This is what Dems should've been doing all along, exposing the greed and callousness of Big Insurance.
By the time Congress returns from its recess and takes another whack at the health insurance mess, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., will have started revealing the deceit that protects health business profiteers.
At this point, it's a small step, asking them questions, but I hope and expect it's part of a larger campaign. I'd like to see hearings, their mugs caught on TV, talking about their policies and profits.
Waxman has already begun by demanding that major insurance companies reveal how much they pay top executives and board members and, most important, the size of their profits from selling policies.
His goal?
And what was his purpose in seeking the information? At first, he was reluctant to discuss the investigation. Finally, he gave a guarded reply: that many folks perhaps take too benign a view of private insurance companies.
Actually, I'm not sure that people take a benign view of Big Insurance; it's long ranked as one of the least popular major institutions in the country. What's happened is that their heartlessness and greed have been lost amid the furor and lies and GOP-friendly fixation on the cost of health care reform. Waxman seems intent on reframing the debate, so that's it seen, correctly, as a battle between people and corporate power. He's doing, that is, what many progressives have been suggesting for weeks. The belief that the Dems need to get populist is something like a consensus.
Nate Silver:
Obama...seems strangely resistant to populist rhetoric. I'd thought, frankly, this was one of the real advantages that Democrats had going into the legislative process: big business is very unpopular because of the economic collapse, and there might even have been some way to parlay negative sentiments about AIG -- an insurance company -- into skepticism about the motivations of insurers in general. But we haven't seen very much of this from the highest-profile Dems.
Chis Bowers:
The health care reform debate narrative should be about average Americans struggling against a powerful, for-profit health care financing industry. Instead, it has become a narrative about grassroots conservatives (no matter who funds them) against Democratic politicians. While this is still a people vs. the powerful debate, it is not exactly the people vs. the powerful debate we want to be having.
In August, conservatives used lies to turn health care into a culture war issue, obscuring corporate greed with fear-mongering about abortion and euthanasia. The best antidote to conservative cultural populism is, as always, progressive economic populism:
Thomas Frank:
After I listened to a few angry town-hall meetings on the radio, the situation was clear to me. Democrats had to meet this pseudo-populist challenge by rolling out the real thing, the New Deal vision that is their party's raison d'être...Maybe Democrats are afraid it will hurt their standing with those generous fellows on K Street if they channel Harry Truman and say what needs to be said: That government can be made to work for average people. But it will hurt even worse if they refuse to say it.
As Frank point out, taking on corporate power is not without risk. But it's a risk they can't afford not to take.
It's not just for the health care fight that Democrats need to pry themselves away from the dirty clutch of corporate power and get back to where they belong.
Rick Perlstein:
Somewhere along the line Democrats lost a sense of their natural power base--which is the fact that their ideas are economically beneficial to the vast majority. Acknowledging this fact became "demagoguery." Conservatives convinced them it was "class warfare." They became afraid of their simplest and most powerful message. All the other timidity follows from that.
UPDATE: via SharksBreath in comments, Denis Kucinich is calling health insurance exes before his panel.
Nice duo, the Mustache and the Menace, but maybe someone more, uh, telegenic wants a piece of the action?
