The Amateur Philosopher

I so don’t have time to write this post that it’s not even funny. I have 10 chapters (~375pp) of page proofs to get through in the next 9 days. But there’s something so irritating going on in the health care debate right now that, page proofs be damned, I have to take a few minutes to get it off my chest.

No, it’s not Palin’s paranoid fantasies about “death panels” telling her she needs to get an abortion. It’s not some Republicans’ (including at least one senator’s) suggestion that they should oppose reform, not because they think it would be bad for Americans, but because they think their opposition could cripple Obama politically. Apalling as these things are, I must sadly admit that I more or less expected them, given the sources.

No, what’s really galling me is a sentence that , in one form or another, I’m hearing bandied about a lot about health care reform right now: “Libearals have to be willing to compromise if they want to save health care reform.” This is usually meant to suggest that liberals may have to give up the public option. You don’t just hear this coming from people on the far right. You hear it as part of the standard mantra of the mainstream press–even the slightly left-leaning press (like NPR).

Now, I’m not one to say liberals never need to compromise. But what seems to have gotten completely lost in this debate is that the “public option” is a compromise for the left–a huge compromise. An uncompromised liberal position on health care involves not a public option but a single-payer system, to prevent government supplied health care from slipping into the massive uncompetitiveness that plagues Medicare. That’s what, if I were king, I’d like to see in America, but given that we’re actually a democracy, I understand that sometimes political compromise is necessary; we have to accept a situation that nobody finds perfect in an effort to have something that a majority can get behind. And because of this, I support the current health care plan, as it’s now formulated, even though it doesn’t have single-payer health insurance.

Given this, what people seem to mean when they say “compromise” here is “complete and utter capitulation.” The health-care bill minus the public option is not a compromise; it’s a bill that could have been written in its entirety by a health insurance industry trade group. It’s a huge giveaway to insurance industry companies. And what does it require of them in return? That they no longer refuse to cover pre-existing conditions–which sounds like a big deal until you realize that there are no provisions about what premiums they can charge for people with pre-existing conditions; by making these premiums prohibitive, they can make it quite impossible for those with pre-existing conditions to buy insurance at all, or for their employers (if they’re required to foot the bill) to retain them.

And that sort of “compromise” seems like it’s exactly what’s about to happen: Another effectively no-strings-attached giveaway of taxpayer money to private industry. Huh.

On the upside, my 9-day deadline means that hopefully, in a couple of weeks, I’ll be able to return to humanity and start posting again more regularly.