Call in the Crash Cart

Everyone should share some blame for the health care fiasco.

by David Faris

Health care reform proponents were scheduled to hold vigils on Wednesday night in Love Park and at Keswick Theatre in Glenside. If you weren't at one of them, and you haven't been writing letters to your Congresscritters or helping the cause in some other way, don't be surprised if you wake up next November with the same inane health care system you voted Obama into office to change, and a Congress full of the same blinkered ideologues who just finished destroying the country.

Liberals need to shake loose from their electoral afterglow and realize that we're losing Obama's presidency not only to the desiccated remains of the bankrupt GOP, but also to the corporate wing of our own party and the self-satisfied collective inaction of the activist base.

America's health care debate, currently dominated by conservatives who seem to have turned over their whole movement to people who can't win an argument with Jon Stewart, must be our dumbest national conversation since Terry Shiavo eye-rolled our collective life to a halt in 2005.

Republicans, who should still be sitting in the corner on a time-out, invent and perpetuate preposterous falsehoods like "death panels." BlueCross/BlueShield Democrats hold the entire reform process hostage to their campaign contributions from insurance companies, while the Right's lunatic fringe (welcome back, guys!) brings weapons to town hall meetings with not-so-subtle undertones of violence.

Everyone should share some blame for this fiasco. The Democrats' big mistake was framing reform around the issues of cost control and the uninsured rather than around the inadequacies of existing coverage. Americans don't care about the uninsured — given the choice between building a baseball stadium and giving health insurance to the poor, your friends and neighbors will happily choose the stadium every single time.

Of course, everyone should have health insurance — not only is it morally imperative, but preventive care would also save boatloads of money in the long run. But even for people who are allegedly insured, the current system is about as effective as the 2009 version of Brad Lidge. Many people are underinsured — like the guards at the Philadelphia Museum of Art — and pay substantially out of their own pockets for their "employer" health care plan. For many, the deductible system sets up elaborate disincentives, leading people to avoid needed care.

Only in America. Literally. No other wealthy, advanced democracy features a health care system with such a combination of mind-boggling administrative waste, naked avarice and crushing indifference to the plight of the poor. Instead of squabbling with each other, we should be uniting against the common enemy: the insurance companies, whose sole justification for existence is controlling costs. Which they don't.

Big health insurance companies are still pulling down towering profits during the Great Recession, even as 700,000 Americans are forced into bankruptcy by medical debt every year. UnitedHealth Group raked in an $859 million profit in the second quarter of 2009 alone. Aetna posted a $346.6 million profit. Why is that even legal? Perhaps because in America, you exist to be profited from.

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The shame is that all of this waste and cruelty obscures the often-heroic efforts of doctors and other professionals, some of the best of whom just saved my father's life in Boston with innovations straight out of the Star Trek sick bay. The advances of modern American medicine continue to make possible miracles that were unimaginable only a few years ago.

All of which is to say that America's medical professionals are not the problem here. They are the natural allies of the reform movement, and the product of a truly insane system of medical education, which forces prospective doctors to go hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

The doctors you imagine returning home to bottles of $1,000 wine are more than likely working 90-hour weeks to excavate themselves from truly staggering debt loads. Unsurprisingly, most sane people avoid going into medicine. The resulting doctor shortage also drives up the cost of care and deprives people in underserved areas of access to first-rate care.

The reforms under consideration won't solve all, or even many, of these problems, which are the product of choices made long ago and which will take several presidencies to address. But asking insurance companies to accept all applicants isn't socialized medicine, nor is offering a public option the first step on the way to fascism.

If Obama is humiliated and defeated during this fight, it will destroy not only the first term of his presidency, but the very dream of health care reform itself. Progress in America requires constant mobilization and steadfastness in the face of the inevitable counter-attacks from the powerful. So far the left has shown neither, and time is running out.