This post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich situates Health Care Reform in a historical context. He argues that one can discern two trajectories in social safety net legislation. One is represented by Social Security and Medicare, enacted by FDR and JFK, in which the government collects taxes and pays benefits. In the other, represented by Eisenhower and Nixon, the government expands the safety net indirectly through tax breaks and regulation.
Reich's conclusion: the Health Care Reform bill President Obama will sign tomorrow belongs to the second, more conservative trajectory.
Indeed. If someone had told you five years ago that in 2010 the government would reform health care by delivering millions of new customers to insurance companies and doctors in exchange for tighter regulations, AND that the pharmaceutical industry, the AMA and the AARP would endorse the bill, you'd have probably assumed that the Republicans would be the ones enacting health care reform.
Which makes a speech like this one borderline delusional:
Given what the bill actually does, Congressman Boehner's speech is cynical at best, nihilistic at worst. The massive resistance to Health Care Reform was solely about denying the President and his Democratic majority a legislative victory. The Republicans stand for nothing other than the exercise of raw political power to squash their enemies.
But they lost! And it's an irreversible defeat, no matter what happens in November. Tomorrow, health insurance becomes a right, not a privilege--as it should be. Citizens will soon take it for granted that a just society does not abandon sick people to fend for themselves, just as they take it for granted that a just society does not abandon the aged to poverty or disease. No majority will be able to muster the political capital to revoke a right like that.
In the short term right wing political violence will increase, as the tea-partiers who lament our slide into the bleak tyranny where disease doesn't bankrupt people feel more and more helpless. The bill the President will sign is not all that popular, but Obama looks a lot more reasonable that the freaks sporting tricorne hats shouting "Kill the bill" and racial epithets at Congressmen, to say nothing of the Right Wing Jihadists who crash airplanes into government buildings.
I may be wrong. Maybe Democrats will pay for this vote in November.
On the one hand, that prospect really disturbs me, given the rot in the contemporary Conservative movement.
On the other hand, if losing an election is the price you pay for universal health coverage, so be it. LBJ paid a far steeper price when he signed the Civil Rights Act in 1965. To do it, he broke the century old Democratic coalition, and consigned the Democrats to nearly a half-century of electoral weakness, but we are a better republic for it. Majorities are for governing, not for crouching.
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