Why Can't Obama Convince the Dems On Health Care?

It's easy enough to blame the spineless Congressional Dems for the failure of the health care plan. And it's not just the millions being spent by insurance companies and health care profiteers and the distortions put forward by the corporate media--those are important realities, but they don't explain why the Obama voters are not lighting a fire under the butts of their elected representatives to support health care transformation. People are concerned.But their worry about rising costs is not totally irrational. They rightly fear that they might pay the price in the 2010 elections for a new plan that has caused rises in prices by insurance companies, hospitals or pharmaceuticals coupled with taxes on the earnings of middle income people and on small businesses.

It's great to see President Obama finally striking out at the Republicans who want no progress and are trying to block every plan for a reason that is despicable: their desire to have Obama fail so that they can go to the election of 2010 and say: "See, this nice guy accomplished nothing."
And it's great to see the President starting to talk about the destructive role played by the insurance companies. Both of these switches in his oratory may be too little, too late. When he had the attention of the country in the Spring he was, instead, teaching the American public that his highest goal was bi-partisanship, and he shaped his economic, environmental and health care programs to achieve that unrealistic and undesirable goal (undesirable,because it meant compromising to the Right and ignoring the people who actually voted for him and their desires).

The fundamental problem for Obama is that the plans he is willing to back are all flawed in precisely the way that the Republicans are saying: they will necessarily cause a significant rise in the cost of the total health care bill.

There are only two ways to deal with that:

1. Obama could acknowledge that and say: "the issue is simply this: will the wealthy be willing to pay for the poor who are excluded from heatlh care, plus all the others who are kept from health care by the health care profiteers in the insurance companies, hospitals for the rich , and super-rich doctors--because I as President will reject a solution that delivers health care by raising the costs of middle income people who are already struggling. So, yes, this must be paid for by a straightforward tax on the rich and the wealthy corporations like the banking companies that have been reaping billions made possible by the aid we gave them to prevent them from collapsing. So, I won't ask employees making less than $250,000 to carry this burden, but only the wealthy."

Or, and far more persuasive in the long run:

2. Obama could embrace Single Payer: "I've always said that the Single Payer plan was the most rational and that if we had to devise a system from scratch that would be the one to adopt. So if the Congress does not develop the reforms needed that I've proposed, then I will revive Single Payer as the plan to replace all these stop-gap measures. Single Payer will reduce the total cost of health care in this country without new taxes because it will totally eliminate the role of Insurance Companies and their super-profits. It's a plan to extend Medicare to everyone. Like Medicare, you are still free to choose your own doctors. But the government will set limits on how much those doctors and hospitals can charge for any given procedure."

Obama could continue: "There may be some doctors who want to retire from medicine because they won't make the same super-profits the current system allows, but we will actually expand the number of doctors, because part of the plan I will offer is the building and financing of one hundred new medical schools and the creation of a public fund to pay free tuition and living-subsidies to medical, dental, nursing and psychology students so that we can expand the range of qualified students who get to receive the health care training that is needed, and these will be students who will not in their later years be complaining that they have the right to huge profits in providing health care services and justify that on the basis of the suffering that they experienced in taking huge loans to get through their training. The Single Payer plan, which I prefer to call the 'responsibility-for-caring-for-each-other medical plan' will provide reduced costs for pharmaceuticals, because the government will be able to negotiate reasonable prices with pharmacy companies, or eliminate the right of pharmaceuticals to patent any product that is needed for the health care needs of the world. This is the historical moment when patriotic Americans have to say clearly: 'we are all in this together, an offense against one is an offense against all, and we intend to beat the enemy of the well-being of Americans, the enemy that seeks to weaken our country by allowing tens of millions of people to be without adequate access to the health care that they need.' So it's now time to return to the Biblical values of "love they neighbor as thyself," and to reject those immoral values that place self-interest over the need to care for each other. The first step in reclaiming the highest values of America is to back Single Payer or "responsibility for caring for each-other health care"--and that is precisely what I intend to do, should have done from the start, but now will fully embrace if the Congress is unable to find a reasonable way to provide health care for all without raising taxes or otherwise increasing the financial burden on middle income working Americans."

Yes, he'd face the wrath of the insurance industry, the medical profiteers, their friends in the media, and the Republicans--but he'd finally have a stance that he could unequivocally sell to the American public that would make common sense, rally people's sense of caring for each other, and lower the financial burden on most Americans. So if Obama fails to go in this direction, he has only himself to blame for the failure of his health reform.

But lets say he goes in this direction--then what should he do to counter the huge attacks that he is already facing and that would only be stronger after he embraced this direction? Here is what he would need to do:

1.Spend every night for the next 3 months in a different American city where he would conduct public "teach-ins"/rallies on health care and invite anyone in the city who actually wanted a serious health care reform to come meet with him. For the tens of thousands of people likely to show up he would put a simple challenge: they need to promise their elected representatives to Congress (including their US Senators) that if these reps don't support the single-payer plan proposed by Obama, they will personally campaign against them in the primaries and in the election.

2. Obama needs to quietly but firmly get a movement going to run candidates in the primaries against any Democrat who fails to support his plan. Rahm Emanuel recruited many of these faux Dems because he thought it was so important to win that he didn't care what they stand for. Now Obama needs an operative with exactly the opposite intention--to find Dems to run in the primaries against those House and Senate Dems who won't support single payer health care, and against those Republicans who are doing all they can to block every aspect of his program. Then, Obama should announce that if his single-payer plan is not enacted by this or the next Congress, he will run again for President and seek an even stronger mandate from the American people for a cross-party alliance of all those who want a serious health care reform.

3. Obama should ask people in every part of the U.S. who have been hurt by our current health care plan to go door-to-door in their neighborhoods telling their stories and seeking support for a single payer plan, and do the same in some wealthy neighborhood within an hour's drive from where they live.

4. Obama should rename "single payer" the "solidarity and caring for-each-other health care plan."

5. Obama should make it clear that he believes that most Americans would love to live in a world in which ethical considerations, and a sense of community and caring and love were actually the core guide to people's behavior. But since most of us don't realize that this is what most others want, he intends to use his presidency to help people become aware of each other and recognize that they are not alone in wanting to take seriously the teachings of the Bible and of Jesus to "love your neighbor as yourself." Health care, he should say, is the test case, but it is only the beginning of a campaign for a "Caring for each other" politics of the Obama years.Tens of millions of Americans would be mobilized by this kind of approach and he would suddenly find a new poltiical climate favorable to serious health care reform. In every major city in the US tens of thousands would be mobilized into a campaign for health care. Unlike his current strategy, relying on emails and the national media, a strategy of mass mobilization would have an immense impact and be far more "Realistic" than the approach he has taken to date.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine and Chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in San Francisco.

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