Obama urges a little 'soul-searching' on healthcare

Arguments based on damning health statistics are of limited use against Republican misrepresentation

THE DEBATE over US healthcare policy had lain dormant since a Republican Scott Brown shocked Democrats by winning the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat on January 19th.

President Barack Obama brought healthcare back to centre stage this week, publishing his own proposal for bridging gaps between House and Senate draft Bills on Monday, then convening an extraordinary seven-hour marathon debate with leading Congressmen from both parties on Thursday.

The summit demonstrated two things we already knew: that Obama is “the smartest kid in the class” and that differences between Democrats and Republicans are irreconcilable, at least on this issue.

Obama’s mastery of the minutiae of high-risk pools and insurance exchanges was stunning. In repartee with Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Obama deflated one of the Republicans myths about the Bill, that it would raise individual insurance premiums.

“It’s not factually accurate,” Obama corrected Alexander. “Here’s what the Congressional Budget Office says: the costs for families for the same type of coverage that they’re currently receiving would go down 14 to 20 per cent.”

At its ugliest, the battle over healthcare is a power struggle. Republicans do not want to hand the Democrats anything that can be construed as a victory before the November mid-term elections, so to hell with the public interest. Republicans continue to misrepresent healthcare reform as a “government takeover”, though they finally dropped allegations that reductions in Medicare spending amounted to “death panels”.

“Unfortunately . . . this became a very ideological battle,” Obama noted at the outset of the summit. The most fundamental difference lies between each party’s vision of the role of federal government, and the government’s responsibility to look after its citizens. Democrats quote Ted Kennedy saying healthcare is a human right. Republicans see it as a privilege for the rich; one lawmaker boasted that the Canadian premier’s decision to seek heart surgery in Florida proved the US has the world’s best healthcare system.

Amid the hundreds of statistics bandied back and forth at Blair House, those cited by the Senate majority leader Harry Reid were most shocking: “Harvard just completed a study that shows 45,000 Americans die every year because they don’t have health insurance – almost 1,000 a week in America,” Reid said. One thousand people are dying every week for lack of healthcare, and the Republicans insist it’s time to start from scratch on healthcare reform.

Furthermore, 70 per cent of the 750,000 bankruptcies filed in the US in 2008 were filed because of healthcare costs, Reid added. And “80 per cent of the people that filed for bankruptcy because of healthcare costs had health insurance”.

The White House understood belatedly that insurance companies are the true villains of the piece. At Thursday’s summit, Sen John D Rockefeller IV called them “sharks swimming just below the surface of the water . . . a rapacious industry”.

The top five US healthcare companies took in a record $12 billion in profits last year, and are raising premiums this year again by double-digit figures. Yet by forcing all Americans, with few exemptions, to purchase health insurance, the Democrats’ plan would give an enormous gift to the healthcare industry.

The insurance companies’ hold over Congress ensured that plans for a “public option” – government insurance that would have competed with them – never got off the ground. “The Republican party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the healthcare insurance industry,” says New York representative Anthony Weiner.

It’s worth comparing Obama’s healthcare proposal to the Republican “plan” put forward by the House minority leader John Boehner in November. Obama would extend healthcare coverage to 30 million of the 45 million Americans who currently lack insurance. Boehner’s would extend coverage to three million. Obama would tax large companies that fail to cover their employees. Boehner would ask nothing of employers.

Under the Republicans’ plan, there is no requirement for individuals to buy insurance, nor would insurers be prohibited from denying coverage to clients with pre-existing conditions. The Republicans advocate “high-risk pools” for sick patients. Premiums could easily cost a third to half of a household’s income, Steven Pearlstein writes in the Washington Post. “It takes a Republican to view this as a solution – the equivalent of giving a starving man a coupon for $2 off his next dinner at Le Bernardin.”

Obama concluded the summit by appealing to Republicans to “do a little soul-searching and find out are there some things you’d be willing to embrace” in the Democrats’ plan. But he made it clear that if agreement is not reached within six weeks “I think we’ve got to go ahead and make some decisions, and then that’s what elections are for.”

Translation: if Obama can rally divided Democrats, his party will pass the Senate Bill in the House, using the controversial budget reconciliation procedure to push necessary “tweaks” through both chambers. Republicans are already screaming about what they claim is a manipulation of the democratic process. We’ll learn what voters think of it next November.