"In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed - “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.
Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.
And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind."
Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.
It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.
The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."
Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.
Look at this amazing Google timeline of the national debate about health care reform over the past 100 years. At a glance, it’s clear that the anti-reformers have won the debate by throwing lots of money and hysterical arguments at the issue, leaving us where we are today.
There’s only one lesson to learn from this timeline: Health care reform is routinely defeated by the insurance and medical industries’ insistence that there is no need for a government mandate, that socialized medicine is bad, bad, bad, and that the industry and the markets can self-regulate themselves, covering more for less money.
100 years later, more Americans are losing more of their assets as a result of out-of-control health care costs, 47 million Americans are uninsured, jobs are being lost or eliminated because of the cost to employers to ensure the workforce, and yet, the debate still centers around the medical-pharma-insurance industry claims that market-based coverage is the best option.
While the health care argument can be framed in terms of economics, there’s an important social component that’s being buried in the current hysteria over costs and budgets. As our current system stands, the rich get the very best health care available, the elderly get better health care than they did before they were elderly, and the very poor get the basics.
The ones left in the cold? The unemployed, the self-employed, the small business owners, the middle class, people suffering from chronic illness and their caretakers. There is a fundamental social inequity built into the structure of health insurance and health delivery systems that cannot be solved by the markets because the markets are designed to be efficient and efficient markets cannot accept known risk.
