To me, health care is the single most important issue in this election. Implementing a universal health care plan is the one thing we can do to vastly improve the lives of millions of Americans. So I thought I'd share the following rather stirring case for universal health care, which I happened to stumble across while researching the topic. It's been excerpted, and in some parts, lightly edited for length:
In the 2008 campaign, affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. We have the ideas, we have the resources, and we will have universal health care in this country by the end of the next president's first term.
I know there's a cynicism out there about whether this can happen, and there's reason for it. Every four years, health care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics, leaving the rest of America to struggle with skyrocketing costs.
For too long, this debate has been stunted by what I call the smallness of our politics - the idea that there isn't much we can agree on or do about the major challenges facing our country. And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process.
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And yet, in recent years, what's caught the attention of those who haven't always been in favor of reform is the realization that this crisis isn't just morally offensive, it's economically untenable. For years, the can't-do crowd has scared the American people into believing that universal health care would mean socialized medicine and burdensome taxes - that we should just stay out of the way and tinker at the margins.
[R]egardless of what combination of policies and proposals get us to this goal, we must reach it. We must act. And we must act boldly. As one health care advocate recently said, "The most expensive course is to do nothing." But it wasn't a liberal Democrat or union leader who said this.
It was the president of the very health industry association that funded the "Harry and Louise" ads designed to kill the Clinton health care plan in the early nineties.
The debate in this country over health care has shifted... And so Washington no longer has an excuse for caution. Leaders no longer have a reason to be timid. And America can no longer afford inaction. That's not who we are - and that's not the story of our nation's improbable progress.
Never forget that we have it within our power to shape history in this country. It is not in our character to sit idly by as victims of fate or circumstance, for we are a people of action and innovation, forever pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Universal health care as a core Democratic value. No more caution. No more timidity. No more caution. We must propose something bold, and fight back against those who would try to oppose it using fear tactics and Harry and Louise-style ads. An appeal to our national spirit of accomplishment. Exactly what I want to hear.
Now is the time to push those boundaries once more. We have come so far in the debate on health care in this country, but now we must finally answer the call first issued by Truman, advanced by Johnson, and fought for by so many leaders and Americans throughout the last century. The time has come for universal health care in America.
--Senator Barack Obama, January 25, 2007.
Whatever happened to the person who said all this? Somewhere between then and now, that person turned into the one who is now sending out misleading mailers based on Harry and Louise, denying that he was ever in favor of single-payer, raising the specter of government intrusion and burdensome payments, and promoting a plan that is in some ways less ambitious than those of Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As Paul Krugman wrote in his blog the other day, a dream is dying. And for some terribly cruel reason, this time it is dying not at the hands of an implacable Congress--it is dying in the Democratic primary.