The Institute of Medicine’s methodology says 22,000 people died in 2006 because they didn’t have health-care coverage. A recent Harvard study found the number nearer to 45,000. Since we talk about the costs of health-care reform over a 10-year period, may as well talk about the lives saved that way, too. And we’re looking, easily, at more than a hundred thousand lives, to say nothing of the people who will be spared bankruptcy, chronic pain, unnecessary impairment, unnecessary caretaking, bereavement, loss of wages, painful surgeries, and so on.
A lot of progressives woke up this morning feeling like they lost. They didn’t. The public option and its compromised iterations were a battle that came to seem like a war. But they weren’t the war. The bill itself was. When liberals talked about the dream of universal health-care insurance 10, 20 and 30 years ago, they talked about the plight of the uninsured, not the necessity of a limited public option in competition with private insurers.
Ezra Klein on what remains in health care reform. Yes, it’s still worth passing the bill. In sports terminology, passing the bill that’s out there now constitutes “escaping with a win,” not losing.
Update: Please also read Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill, by Nate Silver.
Update: Kevin Drum:
Ten years ago this bill would have seemed a godsend. The fact that it doesn’t now is a reflection of higher aspirations from the left, and that’s great.
Update: Here’s one proposal for how health care reform should have been handled, politically. It reads like a joke to me. How many Senators were against more substantial reform and letting Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Joe Lieberman, and Ben Nelson take the flack? I suspect that Rahm Emanuel and Harry Reid have a better count than I do, and that the number is far greater than zero. Yglesias names a few of them in his post.
Why is health care reform important? I haven’t seen it put better than in this St. Petersburg Times op-ed.
This assertion by Tom Schaller at fivethirtyeight.com strikes me as completely true:
In other words, although the end-of-life use of Medicare is a government problem that violates almost every philosophy they espouse about the proper role of government—public sector over private; easily exploited by, rather than protected from, trial lawyers; a moral hazard, consequence-free billing system as opposed to rational, need-based spending; a program with rising outlays as opposed to slow or zero growth outlays—Medicare is instead the very program they are rallying behind.
And why? For votes—specifically the votes of those angry, mostly-white seniors upon whom they are betting their electoral fortunes in 2010 and beyond. In short, the GOP has now become so wedded to its dying, white majority that it is willing to sacrifice not only good public policy and smart long-term budgeting, but its very own core principles. Their politically-motivated, 180-degree defense of Medicare and their inflammatory rhetoric about death panels proves that the GOP is now the party paralyzed by identity politics.
Ezra Klein on the future of health care reform:
Failure does not bring with it a better chance for future success. It brings a trimming of future ambitions.
Matt Taibbi has written what to me looks like the definitive account of the health care reform process thus far. I can’t find a thing in it to argue with. The most frustrating thing about it is that I have a hard time seeing how it could have gone any differently. It’s not as though anyone can point to any one bad decision that would have made things go more easily — this is how our government works.
The one thing that really does disappoint me is that when campaigning for President, Barack Obama said he would break through the gridlock in Washington by going directly to the people and getting them to put pressure on Congress to enact important reforms. I’m not sure whether he’s to blame for not harnessing the public effectively, or the public is responsible for not answering when he called. But we’re now stuck with the same dysfunctional lawmaking process that we’ve had for as long as I can remember.
Not only are we stuck with a government that is incapable of effectiveness, but we are stuck with a populace that is unwilling to demand effectiveness. The most energized portion of the electorate is operating in a fever dream of paranoia and stupidity so deep that they are indistinguishable from followers of Lyndon LaRouche.
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