Mainly that it’s awful, and not nearly as good as single payer. But he goes onto defend it as better than nothing, and also give shoutouts to Vermont for experimenting with single payer and our own State Senator Jamie Eldridge here in Massachusetts. I was a big fan of Moore’s when I was an angry Chomsky spouting teen, and have since found that his work overwhelmingly favors simplistic arguments and style over substance-BUT on healthcare he knows his stuff. Sicko might have been one of his most underrated films, and it’s an issue he has been covering for nearly 40 years. His Times op-ed today is definitely worth reading.
I believe Obamacare’s rocky start — clueless planning, a lousy website, insurance companies raising rates, and the president’s telling people they could keep their coverage when, in fact, not all could — is a result of one fatal flaw: The Affordable Care Act is a pro-insurance-industry plan implemented by a president who knew in his heart that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all model was the true way to go. When right-wing critics “expose” the fact that President Obama endorsed a single-payer system before 2004, they’re actually telling the truth.
What we now call Obamacare was conceived at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and birthed in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor. The president took Romneycare, a program designed to keep the private insurance industry intact, and just improved some of its provisions. In effect, the president was simply trying to put lipstick on the dog in the carrier on top of Mitt Romney’s car. And we knew it.
In blue states, let’s lobby for a public option on the insurance exchange — a health plan run by the state government, rather than a private insurer. In Massachusetts, State Senator James B. Eldridge is trying to pass a law that would set one up. Some counties in California are also trying it. Montana came up with another creative solution. Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat who just completed two terms, set up several health clinics to treat state workers, with no co-pays and no deductibles. The doctors there are salaried employees of the state of Montana; their only goal is their patients’ health. (If this sounds too much like big government to you, you might like to know that Google, Cisco and Pepsi do exactly the same.)
the general opinion of the Left. The real left that isn’t really represented by the Democratic Party.
I can’t remember exactly where I read it: https://www.jacobinmag.com/?s=obamacare
I’m intrigued by this premise:
Psychoanalyzing presidents is iffy (especially a pretty straightforward one like O), but I could buy that.
I seem to recall his saying that if he were to create a system from scratch he would use the single-payer model, but his instinct to not be perceived as radical gets in the way.
It got in the way of his entire presidency. And considering that 48% of the country thinks he’s an Islamist socialist I don’t see why he bothered.
…when trying to reason with unreasonable people.
1. It is NOT a Heritage Plan. Scott Lemieux went back and read the actual Heritage Plan from the Clinton era, and it does not look like the ACA. Heritage wanted to gut Medicaid, Obama has expanded Medicaid to historic levels. Chief Justice John Roberts, doing exactly what Jesus WOULD NOT DO, let Republican Governors stop the Medicaid expansion.
2. The ACA was passed in a Senate where votes were needed from Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman. The Senate is a real bottleneck for justice and democracy, but that’s reality. And I assure you, if Mitch McConnell had been Senate Majority Leader, not Harry Reid, you would not have gotten anything like the ACA.
I wish Michael Moore would find ways to acknowledge these realities.
by saying it’s better than nothing.
We should also acknowledge the fact that the ACA could have been a lot better in policy and implementation if the President spent the kind of capital to pass it when it was popular, before he allowed months and months to pass him by leaving things to Max Freaking Baucus in the Senate, as he did was it then became deeply unpopular, watered down and his hand was forced.
While the ACA was being hammered out, it was quite shocking to me how quiet the Democratic machinery was. So instead of the story being about how the health insurance industry worked, why bringing everyone on board would be good, why mandates and premium supports were necessary, how easy it is to be cut out of the insurance market, and how healthcare reform could rein in costs and protect our fiscal future, instead of all that, we got stories on backroom negotiations, would this or that conservative Democrat go along, and would Snowe or Grassley agree to anything at all.
Pretty dumb.
I suspect that some part of it is the delicacy of working with legislators. When a Democrat is President, his (or her) guys control the Democratic Party machinery too. So anything that it says can get attributed to the President. So conservative Democrats who are not sure about their support for this or that aspect of the bill will take extreme offense if advertizements are being run in their districts. That really limits the use of the bully pulpit — unless one really has a plan to both pressure the legislators, help them over their upset, and bring them back to the table in a more, not less, co-operative mood.
I noticed something similar at the beginning of Gov. Patrick’s first term. The legislature was not going to have the governor leading grassroots efforts to pressure individual legislators.
In both cases, I think that means having a noise machine that’s independent of the Democratic Party and that can push things. While most of what Fox does is abhorrent and a left-wing version would be unappealing to Democratic constituencies, it does operate independently of the GOP. During the Bush years, it would have been ludicrous to blame Bush for what was on Fox. So Fox can operate as bully pulpit during Republican presidencies without getting Republican legislators angry at their President.
If only DFA were bigger, more effective, and louder.
I would argue that is exactly what ProgressiveMA is trying to do and exactly what OFA should have been doing starting January 20th 2009. It’s hard as a former student director of SFBO and frustrating to see these great groups that brought out the vote in IA, in the IL primary, and in WI and IN go dormant during non-election years. I really hope the President learned his lesson for 2014-that he needs to be the one leading his party in Congress as well as from the White House.
meant to uprate
Wouldn’t OFA have been too Obama-associated for that?
we in Mass. should correct him. Mitt Romney did veto parts of the health care overhaul passed by a supermajority of Democrats in a Legislative branch that is constitutionally stronger than the executive branch.
Sure, Romney tried to veto some features of the bill. Sure, some of them are important. A lot of the things he vetoed, though, were things that go beyond the federal bill (like dentail for Medicaid recipients).
More importantly, Romney was on board with the basic concept that forms the heart of the Mass. bill and the Obama bill: steering most of the uninsured to private insurance companies through an exchange, with tax penalties for those deemed to have sufficient income but don’t enroll.
getting thrown overboard. Romney has always been smart enough to pivot himself when it suits him.
I don’t deny it was fun to score points on Romney for opposing the ACA which so similar to what he had to sign. But let’s not assign compassion to the man when he has not demonstrated it.
he’d have a major feather in his cap when he ran for President. He’d worked across the aisle to fix a daunting problem in a free-market-based way. He had no idea Obama would win in ’08, push a very similar bill through, and the whole idea would be toxic to the GOP base as a result. It wasn’t about compassion, it was about resume-building.
And let’s not forget that Romney thought it was the essence of conservatism to tell someone who “could afford it” to buy health insurance rather than expect society to provide it.
Moore is not there to be an academic policy wonk. Read the average article in the Herald, NY Post, Daily News: they have as much depth as Facebook posts. Moore’s job (beyond making money for himself) is to make some impression on the millions of Americans out there who don’t follow politics or policy at all, and for whom even simplistic arguments contain more detail than they generally encounter. If you’ve “outgrown” his stuff, that’s great, but there are plenty of people out there who have no idea, for example, about how Wall Street’s interests differ from their own. Moore points out things that are wrong with our system for a non-expert audience and I think that’s useful.
Agreed.
I think sometimes he forgets that politicians have to compromise to get things done. I’m not attacking it for being agit prop-it is, but I think Downsize This, Roger and Me, and even Bowling for Columbine made good natured attempts to get the other sides perspectives and reach out to the undecideds. Fahrenheit 9:11 was a rushed film-he made it seem like he went overseas when he really reused a lot of other peoples footage without attribution, and it made a lot of dumb spurious conspiracy allegations when really it was self-evident the war was crap. No Way Out and Body of War were far better researched, less polemical, and more effective.
I think Moore makes it too easy to be the “go to left wing crazy” that his more pragmatic side-backing Clark, backing pro-life and pro union guys like Stupak and Kildee, and trying to revive the Catholic left-gets lost. Sicko was great precisely because it was well researched and anyone watching it could be persuaded. And I think after Bowling and Fahrenheit Moore fatigue set in and the film was underrated. These are just my two cents. I think this Op-Ed shows us he is serious again.
Perfect? No. But great. Give me a dozen more.
about everything for a very long time now. His arguments maybe “simplistic” but if you look at what he tries to do, he’s never trying to espouse detailed policy, just make the point that some particular thing or another is broken, not working or completely F’d up.
Society needs more of these kinds of people and I wish Moore’s platform was as big today as it was when Sicko came out, since he’s so good at doing what he does.
And should’ve been more widely shown. It should be required viewing for anyone who wants to actually do the political legwork required to get single-payer enacted. I really hope Vermont is successful, and while it’s environment is incredibly unique and the political support overwhelming, if it’s successful I don’t see how it can’t be implemented in Massachusetts. Ours would be a better test case for the nation since we have more powerful insurance interests, a more diverse population, and existing healthcare infrastructure that is top-notch. After the implementation that should be our big fight here.