Drawing A Picture

by digby

McJoan reports:

The Obama administration has already sent a sternly-worded letter to Anthem Blue Cross over the company’s excessive rate increase for individual policy holders in California. How excessive? Up to 39 percent. But that’s not all. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield also informed their customers that they are changing their practice of adjusting rates annually, and as of now are reserving the right to raise premiums basically whenever they feel like it.

There’s little beyond sternly-worded letters that the administration can do, other than something like maybe advocating strongly for some kind of legislative remedy, say in the form of serious competition to private insurers in the form of a robust public option for health insurance. But there’s something Congress can do, and that’s put the insurers on the hot seat and investigate.

And apparently, they are going to do just that.

It seems as if this would have been a very good thing to do before the health care debate even started. Indeed, it would have been a good thing to do constantly since 2007, when the Democrats took the majority.

There was an assumption that the country truly understood the problem with the health care system and felt their own vulnerability to its excesses. Maybe everyone assumed people pay really close attention to the presidential debates and sign on to all the details of the various platforms of the candidates. Or perhaps they just thought that everybody in the country had seen Sicko (if only.) Whatever the case, the politicians erred in not illustrating the problems in living color, over and over again, in a sustained education campaign before they attempted a comprehensive overhaul.

People know something’s wrong. But the problem is that most of them are working and have insurance, which means it is an abstract problem that they don’t personally face. The job of the politicians was to 1) make the moral case for not allowing your fellow citizens to be completely destroyed, physically and financially, because they have the bad luck to get sick and 2) to illustrate how easily it could happen to anyone.

It’s tough to do in an era of self-centered conservatism, so they tried to make it about the nation’s well being as a whole. But that’s not a case that’s easily sold in a political environment that’s been drenched in incoherent conservative cant for decades and which holds as an article of faith that taxes are the major cause of economic insecurity and cutting spending will result in better benefits.

I don’t know if these hearings will help pass health care reform this year. I no longer have any sense of whether that is going to happen or not. But the problem isn’t going away and so regardless of its immediate chances for passage, the Democrats have to keep trying to educate people about the issue. It’s overdue.

.