Beyond Polling That Says So, Do Americans Really Want Health Care Reform?

Although the post-Bush U.S. is once again the most admired nation in the world, new polling in the U.S. shows the Democrats in Congress losing ground. Another new poll shows Obama moving up by 6%. And still another shows Americans self-identifying as more conservative than in recent years. Now chew on this:

Organized workshops in VFW and Knights of Columbus meeting halls with representatives of the National Rifle Association... suggested each family stockpile two hundred rounds of ammunition.

...Back in March [the president] had proposed $40 million in matching funds for municipal extermination programs to control rodents. "The knowledge that many children in the world's most affluent nation are attacked, maimed and even killed by rats should fill every American with shame," he said. The proposal passed the Banking and Currency Committee in June by a margin of 22-6... and on July 20, the House debate on the rat bill, when what had been uncontroversial a month earlier became a subject for hooting derision.

"Let's buy a lot of cats and turn them loose, Jim Haley of Florida howled. An Iowa Republican proposed a "high commissioner of rats." [a rat czar] Another solon joked about proliferating "rat patronage" and "rat bureaucracies." Civil rats!" someone cried. The chamber rocked with guffaws.

Then Representative Martha Griffiths [D] of Michigan stood up to speak-- trembled, in fact, with rage. Rats, she said, had killed more people "than all the generals in history." They "carry the most deadly of diseases. Do you think that's funny?"

She talked about the fancy expense-account restaurants where the congressmen took their lobbyist friends: "Rats swish their tails through sewers and brush across the food you eat. Griffiths drove the message home: "If you're going to spend seventy-nine billion dollars to kill off a few [Taliban], I'd spend forty-million dollars to kill off the most devastating enemy that man has ever had."

To no avail. The House slapped down the civil rats bill by a vote of 207-176. Only twenty-two Republicans voted in favor. The anguished cries of liberals masked the anguish of their retreat: that their dreams of warring on poverty had once been so much grander than $40 million for rats... [Their] poverty programs were doing, after all, what they were supposed to be doing: redistributing wealth, and thus redistributing power. When polled in 1961, 59 percent of the electorate said the federal government bore responsibility to make sure every American had an adequate job and income. Then the government started making modest steps towards that goal, and by 1969, only 31 percent still thought that. The income of nonwhites had started rising faster than the income of whites, and though the gap was not nearly closed, many whites' incomes were beginning to stagnate, even, in real terms, to fall. The War on Poverty came out of their hard-earned tax dollars-- draining money, some whites thought, towards ungrateful rioters. Who still demanded their welfare checks.

Yes, the president in the above vignette was Lyndon Johnson, not Barack Obama; I substituted "Taliban" for "Viet Cong" for the sake of the narrative. I hope you don't feel tricked. It does look like some things never change though, doesn't it? Instead of the War on Poverty or the war on rats, today we're talking about a battle to bring Americans' health care reform that is older than I am. Frankly, it shocked me today-- in a good way-- when among the 30 Democrats who signed a letter to Reid demanding a ROBUST public option were conservatives Michael Bennet (CO), Dianne Feinstein (CA), Herb Kohl (WI) and even Arlen Specter, the penultimate corporate shill who has publicly declared in the past (on Meet the Press) that he opposes a public option. Less surprising, last night New York Congressman Anthony Weiner posted a message on his website that encapsulates where that battle is right now:

The concerns of real Americans should not take a backseat to Beltway politics.

Senator Max Baucus is trying to move his health care proposal closer to a full vote on the Senate floor. While insiders are waiting with bated breath for the so-called ‘score’ to be released any day that will assess the bill’s cost, we need to focus like a laser on the real issue: Baucus’s proposal should have been dead on arrival when he left out the public option.

The health insurance lobby has won virtually everything it has fought for in the Finance Committee to date. Now Senators are debating a bill that does nothing to take health care back from insurance companies. Americans know what is needed: a health care plan that gives all Americans the choice to have affordable, quality health care.

There is only one answer and that is the public option. Let my colleagues in Congress know that any bill without a public option isn’t worth debating.

Back to those polls we referred to up top. Dr. Howard Dean says the Democrats could well hurt themselves electorally next year-- even if they do pass a bill with a crabbed, watered-down public option like the one Chuck Schumer proposed. "If the Democrats want to hold on to their majority, you're going to have a problem."

That's because the public option wouldn't be up and running until 2013, long after the 2010 elections, meaning voters won't really see any benefits until long after the election.

To address that problem, Dean said Democrats need to do something that will have tangible results by next summer. His proposal: opening up Medicare to people over the age of 50 so that a "certain mass" of people will already have benefited from health reform by the elections. "You need to have people sign up for this program by July 2010," Dean said.

Oh, and about the NRA encouraging people-- white people-- to buy lots of weapons... that's still happening too. This is long overdue: