Ju-Jitsu

In defending his plan to veto affordable health insurance programs for CHILDREN, a move that the Senate wildly disagrees with, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt says that's only because the President is thinking big.

Clinton unveiled her plan as Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said President Bush wants to achieve universal health care before he leaves office.

Leavitt told the USA TODAY editorial board that Bush will veto a Democratic plan emerging from Congress that would add $35 billion in taxpayer subsidies to the Children’s Health Insurance Program over five years. In doing so, Leavitt said, Bush will urge Congress to join him in seeking coverage for all Americans.

“He’d like to see the larger debate begin,” Leavitt said. “The very best opportunity we have may well be in the next 15 months.”

This is some ju-jitsu. Actually it's more like the ancient martial art, as promoted by Mike Meyers in So I Married An Axe Murderer, of Fah-Q.

So after six years of doing nothing about health care, watching the ranks of the uninsured skyrocket, and threatening to veto popular state programs to provide kids with health insurance, in an era where it's considered good news that employer-paid health care is only rising in cost moderately instead of obscenely, NOW Bush wants "universal health care"?

I've got news for you. He doesn't. And this is the danger of letting Republicans like Romney and Schwarzenegger get away with using the term "universal health care" when what they actually want is universal health insurance, without a floor on coverage or a ceiling on costs. Bush just wants everyone to have to pay for crappy health care without help from the government beyond "tax incentives" that will be mainly targeted at the rich.

On the other hand, Democratic plans on health care are informed by genuine progressive ideas about cost containment and guaranteed issue and community rating and public/private competition. They have mandates for universality, but those are designed to drive down cost by expanding the risk pool, not by forcing the middle class to pay a quarter of their annual income on insurance. "Universal health care" has now just become a phrase that politicians can throw around like "energy independence." It's meaningless without some actual plans to back it up.

(Incidentally, walking the walk is why progressives like John Edwards are so prized by labor, because they frame their policies in a context of how they'd affect actual working people.)