Are They Lost in the Desert?
The Republicans bet everything on stopping Health Care Reform. They opposed it at every step hoping that they could convince voters in the fall that President Obama and the Congressional Democrats couldn’t deliver. They knew that if they stopped health care reform they would cripple Obama’s ability to get other legislation through Congress and set the stage for telling voters that ‘Democrats are all talk and no action’.
Fortunately, their strategy backfired on them. Health care reform passed and was signed into law. Contrary to the scare tactics used by the Republicans and their Tea Party allies, rocks did not fall from the sky, horrible plagues did not cover the country and death panels did not appear at our homes.
Now many Republicans want to run on a platform of repealing the legislation. But is that really a winning strategy? By election day, most Americans will realize that health care reform is not the evil conspiracy that Republicans have tried to convince us of, but rather includes some rather good things.
Do Republicans really want to kick recent college grads off their parents’ insurance policies? Do they really want to deny insurance coverage to kids with pre-existing conditions? Do they really oppose closing the ‘donut hole’ in senior citizens’ prescription drug coverage? Do they want to cancel the 35% tax credit that helps small businesses provide health coverage to their employees? Do they want to once again allow insurance companies to cancel health insurance coverage after the fact when you get sick?
These don’t sound like winning platforms to me and, I suspect, by November they won’t sound like winners to most Americans.
Recently the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, took the first steps toward creating the high-risk pools established by the legislation for those who cannot get conventional health insurance due to pre-existing conditions. This is long overdue. Here on the Eastern Shore, there is a regular parade of fundraisers for individuals who need lung transplants, cancer treatments, special prostheses and other medical treatment that they can’t afford because they’ve been denied health insurance coverage or can’t afford it.
Of course, most of the tea party people oppose this; they think it costs too much. And for sure, the $5 billion set aside to subsidize this coverage through 2014 spread among the American people comes to some $14 a person – about two movie tickets.
Those who need health insurance because of some pre-existing condition are not ‘those people’, they are our friends, our neighbors and our relatives. What would the opponents of this and similar programs have them do, curl up and die? We’ll see what the rest of America thinks this November.
Excellent post! Thanks for your in-depth coverage of the health care issue.
My concern now is that President Obama has used up all his political capital on health care. Unless Democrats like Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin are willing to use some of their own political capital to support the president’s other proposals, I’m afraid we’ll have gridlock until November. I’m thinking about President Obama’s jobs program, Wall Street reform program, and energy program. I understand that offshore drilling is a sensitive issue, but I was disheartened by Sen. Mikulski and Sen. Cardin’s rush to distance themselves from Obama’s initiative on offshore drilling. This kind of “support” from leading Democrats is disappointing. Realistically speaking, we are not going to be able to pass a purely “green” energy package without at least a nod to either petroleum or coal, or both.