healthcare legislation

WILL THE HEALTHE CARE DEBACLE BE OUR
PRESIDENT’S DOWNFALL?

Dr. René Menguy

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Doing what's right isn't the problem. It is knowing what's right. Lyndon. B. Johnson

It seems to me that the qualifications for leadership include the wisdom to understand that some “victories” are out of reach, that some battles are better avoided than won; and have the courage to admit it, back off and regroup. It would appear that Mr. Obama cannot do that, which is why I wrote, in a recent posting, that he is incompetent. To be sure, he was more than competent as a political campaigner. Then he aimed too high; which is unfortunate, for him and for our country. As our leader in these extraordinarily difficult times, he is proving to be a failure.

Why? His first year in office was marred by a series of blunders and missteps ranging from his intrusion with the full might of the Presidential Office into a local police matter to the alienation of our closest ally in the Middle East. To list them all would require the entire space allotted me. Now he confronts the country with his obstinate refusal to accept the fact that a majority of Americans do not want his heath care bill, with all its implications and huge cost that the country can ill afford at this time, rammed down their throats. If this bill were good for the country, many Republicans in the House and the Senate would set aside party loyalties and join the President and their Democrat colleagues and vote for it. The fact that so many legislators on both sides of the aisle oppose it, after over a year of wrangling, should suggest to the President that it might be wise to drop it and attack more immediate and important problems such as the jobs, the economy and the unsettling prospect of an Iran with a Nuclear weapon. Should we allow the latter to occur, the matter of the huge debt to be inherited by our grandchildren, emphasized over and over again by those opposed to the President’s policies, will be moot; there won’t be any grandchildren.

It should be apparent to anyone with some experience in the delivery of health care that the President’s Health Care Bill must be rejected. 1) We can’t afford the cost. 2) Washington’s involvement in healthcare, from the Public Health Service to the Natl. Institutes of Health to the support of Specialist training, among others, is already huge. We don’t need more. 3) What our healthcare delivery system does need, is some repair work such as mitigating the huge cost of malpractice litigation (in this regard, the sop tossed to the Republicans is a joke), encouraging Americans to acquire health insurance early in life, which would help correct the “preexisting condition” problem, and facilitate the crossing of state lines for Insurance companies. Those pushing for a total revamping of our Heath Care Delivery system point out again and again that ours is the only western democracy without National health care. They forget that ours is a federalist society. In France, Marseille dances to the tune played in Paris. Not so here, where States jealously guard their rights. Moreover, the pluralistic composition of the US society causes problems not experienced by countries like Germany, France or Italy. For example, we have a large African American population that carries with it a set of genetically related illnesses such as obesity, hypertension and type II diabetes.

The main purpose of this health care legislation is a reduction in the cost of care. This legislation will not bring that about, short of a huge redistribution of health benefits, because the percentage of people over 65 in the private insurance pool is increasing steadily as is the demand for medical and surgical services.

The President may well succeed in pushing this misbegotten piece of legislation through Congress. Whether he does or not, he loses. How in the world did the greatest country in the history of the world get itself into such a mess?