The Good Wife shows the kind of health care fight the president could have fought -- if he'd been interested in actual reform
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Once we get past the commercial: On last night's The Good Wife, a desperate Will Gardner (Josh Charles) takes the awkward first step toward playing his only remaining card against the insurance company: the friendship between Alicia Florrick's (Julianna Margulies) husband Peter (Chris Noth), the disgraced former state's attorney, and the state insurance commissioner. (You can see how it works out, and get an eyeful of Martha Plimpton's frightful appearance as the insurance-company lawyer, here.)
by Ken
I keep thinking of the kickoff of President Obama's current campaign for heath care revision, ever since he decided to take the gloves off and fight for the crappy insurance-revision package of his choice. Remember how he quipped so wittily that everything there is to be said about health care reform has been said, and now it's time to do it? I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was thinking that in fact many, maybe most, of the most important things not only hadn't been said but had been pointedly ignored, at least in the official discussion -- like what exactly about our health care system needs reforming and why and how, and what a better system might look like, and how we could get there from here.
I realize this isn't exactly a blazing insight, but at this point in the process, I think we can safely say that it didn't happen because the president and his people didn't want it to happen. I don't know what he thinks the problem with U.S. health care is, beyond the large number of uninsured people, but at this point I have a pretty good idea what part of the problem he believes the government should be involving itself in.
This is very different from, for example, Howard Dean's idea of what's wrong with U.S. health care and how he thinks the government can genuinely reform the system. And that means taking on two of the principal problems: Big Pharma and the insurance companies, who have made our "health care" system about their profits, and really very little about health.
This is one of the things that was never part of the official "debate" on health care, on either the Democratic or Republican side, and now I think we can say conclusively that this was no accident. If we were truly concerned about incorporating some concern about health into our system, we would have to be discussing these issues, because our system as it exists includes no incentive to healthful living. You might think, as I once naively did, that the insurance companies have an interest in "wellness" education, but the reality is that their relationship to individual humans is typically too short-lived for them to see any financial benefit.
Early on in the "debate," Paul Krugman wrote some terrific columns extolling the virtues of the V.A. system, one of whose great strengths is precisely continuity of care -- patients see the same doctors, or other doctors within the system who have access to their medical records, which not only increases the likelihood of effective treatment but creates a shared interest in maximizing good-health habits. Of course this is possible in good part because nobody is making money on the deal. Somehow this never became part of the official discussion -- in the same way that a single-payer system was never allowed to. Again, not an accident. We can see now that too many of the players were beginning with the assumption that the interests of the big-money players, the insurance and drug companies, had to be protected as zealously as those of America's patients.
Remember how badly the whole case for health care reform was clobbered by the insurance companies and their Republican allies hewing closely to the famous Frank Luntz memo and plastering the air waves with "stories" -- moving human-interest stories about how horrible all those dastardly foreign systems like Canada's and the U.K.'s are? And nothing was heard from our side, when we all know that the reality is that our side is the one with all the real health care human-interest stories, about people abused or allowed to die by the health care profiteers. Now we can see that this wasn't an accident either. The president and his people, and for that matter most of the Democrats in Congress, couldn't answer back, because they're fundamentally in agreement with the position staked out by Luntz.
Last night's Good Wife episode had an insurance-company plot line: Alicia's firm is reperesenting a young couple whose baby will die without emergency in utero heart surgery, which the insurance company is refusing to pay for on the ground that it's experimental. Every time one of its arguments is knocked down, it comes up with a fallback legal obfuscation. As lawyer Will Gardner (Josh Charles) keeps pointing out to the judge who's hearing the emergency appeal, the insurance company's lawyer is simply playing a delaying game. Three more days, the last possible time for the surgery, and the case becomes irrelevant, so all they have to do is delay until then. Eventually, having lost all other arguments, the insurance company comes up with an astonishing but legal ground for rescinding the couple's insurance altogether.
I keep thinking of the kickoff of President Obama's current campaign for heath care revision, ever since he decided to take the gloves off and fight for the crappy insurance-revision package of his choice. Remember how he quipped so wittily that everything there is to be said about health care reform has been said, and now it's time to do it? I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was thinking that in fact many, maybe most, of the most important things not only hadn't been said but had been pointedly ignored, at least in the official discussion -- like what exactly about our health care system needs reforming and why and how, and what a better system might look like, and how we could get there from here.
I realize this isn't exactly a blazing insight, but at this point in the process, I think we can safely say that it didn't happen because the president and his people didn't want it to happen. I don't know what he thinks the problem with U.S. health care is, beyond the large number of uninsured people, but at this point I have a pretty good idea what part of the problem he believes the government should be involving itself in.
This is very different from, for example, Howard Dean's idea of what's wrong with U.S. health care and how he thinks the government can genuinely reform the system. And that means taking on two of the principal problems: Big Pharma and the insurance companies, who have made our "health care" system about their profits, and really very little about health.
This is one of the things that was never part of the official "debate" on health care, on either the Democratic or Republican side, and now I think we can say conclusively that this was no accident. If we were truly concerned about incorporating some concern about health into our system, we would have to be discussing these issues, because our system as it exists includes no incentive to healthful living. You might think, as I once naively did, that the insurance companies have an interest in "wellness" education, but the reality is that their relationship to individual humans is typically too short-lived for them to see any financial benefit.
Early on in the "debate," Paul Krugman wrote some terrific columns extolling the virtues of the V.A. system, one of whose great strengths is precisely continuity of care -- patients see the same doctors, or other doctors within the system who have access to their medical records, which not only increases the likelihood of effective treatment but creates a shared interest in maximizing good-health habits. Of course this is possible in good part because nobody is making money on the deal. Somehow this never became part of the official discussion -- in the same way that a single-payer system was never allowed to. Again, not an accident. We can see now that too many of the players were beginning with the assumption that the interests of the big-money players, the insurance and drug companies, had to be protected as zealously as those of America's patients.
Remember how badly the whole case for health care reform was clobbered by the insurance companies and their Republican allies hewing closely to the famous Frank Luntz memo and plastering the air waves with "stories" -- moving human-interest stories about how horrible all those dastardly foreign systems like Canada's and the U.K.'s are? And nothing was heard from our side, when we all know that the reality is that our side is the one with all the real health care human-interest stories, about people abused or allowed to die by the health care profiteers. Now we can see that this wasn't an accident either. The president and his people, and for that matter most of the Democrats in Congress, couldn't answer back, because they're fundamentally in agreement with the position staked out by Luntz.
Last night's Good Wife episode had an insurance-company plot line: Alicia's firm is reperesenting a young couple whose baby will die without emergency in utero heart surgery, which the insurance company is refusing to pay for on the ground that it's experimental. Every time one of its arguments is knocked down, it comes up with a fallback legal obfuscation. As lawyer Will Gardner (Josh Charles) keeps pointing out to the judge who's hearing the emergency appeal, the insurance company's lawyer is simply playing a delaying game. Three more days, the last possible time for the surgery, and the case becomes irrelevant, so all they have to do is delay until then. Eventually, having lost all other arguments, the insurance company comes up with an astonishing but legal ground for rescinding the couple's insurance altogether.
Yes, a network TV drama dealing with the real-world issue of rescission! Will wonders never cease.
The show had you frothing, at both the insurance company and the monstrous lawyer, a really hateful (I mean this in a good way) performance by Martha Plimpton. It was a shock to switch to an episode of HBO's How to Make It in America -- a fairly watchable but kind of pointless show, or maybe you have to be 20-something to appreciate it -- and see Plimpton portraying a merely annoying, as opposed to murder-worthy, human.
The president can't fight this fight for the simplest of reasons. He doesn't believe in it.
SPEAKING OF THE GOOD WIFE . . .
Since my preliminary favorable report, I've become a really big fan of the show. All the characters are humming: Alicia Florrick (Juliana Margulies), the "good wife" who discovers that her husband has been consorting actively with a hooker; her seasoned-pol husband Peter (Chris Noth), the partners in the law firm where she finds work (Josh Charles [right] and Christine Baranski), Alicia's rival junior associate (Matt Czuchry), Alicia and Peter's kids (Makenzie Vega and Graham Phillips). The stories of Alicia's personal and professional lives have been kept individually powerful and beautifully balanced. I usually watch it in real time rather than via DVR, and I hate it when each episode ends.
When my friend Peter and I talked about The Good Wife, he figured I'd found my way to the show because of Josh Charles, knowing how much I'd loved his work in Aaron Sorkin's great Sports Night, a series in which you had not only some of the best writing ever done for a TV comedy but a cast in which 10 or 12 people were doing some of the best acting ever done in a TV comedy, and on a week-in, week-out basis Charles did, for me, the most memorable work as the vaguely-Dan Patrick-like cable-sports-show co-host opposite Peter Krause's vaguely-Keith Olbermann-like one.
The show had you frothing, at both the insurance company and the monstrous lawyer, a really hateful (I mean this in a good way) performance by Martha Plimpton. It was a shock to switch to an episode of HBO's How to Make It in America -- a fairly watchable but kind of pointless show, or maybe you have to be 20-something to appreciate it -- and see Plimpton portraying a merely annoying, as opposed to murder-worthy, human.
The president can't fight this fight for the simplest of reasons. He doesn't believe in it.
SPEAKING OF THE GOOD WIFE . . .
Since my preliminary favorable report, I've become a really big fan of the show. All the characters are humming: Alicia Florrick (Juliana Margulies), the "good wife" who discovers that her husband has been consorting actively with a hooker; her seasoned-pol husband Peter (Chris Noth), the partners in the law firm where she finds work (Josh Charles [right] and Christine Baranski), Alicia's rival junior associate (Matt Czuchry), Alicia and Peter's kids (Makenzie Vega and Graham Phillips). The stories of Alicia's personal and professional lives have been kept individually powerful and beautifully balanced. I usually watch it in real time rather than via DVR, and I hate it when each episode ends.When my friend Peter and I talked about The Good Wife, he figured I'd found my way to the show because of Josh Charles, knowing how much I'd loved his work in Aaron Sorkin's great Sports Night, a series in which you had not only some of the best writing ever done for a TV comedy but a cast in which 10 or 12 people were doing some of the best acting ever done in a TV comedy, and on a week-in, week-out basis Charles did, for me, the most memorable work as the vaguely-Dan Patrick-like cable-sports-show co-host opposite Peter Krause's vaguely-Keith Olbermann-like one.
Actually, since I haven't seen Charles's special qualities as an actor used as well since Sports Night (have I maybe missed something?), the prospect of his involvement in The Good Wife didn't set off any alarm bells for me. In fact, he has been simply terrific.
YOU CAN WATCH EPISODES ONLINE
Note: CBS has Good Wife episodes viewable online. You can find last night's, titled "Heart," here.
Note: CBS has Good Wife episodes viewable online. You can find last night's, titled "Heart," here.
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Labels: Barack Obama, Good Wife (The), health care reform, health insurance, Howard Dean
posted by KenInNY @ 6:00 PM
6 comments
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6 Comments:
Making money and making sense are mutually exclusive.
It is time to start making sense.
One truth at a time.
Good thinking, Ken. Big Pharma does not seem to be considered at all in the reform package. Yet, the prices of drugs continue to escalate, and the usage has become HUGE. Partially due to all the tv ads, and the difference in time involved in writing a prescription, as opposed to doing a lengthy interview and examination of the patient. Side effects and cost are ignored, speed is of the essence. I do not see that there will be a change in the super market checkout approach to a doctor's visit.
I didn't know Christine Baranski was in it. I've been a big fan since she was on the Cybil Show ( where Allan Ball wrote)
Our Pres just doesn't like conflict. Which was unavoidable given how some people feel about HC reform
No, it's no accident that nothing is being done about drug prices. Usually the way Big Pharma is said to have figured in the "health care reform" hi jinx of 2010 is in the form of the secret deal the president struck with them to keep his mitts off in exchange for what was supposedly a commitment to kick in a big sum to something or other but was apparently really an agreement NOT to spend X many hundreds of millions of smackers to kill whatever plan not to its liking resulted.
When the secret deal became unsecret, we naive progressives naturally accused the president of selling out. What I'm saying is, now we can see that he didn't sell out, it was always his intention to make sure that Big Pharma and Big Insurance were protected -- you know, just the way the Bush regime wrote the Medicare Part D program to protect Pharma by making sure that all that loot being shoveled into its coffers couldn't be lessened by (gasp) the government using the size of its Medicare customer base to negotiate lower prices (price negotiations were expressly forbidden), and drug importation was similarly forbidden. Within those limits, as I now read him, he would see what kind of changes to the insurance system (NOT the health care system) to include a PORTION of the Americans currently left out of it.
And Lee, yes, Christine Baranski is one of the GOOD WIFE cast regulars, and she's created an interesting character -- the OTHER surviving managing partner (with Josh Charles's character) of the law firm, with considerable tension between them and both having to face the struggle to save the financially troubled firm. So far she's had less to do, but that just gives the writers more territory to move into, I hope.
Ken
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/SoMLoWBKM4I/AAAAAAAAK4g/wKdZyg5LxQ0/s1600-h/profits.bmp
Jesus, who is not a facist nor would sanction facsism, said "the truth will set you free."
Assuming this data is accurate, setting insrance companies as huge profit mongering companies getting rich off the poor masses has one problem...the truth.
being an health insurance agent in Michigan, I was trying to look up the acronymn, PAM that was used on the episode involving the insurance company. I couldn't find anything at all. Is that a legitimate word or a TV makebelieve word?
Pete
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