More about Obama's lack of substance.
Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 07:56:01 AM PDT
In my previous entry I discussed, briefly, why Hillary Clinton's charge that Barack Obama is all fluff and no substance is true (but falling on deaf ears). Now I'll go into why it's true.
I'll do this by going to town on some of the issues posted on his web site, asking some hard questions about how Mr. Obama intends to bring about this change he keeps talking about. Today I'll focus on his web site's Issues page on health care coverage.
Coverage for all.
- Guaranteed eligibility. No American will be turned away from any insurance plan because of illness or pre-existing conditions.
This is a bit vague, isn't it? How does Obama expect to cover all Americans, when his plan does not include mandates and doesn't cover everyone?
Obama is being misleading when he says his proposal would "cover everyone." It would make coverage available to all, but experts we consulted estimate that 15 million to 26 million wouldn't take it up unless required to do so.
Not that this lets Hillary Clinton off the hook, by the way. The same source writes:
Clinton stretches things a bit, too. Even her plan – which, unlike Obama’s, includes a mandate for individuals to get insurance – would leave out a million people or perhaps more, depending on how severe the penalties would be for those who don't comply. She won't say how her mandate would be enforced, but has said that she was open to the possibility of garnishing wages.
But I digress. FactCheck.org writes:
Obama requires only that children have coverage and that dependents be covered under their parents' insurance up to age 25.
Paul Krugman -- whose biggest issue is health care reform, and whose analyses of the candidates' plans asks whether they stand a chance of working -- writes:
An Obama-type plan would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don’t sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else. Mr. Obama, contradicting his earlier assertions that affordability is the only bar to coverage, is now talking about penalizing those who delay signing up — but it’s not clear how this would work.
And:
Mr. Gruber finds that a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion. Over all, the Obama-type plan would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the Clinton-type plan only $2,700.
So Obama's plan does not offer universal coverage. The only way to ensure that every American is covered would be to go with single-payer health care. HR 676 does this, but no major politician wants to even try to go for this. Which brings me to my next point. How does Obama intend to get this passed, when he won't even say how he'll get the opposition to make concessions? Or whether or not he's inclined to? Obama's web site doesn't say, and neither does he.
Obama often speaks of bipartisanship on the campaign trail, of getting Democrats and Republicans to shelve their differences and work together. If it's the same "bipartisanship" he showed in the Illinois state senate, where he worked to gut health care reform on behalf of the insurance lobbyists, then his entire argument is based on a lie -- an empty promise of reform that he has no intention of keeping, because he has neither the will or the courage.
It's a major stumbling block, and probably the first one that shall ultimately kill all hopes of health care reform. When Obama talks about the issue, he doesn't really address how he'll bring his reforms about -- except to bring everyone to the table and get them to play nice. But he never explains how he intends to accomplish this.
It is no secret that the GOP today is a lock-step political party. This is a result of movement conservativism's maintenance of iron discipline within the party ranks. Those who follow orders see benefits, even when it leads to their removal from public office. For example, Rick Santorum was handed a cushy job at a fascist think tank following his re-election defeat in 2006. By Contrast, moderate Republican Lincoln Chafee -- who often voted against his own party -- ended up facing a stiff primary battle that left him weakened going into the general election. And the RNC refused to support him. So he, too, lost. What's more, rather than find himself with a high-paying job, he managed to get a year-long teaching position at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.
This is the sort of rigid disciplinary system within the Republican Party that Obama must overcome. But he's given no indication of how he expects to accomplish this task. Furthermore, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to meet a new, Democratic president half way. Why should they make concessions, when they know all they need do is get their bought politicians in both major parties to kill any health care reform, no matter how tepid, and keep everything they want? Looking at Obama's web site, I find nothing that indicates he even acknowledges the problem, to say nothing of how he'll address it.
This is the emptiness inherent in Obama's campaign. A lot of fine-sounding rhetoric, a lot of obvious statements about what needs to be done, but little or nothing on how to actually accomplish anything substantive. And this is just the first bullet point in Obama's plan. I haven't even touched the others yet.
