Posted: Jan. 24, 2010

FREE PRESS EDITORIAL

"

Health care crisis is alive and well

Nation must not be satisfied with a system that fails so many

Barack Obama has made some serious strategic mistakes in his year-long crusade to reform American health care.

He failed to anticipate how vigorously the entrenched interests involved -- the millions of economic actors who profit from the very dysfunctions his initiative is designed to ameliorate -- would resist reform, or how effectively those interests would harness the same freelance anger and economic anxiety that fueled Obama's own election.

He didn't appreciate that the same instincts that make voters so distrustful of large corporations and financial institutions have made them equally wary of the federal bureaucracy he now heads, or that their wariness might doom his plans to expand the government's role in health care.

And although many elements of the health care bills adopted by the House and Senate were either proposed by Republicans or designed to appeal to Republican voters, Obama probably gave up too early on his efforts to woo moderate Republicans such as Maine's Olympia Snowe. That left Democratic holdouts like Nebraska's Ben Nelson and Michigan's Bart Stupak in a position to extort self-serving side deals that diminished Obama's stature as well as the viability of his health care initiative.

Still an emergency

But however suspicious Massachusetts voters are of the remedies he prescribed, Obama did not contrive the dire health care crisis those remedies were designed to address. That emergency was and remains very real.

Whether one frames the health care status quo as a moral outrage that leaves tens of millions in the world's richest democracy without health coverage or as an economic catastrophe that threatens to bankrupt both private industry and the public treasury, the status quo is an unsustainable condition that cannot be ignored.

Voters cheering the prospect of renewed gridlock are like spectators applauding firefighters' retreat from a burning building. They may not like the firefighters who responded to the scene, or they may sincerely believe those firefighters lack the right equipment to put out the blaze. But allowing the building to burn to the ground is not a reasonable option.

More . . .

"

-- Edited by Sanders on Sunday 24th of January 2010 04:08:17 PM