By John Nichols
Capital Times
3/10/2009
Health care reform is a vital and engaging concern for tens of millions of Americans.
But you would not have known it from Thursday’s White House Forum on Health Reform, which was so narrowly focused and uninspiring that it almost made Hillary Clinton’s bumbling efforts of the 1990s look good.
President Barack Obama sounded some of the right notes. “Now I know people are skeptical about whether Washington can bring about this change. Our inability to reform health care in the past is just one example of how special interests have had their way, and the public interest has fallen by the wayside … (But) this time, there is no debate about whether all Americans should have quality, affordable health care — the only question is, how?
Unfortunately, that is a mighty major “only question.”
And Thursday’s forum made little room for those capable of answering it.
The White House was packed with the political insiders, corporate lobbyists and a few administration-designated “everyday Americans,” who helped to illustrate the depth of the crisis that the insiders have allowed to metastasize over the past decade or so.
Only a handful of serious reformers were allowed in.
Thanks to pressure from the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Healthcare, Physicians for a National Health Program, Unions for Single Payer Health Care and the Progressive Democrats of America, an invitation was extended to House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers, D-Mich., the sponsor of H.R. 676, legislation that seeks to create a single-payer insurance program, which would take profiteering out of the health care system.
Also present was Dr. Oliver Fein, President of Physicians for a National Health Program.
But right before him on the White House list of “Community Leaders and Stakeholders Expected to Attend” were the CEOs of Pfizer and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
While the doctor’s name was missing from the speaker lists, the names of the CEOs were on it, along with representatives of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and the Business Roundtable.
The weight of opinion at what was supposed to be a wide-ranging discussion of health reform was — at best — on the side of tinkering with the existing for-profit system.
“Change we can believe in” was not on the agenda.
Who could have put it there?
Dr. Quentin Young, the Chicago doctor who served as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician and whose medical office cared for the Obama family, ought to be at the table. “(Single-payer) no longer is the best solution,” he says. “It’s the only solution.”
Why wasn’t Dr. Young on the speaker list?
Where was his longtime ally, Dr. Linda Farley, the Dane County physician who has been honored with the American Academy of Family Physicians Presidents Award and named the Wisconsin State Medical Society’s Physician Citizen of the Year? “Health care is a service, not a commodity,” says Farley. “Physicians must be committed to providing quality care to all the people based on their need, not on their ability to pay. (Single-payer) would allow physicians and other health care workers to concentrate on the health of patients and populations, without the hassles of excessive paperwork.”
Where, on the long list of congressional participants, was the name of U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin? Elected to Congress as an outspoken advocate for single-payer health care, the Wisconsin Democrat is a member of the key committee in the House that deals with health care issues — Energy and Commerce — and she has succeeded in developing bipartisan coalitions that allow for state experimentation with various reform plans. In other words, she’s a principled yet very practical player in the debate.
Baldwin should have been speaking.
The point here is not to give up on the Obama administration as a vehicle for real reform. White House forums of the sort held Thursday are “for the cameras” events that set the tone — not the policy — of an administration.
The president knows that single-payer is the right fix for what ails the American health care system.
As recently as last August, Obama told a health care forum in New Mexico: “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.”
The insurance industry and its allies don’t want to start from scratch and make a system that works.
They want to keep patching up a system that doesn’t work — that fails to provide care to roughly 50 million Americans, that leaves another 50 million underinsured and that is defined more by its cost overruns than its quality — so that they can keep profiteering.
Thursday’s White House sessions provided a great forum for advocates of “patching up” and “tinkering with” a broken system.
But that’s not the treatment that is needed. That’s a prescription for failure.
Obama is better positioned that any president in decades — perhaps ever — to design a system from scratch.
The special interests, corporate insiders and congressional compromisers who made the mess and fear the change won’t remind him of that fact — as Thursday’s forum so amply illustrated.
Real reformers should keep banging on the doors and demanding a place at the table.
Single-payer is not “an alternative.”
It is not one of “various treatment options.”
It is the cure.
John Nichols is the associate editor of The Capital Times.
