Health-Care Reform

If there is one thing I hate in pol­i­tics, it is intel­lec­tual dis­hon­esty — whether it comes from Democ­rats or Repub­li­cans, lib­er­als or conservatives.

As I watch the cur­rent cov­er­age of the health-care reform debate on C-Span online, I can­not help but shake my head. I know that the floors of par­lia­ments and tele­vi­sion talk-shows are not the places for rea­soned, lengthy dis­cus­sion, but I wish that the dis­course on such an impor­tant issue were occur­ring at a higher level.

For exam­ple, here are the Repub­li­can argu­ments against the health-care reform bill:

• The bill goes against the will of the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Well, how many times have Repub­li­cans passed bills that are not sup­ported by a major­ity of Amer­i­cans? A repub­li­can form of gov­ern­ment can­not — and should not — be gov­erned by polls.
• The bill is the prod­uct of back-door pol­i­tics and polit­i­cal deal­ings. Every major bill is the prod­uct of back-door pol­i­tics and polit­i­cal deal­ings! Every con­gress­man and sen­a­tor knows this.
• The bill insti­tutes social­ism. I have news for the Repub­li­cans — the United States has not been a purely-capitalist coun­try ever since the fed­eral gov­ern­ment insti­tuted “hor­ri­ble” things like child-labor laws, minimum-wage laws, and workplace-safety reg­u­la­tions in the early twentieth-century. In eco­nomic terms, the United States has been a mixed-economy for a hun­dred years. I even doubt that the aver­age Repub­li­can knows the actual def­i­n­i­tion of social­ism — the gov­ern­ment own­ing the means of production.
• The agree­ment to ban fed­eral fund­ing of abor­tion comes through an exec­u­tive order, which is only a “piece of paper” and would sub­servient to the statu­tory law as passed. Have Repub­li­cans not heard of court-upheld sign­ing state­ments — loved, in fact, by Pres­i­dent George W. Bush — that let the exec­u­tive branch (wrongly in my opin­ion) enforce laws (or not) as it sees fit?

Now, this is not to say that I do not have issues with the bill. The eco­nomic cost of the mea­sure — based on esti­mates from the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office — are seem­ingly based on assump­tions on future acts of Con­gress that may or may not occur. If oppo­nents of the bill want to be intel­lec­tu­ally hon­est, focus on the real issues. Don’t rely on polit­i­cal hyper­bole that any­one with half a brain can see and that you know your­selves to be full of malarkey.

If the bill does, in fact, reform health-care and grant cov­er­age to mil­lions of Amer­i­cans at a rea­son­able price, then I will be proud to see the United States finally match what Europe and Israel did decades ago. It would be about time.

Ear­lier: Uni­ver­sal health-care in Israel.