While I do not agree with the way in which the president took on health care and the mess we ended up with, he was absolutely right to understand that health care reform was essential to ensure a strong (and, need I say, moral) economy AND job growth. I think it is unfortunate that too many voices in our own party are trying, in the insiders' feeding frenzy of Monday-morning quarterbacking, to yank apart an obvious truth and buy into the insiders' mentality.
Here is an example, via The Wall Street Journal:
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm on Sunday welcomed the White House push for a new jobs program. "It's overdue, like a million jobs overdue, you bet it's overdue," she told CNN.
Michigan has been among the hardest-hit states in the economic downturn. The jobless rate in the state reached 14.6% in December, the highest in the country.
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) said on Cspan's "The Newsmakers" that the president made a mistake by pushing for an overhaul of the health-care system in his first year in office. "A year ago, it should have been all the economy all the time," Mr. Dorgan said.
I have respected Byron Dorgan's work on many issues, particularly on trade. But, he is, respectfully, way off the mark here.
HEALTH CARE AND JOBS CANNOT BE SEEN AS TWO DIFFERENT ISSUES.
The problem, as I suggest in this video, is not that the president tried to do too much. It is that he did too little--and what little was done was done in half-measures, or in ways that the people saw as the insiders way of doing business (for example, making secret deals with the drug industry--which, by the way, has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to my opponent, Kirsten Gillibrand).
Let's be clear: jobs and health care could have been done effectively together if the insiders' had not seized control over the debate.
First, the economy needed--and still needs--another one trillion dollars of stimulus beyond the $787 billion approved in the stimulus bill.
The greatest crisis we face today is not the deficit--it is that one in five Americans do not have decent, full-paying work. While the recent financial crisis highlighted the jobs crisis in the country, the wage and job crisis has been 30 years in the making.
Second, health care costs jobs. Period. I have made this point before, using the auto industry as an example: UAW members could work for free and the American-based auto industry would still be crippled because of the tens of billions of dollars in health care costs that its foreign competitors do not carry. You can't create lasting good-paying auto jobs--or jobs in other large companies and small businesses--until we rid the bottom line of the burden of health care.
Now, the Administration, I believe, created the conditions for the health care debacle by seeding a feeding frenzy for lobbyists and supporting an approach that would hand a windfall of profits to the very industries that spawned the health care crisis.
But, let us not confuse our disagreements with how this was handled--and botched--with the need to continue to argue that health care and jobs could have been--and should have been--addressed together.
To make these points crystal clear:
- We needed a much bigger stimulus which would have aided the economy--but we didn't get that because of the insiders in both parties buying the foolish argument that we faced a near-term threat from the deficit. We let the bond markets and the corporatists bully people and win--again--to the great detriment of the American people. We did too little--not too much.
- A combination of the Party of No, the drug companies and the insurance industries, their paid representatives in the Senate, and, respectfully, an Administration that did not want to take on, on behalf of the American people, all the aforementioned players, produced an awful bill. We did too little--not too much.
Real change can't wait.