stymieing health care reform

My admiration for Thomas Friedman knows no boundaries. As we ready ourselves to watch President Obama address a joint session of congress to save health care, the "ticking time bomb" of our economy, this is an opinion worth keeping in the back of our minds.

When President Obama was running, he outlined a health care plan almost exactly like what he is trying to pass today. At the time, the only rebuttal was from the Republicans who asked "how are you going to pay for it?"

Today, democrats seem to have discovered a distaste for the bill that simply did not exist last November. Despite inviting Republican leaders to offer alternatives, the minority leadership insists on using this plan as a political tool to hurt the president. Worse yet, Americans don't seem to mind that their health care is being used as a political volleyball on both sides of Congress.

Friedman makes a great point. The president's plan is not far off from the Mitt Romney plan in Massachusetts, and the funding looks like the one John McCain introduced during his campaign. The Republicans are fighting the very plans they supported a year ago, on principle.

The Democrats are even more infuriating. Michael Moore said it perfectly in the August 20 issue of Rolling Stone, "The larger disappointment comes from the Democratic Party itself, which is still behaving as if they're afraid to lead the country. I don't know what part of 'massive overwhelming victory' they don't understand. Millions and millions of people voted not only for Obama, but for the Democrats to run both houses of Congress, including a 60-seat majority in the Senate. It's a mistake to waste any time at this point in enacting the agenda that the American people want."

I honestly don't know how the Democrats' constituents are supposed to feel by their inability to take advantage of their majority. That is something that the Republicans trump Democrats on. The Democrats hold the Executive and Legislative branch and continue acting like the minority party. When midterm elections come up and we lose the house, which is certainly not out of the question, I don't want to hear Democrats complain that nothing is getting done because of a hostile congress. That said, i'm becoming less and less concerned about the Democrats losing control in Congress. It's not like it's helping them much anyway. Am I not supposed to think that Democratic leaders, who supported President Obama's plan last November, got a phone call from a major campaign contributor asking them to dial down the rhetoric on health care reform mentioning a public option?

Insurance companies know that bills like the Wyden-Bennet bill and others that scrap the notion of a single-payer system are digestible to reformers because they look smell and taste like a public option without the icky reality of government competition that would devastate insurance companies profit margins. Right now, insurance companies are spending 1.4 million a day advertising options to convince people to steer clear of a single payer system purely to protect their bottom line. That is appalling in and of itself, but for our elected officials to be complicit in this is truly concerning.

I am interested to see the result of President Obama's address to Congress.