Posted by Bruce Bourgoine who blogs at
Kennebec Blues and Dirigo Blue.
It is apparent that Republican right-wing efforts to derail, dilute, and destroy health care reform are succeeding. They have enervated a compassionate, democratic, and moral attempt to deliver universal health care with substantive reform. They have been aided and abetted by the financial muscle of health of insurance companies in that industry’s obstruction of the will of the people to further protect and preserve profits in lieu of health care delivery. And now they have tossed in the poison pills of immigration and abortion to destroy a genuine effort to extend heath care rights to every American.
From universal single payer coverage to a robust public option to a weakened state opt-out public option to the possible further compromise of a weaker delayed regional or state trigger plan, the concessions have been too many. The right-wing deployment of compromise entrapments has only yielded intentional delays and dilution in a cynical drive to kill health care reform by a thousand cuts. Accepting an extremely weak bill with even further compromises resulting from an eventual House-Senate conference committee that does not come close to comprehensive and robust reform will likely delay critically needed reforms for a decade or more.
The intent of this withdrawal proposal is not to succumb to defeat but to openly win a more comprehensive, permanent, and earlier effective date reform. Withdrawing health care reform now should only be part of a strategy to run vigorously on substantive reform as a central national platform in 2010. We must make it our version of the "Contract with America". We need to place health care reform’s future directly into the hands of voters and run convincingly on a robust single payer system that the Administration and Democratic Congressional majority will support. We need to accurately expose the deliberate machinations of Republicans to kill health care reform and aid big insurance profits within the public arena of an election. And we need the more conservative elements of our own party to have their reluctance to endorse and pass robust reform tested in their home districts with our national platform openly debated.
In temporary withdrawal we do not need to abandon change entirely. Let’s pass a short simple bill that Republicans cannot defeat that addresses a limited number of critical concerns. This immediate effort should at the very least place an instantaneous halt to pre-existing condition discrimination and reverse the prohibition on our Government’s ability to negotiate drug pricing for Medicare. Let’s put the "just say no" Republicans on the spot with the prospect of stopping pre-existing condition insurance company abuse in a bill that challenges their dogmatic rhetoric about big government evil constraint of free markets. And let’s not err by calling this reform or even partial reform; let us name it the 2009 Health Justice Act. Real reform is what we must run vigorously on in 2010 to get a compelling mandate to pass single payer universal health care within the first month of seating a larger and more progressive Democratic majority.