That giant sucking sound we all have been hearing since the summer is the sound of health care reform inhaling all the oxygen from America’s body politic (or so said yesterday’s the Globe front page).
That lifelong cause of Teddy; that great cause of liberalism since Truman: providing access to affordable health care to every American has long stood as the ultimate totem for those of us who want to see a national social safety net (building on the New Deal’s Social Security and the Great Society’s Medicare reforms) stitched whole for once and for all.
And we are close to seeing it done. Yet even if finally victorious in our quest for fundamental health reform, the costs would seem to be far greater than those measured by the whiz kids in the Congressional Budget Office.
In political terms, victory will not come cheap. Financial system reform, so vital to preventing a repeat of the current job-killing global recession, has lost momentum despite Obama’s recent surge on the issue. The economy, far from healed even if not still cascading downwards, remains the great concern of the American people, even as health care dominates the attention of the political class. The fiscal stimulus has worked to stop the bleeding, but health care will not leave much room to consider any further injections of support to still suffering state governments or to provide additional aid to the growing number of jobless Americans.
The health care hurricane has also taken the wind from another long-term priority’s sails: Ed Markey’s Cap-and-Trade bill. The bill was already compromised severely via Blue Dog inspired giveaways to every fossil fuel producer in the land just to get out of the House, and now faces an increasingly rocky path in the Senate. After health care and looking at the competitive 2010 midterms – will anyone in marginal Congressional seats be willing to make another “yes” vote on that, even if the world’s future and our own credibility at the upcoming Copenhagen Summit hang in the balance?
Health care reform is no doubt quite a prize and maybe worth the costs (if the bill does what is needed) to the rest of the President’s agenda that its sausage-grinding legislative pathway has entailed. Obama sure seems to think so. He has doubled down on it – doing five shows and making five pitches on health to the Sunday pundits.
But I do fear the the consequences. I fear that in the the President’s courageous focus on solving entrenched long-term problems, the short-term priority to fix our economy has been neglected. Would it not have been a good thing to have moved the financial reform agenda when the banks were down and their lobbyists cowed? Now, it seems that even the relatively innocuous creation of a new Consumer Finance Protection Agency could face trouble in our man Barney Frank’s Committee.
And even if no longer receeding, a groaning, regionally unbalanced, and jobless economic recovery will be little selling point moving forward. Health care reform will no doubt save lives but its implementation will be difficult and its full benefits a few years down the line. As we await its saving grace though, any further economic pain the American people bear could be laid on the doorstep of that very health care reform. That will no doubt be an unfair criticism but since when has the right played fair when its comes to health or the economy.
Or maybe we still can have it all? A year ago, in the aftermath of Lehman’s collapse, the political winds seemed to shift decisively away from market fundamentalism. The door, so long closed to progressive ideas, all of a sudden sprung wide open to Obama and a prospective new progressive age. Damn the pundits who saw the financial crisis as reason to trim our sails – now was the time for action, for regulating capital excess, for expanding government to correct the myriad failings of private entities in providing life’s basic necessities. Stimulus, then health care and climate change – we’d run the table and renew America.
So was that just a dream or is it still possible? Before the spectre of Palin’s imagined death panels, or those real death panels better knows as Congressional Committees, I was sure it was.
Now though, I remain simply hopeful it is: hopeful that a success on health care after 60 years of trying will be the spark that lights the progressive candle; that Chairman Frank can follow that victory with a financial reform that is more than just a shifting of the deck chairs between regulatory agencies; that the infrastructure-heavy second part of the stimulus package will start to turn the tide on employment; and that Congress, despite struggling for breath, can pass a climate change bill that finally, if belatedly and quite possibly inadequately, sets America on course toward a lower, if not truly low, carbon economy.
So let’s breathe deeply and hope Congress has bigger lungs than expected. For after health care (win or lose), we’re gonna need all the political oxygen that’s left.
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