In Case You Missed This... Confirmation On What Many Of Us Believed Re: The Publc Option Fight

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47. Richard Kirsch

and HCAN were amazing during the battle to pass health care reform. He has written some excellent comments on it.

Health Care and the Winds of History

by Richard Kirsch

The President and Congress didn’t make health care reform happen — the progressive grassroots did.

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It wasn’t only Speaker Pelosi who was energized by the historical import of making health care “a right, not a privilege,” in a phrase she made fully hers. It’s no accident that in countless health care speeches President Obama mentioned that presidents back to Teddy Roosevelt have tried and failed to win health care. Obama pledged to be the last president to make such a quest in an address to a joint session of Congress.

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It wasn’t just the President or Congressional leadership who felt that they were making history. Many rank and file Democratic members felt the passage in historic terms, including some of the members who most risked reelection by voting for health care, which really was very unpopular in their districts.

But as students of the New Deal or other progressive eras in the United States know, presidents and congresses didn’t stand up to powerful forces opposing change on their own. It was organized people’s movements that created the political momentum that fanned the favorable historic winds.

The same is true for the passage of health care reform. If President Obama and the Democratic Congress were delivering the health care baby, it was the organized progressive forces that were the midwives to history. And like any good midwife, what we did was convince the mother, through our grassroots organizing around the country, that it was worth the pain and that the baby would come out right and make the mom and dad proud.

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http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/07/01/health-care-and-the-winds-of-history-13361/

Why Republicans are So Intent on Killing Health Care Reform

by Richard Kirsch

It’s not just about expanded care. It’s about proving our government can be a force for the common good.

Why are John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell so intent on stopping health care reform from ever taking hold? For the same reason that Republicans and the corporate Right spent more than $200 million in the last year to demonize health care in swing Congressional districts. It wasn’t just about trying to stop the bill from becoming law or taking over Congress. It is because health reform, if it takes hold, will create a bond between the American people and government, just as Social Security and Medicare have done. Democrats, and all those who believe that government has a positive place in our lives, should remember how much is at stake as Republicans and corporate elites try to use their electoral victory to dismantle the new health care law.

My enjoyment of the MLB playoffs last month was interrupted by ads run by Karl Rove’s Crossroads front group against upstate New York Rep. Scott Murphy, who was defeated last Tuesday. Rove’s ads rained accusations on Murphy, including the charge of a “government takeover of health care.” Some might have thought that once the public option was removed from the health care legislation, Republicans couldn’t make that charge. But it was never tied to the public option or any other specific reform. Republicans and their allies, following the advice of message guru Frank Luntz, were going to call whatever Democrats proposed a government takeover.

There’s nothing new here. Throughout American history, health care reform has been attacked as socialist. An editorial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in December 1932, just after FDR’s election, claimed that proposals for compulsory insurance “were socialism and communism — inciting to revolution.” The PR firm that the American Medical Association hired to fight Truman’s push for national health insurance succeeded in popularizing a completely concocted quote that it attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.”

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President Obama and Democrats in Congress understood the historical importance and profound moral underpinnings of the new health care law when they enacted it earlier this year. And they knew that the right-wing attack had soured the public in swing Congressional districts and states on reform. They stood up then. They will have to stand up again, understanding that if they give way to Republicans, they lose more than the expansion of health coverage. They lose the best opportunity in half a century to prove to Americans that government can be a force for the common good.

http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/11/08/why-republicans-are-so-intent-on-killing-health-care-reform-26298/