plan. Heaven forbid! Could that be (gasp) single-payer?
Why not? Americans are
familiar with and actually like Medicare and the Veterans Administration,
even if they know that there is plenty of room for improvement in both
systems. A single-payer structure for financing health care is neither
foreign nor frightening to them.
In other words, the public
is light years ahead of the Senate on health care reform, despite all the
heated rhetoric and scare tactics from the health insurance industry, the
pharmaceutical industry, the American Medical Association and other groups
that do not really want change in health care.
Real health care reform can
deliver long-term cost savings and close to full inclusion only by extending
choices when it comes to health insurance, not reserving coverage solely to
the private sector. The latter fiasco is what we have now, and it’s not
getting any better just by talking about it.
Health care reform with a
real public insurance option (not a token) is a shining chance for Democrats
to garner prolonged loyalty from the majority of voters. But they will have
to earn it by growing a backbone, putting their campaign coffers on a diet
and waking up from the illusion of bipartisanship, which simply cannot
happen when there are so many special interest oxen to be gored.
© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission. Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum. To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.
This is Column #CT165. Request permission to publish here. | 
