Health Care Déjà Vu by Brooke Jarvis — YES! Magazine »
Posted By cosmogenium 3 months, 2 weeks ago in Political Opinion
Can health care reform that does not build on the universal right to health care be successful?
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cosmogenium
Your typical liberal curmudgeon old fart blogger with thoughts on most everything trying to change the world and fight fascism one mind at a time.
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hyperbola3 months, 2 weeks ago
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Good story Cosmo. It should get more attention. For almost a cnetury now the oligarchs have been abusing Americans with regard to healthcare.
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FTA:
"""For the rest of the century, health care reform efforts—one led by the Committee on the Cost of Health Care in the 1920s, the short-lived inclusion of health coverage in the New Deal, the Wagner-Murray-Dingall bill of the Truman era, and, of course, the Clinton plan—followed the same storyline.
In each case, says historian Beatrix Hoffman, “the relentless opposition of medical, business, and insurance interests pushed reformers to design health care proposals around placating their opponents more than winning popular support. In turn, ordinary people had trouble rallying around complex proposals [that didn’t recognize] a universal right to health care.”
The root of the problem, Hoffman says, was that the proposals came from elites who sought to compromise with interest groups, where they believed real power lay, rather than to ally with grassroots movements. Reformers gave up too soon—folding to entrenched interests before assessing the strength of their own hands. They failed to enlist the support of the majority of Americans who favored public health care, just as they failed to unite the diverse, already mobilized social movements—like those for civil and women’s rights, organized labor, or, later, for AIDS and cancer funding—that considered it a worthy, but politically unlikely, goal.
This same dynamic still operates today. Reformers and opponents alike have treated this latest attempt as a political game—what concessions can (or should) be squeezed from powerful industries?—rather than as the righting of an injustice that concerns us all.
Our failure to reframe the issue is part of the reason that, though we’ve been at it since 1915, we’re the only industrialized nation without universal access to health care.... """
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