My monthly newspaper column: health care reform

Times Writers Group: Masses ignored in health debate

St. Cloud (MN) Times

October 7, 2009

Here is a simple fact: The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, and we get sadly lackluster results.

Among Germany, France, Japan, Sweden, Australia, Canada and the U.K., we rank last in life expectancy and highest in infant mortality, despite spending 58 percent more on health care per capita than Germany and 220 percent more than Canada, according to a 2007 analysis by The Commonwealth Fund.

The comparatively poor state of American health care is widely known. But the state of our politics has made it almost impossible to have a rational debate about fixing it. As a result, many solutions that make sense to a dispassionate observer are not even open for discussion.

For example, no bill proposing a European-style, single payer, universal system has even made it out of committee, much less to a floor vote in Congress. The debate began by taking what many think is the obvious solution off the table, despite the fact that a single-payer system has substantial public support (49 percent in a Time magazine poll in July) and even rates highly among American physicians, 42 percent of whom approve of the idea, according to a report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine last winter.

The political process has been constrained by powerful minorities that either want to protect the status quo or impose their ideological requirements. This is evident in the controversy about a “public option” for uninsured.

This political reality was illustrated last week when House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner told Politico “I’m still trying to find the first American to talk to who’s in favor of the public option, other than a member of Congress or the administration.”

Because a Sept. 16 Quinnipiac poll found 57 percent of Ohio residents — the state Boehner represents — support a public option, this seemed a bit odd. The only logical conclusion is Boehner is so insulated within his right-wing bubble that he has literally never spoken to one of the about 6 million residents of his state who doesn’t share his predetermined conclusions.

Other political leaders have conveniently ignored the millions who favor a government plan, be they the 76 percent who felt offering a public option was “important” in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in June or the 50 percent who supported a “national health care plan for all” in a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in July.

Instead we have been subjected to misinformation and hyperbole calculated to turn people against decent reform.

The 1 percent of Americans who watch Glenn Beck’s television broadcasts have somehow come to represent us all.

Our own 6th District U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s antics exemplify the situation well. In speaking about to a conservative audience in Colorado in August, she proclaimed “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.” Last week she took to the House floor to warn that government “sex clinics” in the schools could be used to funnel teenagers to Planned Parenthood clinics for abortions without their parents’ knowledge.

As crazy as it sounds, her strategy is working. There is no debate about a single-payer national health care plan.

The voices of millions who favor a public option are being ignored and talk of reining in abuses by insurers has faded.

Hopefully the next time we have a shot at health care reform we will get to discuss a cure, rather than allowing a few ersatz tea parties, some insincere calls for bipartisanship, and a handful of talk-media divas to limit the debate to a choice between putting a bandage on an open wound or doing nothing at all.