Now the conservatives have Obama where they want him – on the defensive.
Oh, boy. The boy wonder who blazed the 
trail to the White House on the wave of millions chanting “Yes we can!” is now reeling under the attack of a different set of slogan key words – “Government-run health care”, “Socialized medicine”, “Rationing”, “Euthanasia”, “Private insurance killer”.
Well, you live by the slogan, you die by the slogan.
Who would have thought that a wildly popular Democratic president, with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, would have difficulty passing legislation designed to reform a health care system that more than half the American population think is too costly, too inefficient, too profit-driven and too messed up to be allowed to continue?
Probably nobody, specially during the heady post-election days of November last year.
But now it is happening. Obama is losing this battle and here are the reasons why:
First, Obama did not learn his lesson from the failure of Bill Clinton’s health care reform initiative in the early 1990s.Everyone in the Obama administration who has something to do with the current legislations in Congress would say they did actually learn from Clinton’s mistakes. No they did not.
Their plan was just to do the opposite of whatever Clinton did. Clinton’s team, on its own, without input from Congress, drew up an ambitious, detailed plan to wean the country away from the current system, introduce a public health insurance option and eventually make the transition to a single-payer universal health care system. To Obama’s team, this was a no-no. So they announced the broad intent to improve health care by waving a blank slate, then asked if parties involved would like to come forward and help fill in the details.
In effect, they announced a party then asked who would secure the venue, bring the food, provide the music and run the party games.
Who took up the call for ideas? Predictably, parties representing the big players of the health care industry, each one promising to bring down their costs by x million dollars now that legislation to reform health care and rein in its cost seemed imminent.
Today, months after those promises were made – and at a time the health care discussion has grown into a full-blown polarizing debate – where are those promises? Where are the numbers to back up the assumption that those promises are more than lip service – and that those who made the commitment will deliver on them? Has it ever occurred to anybody that it is not in the interest of a health care insurer to bring down the cost of premium and deductibles? That it is not in the interest of health care providers to slash their own earnings?
Not the way to lead
The morale of the story here is … you do not lead this way. This is not the way to lead. You do this and you invite all sorts of suggestions, more than enough to confuse you and make you wonder how you got into this mess. Some call it consensus-building; it is not. It is plainly a failure to lead.
You lead this way and, yes, you show an openness and willingness to listen to other ideas on the way to forging cooperation. But you also come across as unprepared, indecisive, and worse, bereft of ideas.
The second reason for the faltering health care initiative is the failure of the Obama team to figure out that the issue is best dealt with when broken up into two manageable parts –one, overhauling the existing inefficient and wasteful system, and two, finding a way to finance the overhaul.
Presenting the issue as a single complex problem invites questions of funding, which has the effect of diluting the main message and shoving it aside. Not that funding is not very important – it is – but arguing spiritedly about money and where it will come from tends to dominate the discussion and leave the core issue in a fog. A few voices raised loud enough, repeatedly, and most everyone forgets what they were arguing about.
Exactly the scenario preferred by the opponents of health care reform.
Look back at what has happened over the past several weeks– hundreds coming to town hall meetings on health care reform to boo speakers and shoot down proposals; a swastika spray-painted on the office of a town advocate of health care reform; or red-faced seniors on Medicare and Medicaid coverage denouncing government involvement and decision-making in health care – hurling invectives at the very government-run system that keeps them protected beyond what their meager social security checks can cover.
Ignorance is bliss
It has been observed that many Americans tend to make decisions that work against their own interests. Whether it is the deplorable standard of education or the desperate desire to cling to what worked in generations past, this inability to make informed decisions based on facts is just not helping.
This country bombed Iraq without worrying about the cost. No one raised a hue and cry about how many millions of dollars a day it would cost to contain the insurgency and keep the killing beyond the protected zone. It is still costing billions now that the Bush-Cheney gang of bullies has been voted out of power.
Sure, reforming health care will cost trillions of dollars over the next 10 to 20 years. But it is already costing billions now with about 45 million Americans walking around without insurance, with no solution in sight.
The biggest defeat for the President himself would be the demise of the proposed public insurance option – the core of the proposed legislation, everything else is just detail – which he promised during the campaign and which opponents of health care reform are now taking apart even as we speak. What would be left would be the status quo.
Of course, health care reform opponents would always cite figures saying a large majority of Americans who have health insurance cannot be happier with their situation and prefer to keep it that way. Yes, the same working Americans who, in this recession, are just one layoff away from the poor house. They can afford it now, no problem, but let’s hear them sing that tune when the pink slip arrives.
The travails of Obama and the Democrats as they fumbled their way into announcing their health care initiative can be best described in baseball parlance: President Obama, the self-confessed Chicago White Sox fan, stood on the pitcher’s mound, his 98-mile-an-hour fastball cocked and ready. He could just let it loose, straight down the pipe, and dare the batter to catch up with it.
But what did he do? He nibbled on the sides, throwing a puny breaking ball that did not break sharply enough and ended up in the middle of the strike zone. In the blink of an eye, the hitter pounced. The ball was airborne and into the hands of a fan 450 feet out in straightaway center field. Home run.
Obama and company want that pitch back. But in life, as in baseball, that is not going to happen.
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