Paul Krugman looks at Obama’s tepid venture into healthcare reform during his days as an Illinois state senator, as reported by this Boston Globe article, and he concludes that Obama is not ready for prime time:
My thoughts: being president isn’t at all like being a state legislator, Illinois Republicans aren’t like the national Republican party, 2009 won’t be 2003, and the insurance industry’s opposition to national health reform — which must, if it is to mean anything, strike deep at the industry’s fundamental business — will be much harsher than its opposition to a basically quite mild state-level reform effort.
The point is that if national health reform is going to happen, it will be as the result of a no-holds-barred fight of an entirely different order from what Obama saw in Illinois. The president’s role will have to be far more confrontational, involve far more twisting of arms and rallying of the public against the special interests, than Obama’s role as a state legislator in the Illinois case. And it will take place against a backdrop of fierce attacks not just from the industry but from Republicans who fear, rightly, that any kind of reform will move the country in a more liberal direction.
My thoughts are much less charitable, because of one paragraph in the Globe article:
The bill originally called for a “Bipartisan Health Care Reform Commission” to implement a program reaching all 12.4 million Illinois residents. The legislation would have made it official state policy to ensure that all residents could access “quality healthcare at costs that are reasonable.” Insurers feared that language would result in a government takeover of healthcare, even though the bill did not explicitly say that.
By the time the legislation passed the Senate, in May 2004, Obama had written three successful amendments, at least one of which made key changes favorable to insurers.
Most significant, universal healthcare became merely a policy goal instead of state policy – the proposed commission, renamed the Adequate Health Care Task Force, was charged only with studying how to expand healthcare access. In the same amendment, Obama also sought to give insurers a voice in how the task force developed its plan.
(Emphasis mine)
Let’s be clear on this: This is not just the “big table” that Obama is so fond of talking about. This is the wholesale abandonment of a core value, and he didn’t just vote for it, he proposed the amendment to abandon it.
Truth be told, I’m sick of his “Red Sea will part before my awsomness” schtick. This was just selling out.
Read Krugman’s blog post, but you may find the Globe article more interesting. He appeared to be joined at the hip with the insurance companies.