Don't Forget Health Care

As we head into the 2006 elections, I hope that the facts about our crumbling health care system are articulated more than once by Democrats. This is an issue that affects every American, and it's important to counter the conventional wisdom. I just came across this year-old series by Ezra Klein that points out the good and bad about universal health care systems in other Western nations, and I was struck by this paragraph:

What really leapt out at me during this series was how normal government provided health care is.  Other nations have doctor choice, hospital choice -- in France, they don't even have limits on specialist choice.  Americans have somehow fooled themselves -- or been fooled -- into believing that government-run health care is somehow different from what they enjoy now.  I genuinely believe they carry some sort of dystopian vision around with them, of gray waiting rooms and faceless bureaucrats and bread lines with stethoscopes, rather than grain, at the front.  In order to keep that prophecy whole, they've had to mentally classify Medicare as some weird, third sort of category -- government paying for private health care.

And Ezra goes on to explain that this is exactly what Medicare is. The Part D prescription drug plan has been a disaster because a) it was written drug companies to ensure their profit margins, and b) it was implemented by Republicans who don't really want government-run programs of any kind to succeed. If Democrats were only aggressive they could put the GOP in a box on this. We should continue to hammer how pathetically this has been implemented, intimating that this is almost a Trojan horse to torpedo government involvement in health care delivery. And if they whine "The media's focusing on the bad stuff, but the prescription drug plan's doing wonderfully," we could say "Then why not expand Medicare to cover the uninsured? If it's working for seniors and their drug plans, wouldn't it work just as well for them?"

Even with these structural budget deficits, we could easily have universal coverage in this country and all it would take is some political will. It would have been easier 5 years ago when we actually had a surplus, but all it would take now is a shifting of priorities. Big business will almost certainly come asking for universal coverage so they can start competing internationally; a labor/management alliance is more than sufficient to get this done.

Read Ezra's whole series. He really drills down to the nitty gritty of other countries' health services, and shows a vision of a world where everybody can get medical care, everyone has choice, costs are cheaper than they are today, and performance is actually better. No plan is going to be perfect, but can any possibly be worse than what we're stuck with right now?

Democrats should be loud and proud about these goals, since they will be able to talk about them virtually unopposed. It's time to turn these ideas into plans, and run on a vision of universal access and comforting the sick.