Is The Health Care Summit A Way Forward... Beyond Politics?

-by Doug Kahn

The President’s health care ‘summit’ is sure to be great theater. It’s the first time a House-Senate conference committee is being staged in public. Because really, that’s what this is. And right on cue, this morning the Republicans signaled that there will be no serious bipartisan attempt to reach any agreement that could possibly help ordinary American families. Dave Camp (R-MI), the top Republican on the Ways and Means committee, and an invitee, gave the GOP weekly radio address and was whining that Obama's and Democrats' efforts to work on the bill before Thursday's summit is another reason for the GOP to scuttle the whole effort.
 
Until I’m proved wrong, I’m going to believe this is the way it has to go, when the job is forcing the U.S. Senate to accept reality. This is the way to make Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman et al go along with real Democrats... or side with the other guys. This is the result of a political reality, that members of the House of Representatives, because they’re elected every two years, ‘get it’ that health care reform has to get passed one way or another or they’re toast this November.
 
I don’t see how you make the case for anything else. I figure the White House desperately wants the whole health care debate to go away, and the Senate just doesn’t want anything to change, ever. So why is it still alive, health care reform, ‘government-run health care’, the public option? The public option!
 
This is political power in a democracy. A big, big majority of Americans want something done, now, about the health insurance companies. All the polls say we’re okay with our doctors and nurses and hospitals and clinics. So we’re somehow forcing the people who most depend on our votes, members of the House, to act against the interests of the corporations.
 
I suppose that since the public consensus is for something that aims toward ‘Medicare for all,’ we ought to give the Democratic Progressive Caucus in the House (and especially Raul Grijalva) major credit for where we’re at. We have a Speaker who is a smart enough politician to realize that our caucus would never vote yes on the Senate Bill. If that had been possible, it’d all be over by now. I’m not saying we’ve won. But we haven’t lost, and given the incredible campaign of corporate money against us, that’s kind of impressive.
 
Writing health care reform behind closed doors hasn’t worked very well, just the way it didn’t work in 1993. If you remember, part of the blame for the failure of Clinton-Care fell on the method; the effort led by Hillary Clinton to write the bill out of the public eye. I suppose the administration’s 2009 strategy of not taking the lead role, and letting Congress work on it, was an effort to avoid the mistakes of the Clinton debacle.
 
Of course, the real mistake was in trying to avoid the obvious, that leaving for-profit corporations in charge of health care harms hundreds of thousands of people, kills a lot of them, and that a majority of Americans are ready to believe that real reform is the only way forward. I look at it this way: if there were a public up or down vote on Single Payer, it’d win by a comfortable margin. Congressional action should be a mirror of that.
 
That’s the only way to make this come out right: majority rule that makes a major change in American society. It’s going to be a huge fight however it’s done, but that’s the only final act that can stick. We Americans see ourselves as a democratic nation, and we’ll accept almost any outcome so long as it’s acted out in public. But we just don’t see Congress as a public forum, as a place where rational debate takes place; we see it as buildings full of conference rooms with closed front doors. (And side doors to let the money guys in.)
 
This public campaign is what I expected from Barack Obama in the first place; I thought he was someone who would use his political skills and the Office of the Presidency to force Congress to act, whether they wanted to or not. I thought he was someone who didn’t mind taking chances, reckless and impulsive at times, which is justifiable when it’s in a good cause, necessary even. Really, don’t you think of yourself as wanting above all to ‘get things done’? That ends up being how the rest of the world sees Americans, as dynamic ‘take-charge’ types, and we enjoy that image. (Of course, they alternate between that and seeing us as aggressive bullies.) And you can’t get things done without acting, without trying things out.
 
It’ll be interesting to see how the script written for the Obama Players works, because it should be seen as a sequel to the 2008 ad campaign for progressive change in health care, ‘Change you can believe in.’ I don’t get it, the recent criticism that Obama and company are still in campaign mode. My criticism is that they’re screwing up the campaign. Isn’t this the way it has to go: 1. say what you want to do; 2. say how you’re going to do it; then 3. go out and actually do it? My disappointment with Obama is that all he accomplished was step one.
 
I want the people I elect to conduct a permanent, all-out political campaign to enact a progressive agenda, the kind of campaign that fired me up in 2008. This stuff has to be sold to the American public, and in a political campaign you’ve got to keep hammering the opposition until the final votes are counted. In the campaigns I ran, we weren’t trying to write the perfect strategy, because I thought it was intellectual arrogance to believe I (we) had the tools to achieve that except by accident. I concluded a long time ago that the human brain is a crude instrument (at least the one I’m equipped with); I just haven’t seen much evidence to contradict that. I made sure that our campaigns were focused on spending all our resources by election day, not having anything left over.
 
That’s the least we can do for the people we’re trying to help. Not sit back and coast.