STANFORD-NETWORK Digest for Wednesday, September 02, 2009.
Subject: sixty years to enact universal health care is not "rushing"
From: john paval
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 2009 09:34:30 +0200
X-Message-Number: 2
I don't agree that there is any "rush" to get universal health care put in place.
It was first proposed in 1949 by President Harry Truman.
The issue has been studied to death, and proposals have been on the table constantly for decades.
The arguments are so recycled that, at this point, conservatives who opposed the administration's plan as a "government takeover of the health industry" are actually proposing that we instead turn to the option of health care cooperatives.
Sound familiar? If it doesn't, it should. And perversely so. The Clinton health care proposal in the early 1990s was based on creating large scale health insurance cooperatives. They, in turn, got that idea from conservative think tanks in the 1980s. Nonetheless, the opposition at THAT time lambasted the proposal for health care cooperatives as SOCIALIST.
The bouncing up and back of the idea of health care cooperatives from conservative think tanks to the clinton administration back to conservative opposition is...bullshit historical obstructionism on a staggering scale. There is no shame in those who raise the issue now, just as there was no shame when rightwingers who shut down the government in the 1990s on the grounds that we had to balance the budget then ran up trillion of dollars in deficit spending once they got control of the white house as well as the congress.
At this point, you have to be out of touch with historical reality to argue that health care reform is being rushed.
Of course, in a media age where people forget last week...that happens a lot.
When I hear people say, "what's the RUSH" on this issue, it reminds me of the way segregationists always argued that we needed to go SLOW on civil rights legislation. And they did, at every step of the way.
Even though action on that issue was one hundred years overdue. When you are on the wrong side of an historical moral issue, just argue delay, for technical reasons. It worked on slavery, it worked on civil rights, it worked on women's rights. What the hell, it can work on health care, too.
For health care, action is sixty years overdue, and counting.
The question is not whether the U.S. is RUSHING towards providing health care for everyone.
The question is how much longer can the american people, in good conscience, DELAY doing so.
Even the most prudent estimates indicate that tens of thousands die in the U.S. every year for lack of access to adequate health care. So this delay...is bloody. It's been a holocaust, spread out over decades.
Enough is enough. It is unconscionable to continue denying every american the human right to decent health care just so some americans can make more money off the system or so that others can preserve some special advantages they have in the present system.
It's time for this delay to end, at LAST.
best,
John