Stand With The President

There's a new little box over there in the left column. It says Stand with the President on Health Care, and below the symbol it says Declare Your Support. If you click on that, it takes you to BarackObama.com and the page about health care, where you can learn a bit more, see a short video and sign up to support the President.

President Obama needs your support, especially right now. The well-paid sharks are out to destroy health care reform once again. They're pouring money into the pockets of conservative Democrats as well as GOPers. The noise machine seems to be having an effect on poll numbers, which only emboldens them to get louder. So right now not only health care but the climate and energy bill and the rest of the agenda crucial for the future are imperiled.

But it's also not a time to give up hope. Mike Madden's summary and analysis at Salon is still sanguine on success, including the public option. President Obama responded to one Senate committee's proposal with another strong endorsement of the public option. "So you could still choose a private insurer, but we’d also have a public plan that you could choose from that would be non-for-profit, wouldn’t have, hopefully, some of the same high administrative costs, and would be potentially more responsive to your needs at a lower cost. I think that helps keep the insurance companies honest because now they have somebody to compete with."

He also confronted the noise machine's deliberate confusions, though with humor: "And I got a letter the other day from a woman; she said, I don’t want government-run health care, I don’t want socialized medicine, and don’t touch my Medicare. (Laughter.) And I wanted to say, well, I mean, that’s what Medicare is, is it’s a government-run health care plan that people are very happy with. But I think that we’ve been so accustomed to hearing those phrases that sometimes we can’t sort out the myth from the reality."

That noise is obscuring very important reasons to support health care reform, as in this essay by a doctor who treats the disabled. The economics of it all come in sharper and more realistic focus in, for example, this article in Bloomberg that comes up with yet more numbers suggesting the cost of doing nothing far exceeds the cost of even the most expensive proposed reform plan.

Health care reform means not only more affordable insurance, and reforms to all insurance that allow portability and stop denial for preexisting conditions. It means lower costs for health care itself, more emphasis on preventive care and health rather than expensive medical practices. It's a big program for the same reason that the recovery act was big: it attacks not just present problems, but it makes positive structural changes and investments to start creating a better future.

People who oppose this include a pretty hefty proportion who are more interested in defeating President Obama and crippling his presidency than they are about opposing a health care bill. (After all, Congress gets great public health care, and the executives, lobbyists and media stars can afford the best insurance and care.) But in this they are right: if health care reform is defeated, it will be much harder to get other crucial legislation passed, like climate and energy.

So debating the details is useful, but in the end, standing with this President is of the greatest importance.