Stepping Stone to Universality
by digby
Charles Pierce gave the president some excellent advice last week. Let’s hope the president — and the rest of the Democrats — take it. He was talking about Health Care:
Right now, it almost never comes up, except as an entry on the list of things cited by the president’s staunchest defenders in response to arguments that he hasn’t done as much as he promised to do in 2008. Let us be honest: The compromises struck to get it passed are biggest problem the ACA has, both politically and, when it fully kicks in, operationally as well. They are what made it both so hard to explain, and so vulnerable to arrant nonsense, in 2010. They are also what made the progressive base so distrustful of it in the first place, the phenomenon that so annoyed the president in that press conference. The last trump card always played in the ACA’s defense in the immediate aftermath of its passage was that the deal was the best that anyone could have managed at the time, and that it was a “stepping stone” toward true universal health care, the point the president made above in comparing it to the births of Social Security and Medicare.
The problem is that the “stepping stone” argument largely has vanished from the argument. (For that matter, in the political dialogue, the ACA itself seems to function only as a checkmark on a list for the administration, and as the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse for the Republicans.) But if the president wants to talk about his achievement in the upcoming campaign, the “stepping stone” pitch is the best one he has, assuming he’s at all sincere about it. Enough of the law is in effect now to make a compelling case for health-care reform as an ongoing process. (Commercials with people who have pre-existing conditions who were able to get coverage now that they were previously denied. Students struggling to find jobs who were able to stay on their parents’s insurance.) To talk about it as a process is a way to admit that the law has its problems, but that it is not fatally flawed. Also, it recommits the president and the Democrats to universal coverage as a goal. The worst thing about the way the president has talked about health-care reform is that it often seems as though he’s achieved what he wanted to do, and now has moved on. Keeping promises, as Obama himself has warned us, can take some time. It would be nice to hear that he’s still working on keeping this one.
I still want Medicare for all, so I’d be happy if the president went all-in on defending that, but I’ll take what I can get.
Pierce is right except for one thing. The Democrats may say nothing about it except as part of the laundry list of achievements for which they feel they don’t get enough credit, but the Republicans can’t stop talking about it. So naturally, the Dems are now afraid to be the staunch defenders of average Americans because some Tea partier is calling them socialists.
Pierce is right. They should take a page from their positioning on women’s health and use it as a “stepping stone” to talking about expanding the health care bill overall. They aren’t going to lose any votes over it. People who hate “Ohbaahmacare” can’t hate it any more than they already do. But it might just appeal to a few people who are confused or dissatisfied with what they’ve seen.
I seriously doubt they will do it. You can see that the Democrats are desperately afraid to revisit the issue. They are still smarting from 2010, which many attribute to the bruising battle over health care. But it would be a good test of the trope that a good defense is a good offense. And if nothing else it would lay the groundwork for future legislation to fix the ACA when the Republicans and the courts inevitably start chipping away at it.
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