Jones Alley
Sun Two
A couple posts ago I mentioned how brilliant I thought the tactics that the president employed to get a victory on health care were, and after little more consideration it occurs to me that the strategy itself was intensely focused and was the other necessary ingredient for him to succeed where others have failed for decades. Instead of trying to come up with a workable plan for a complex socialized health care system, it looks like Mr. Obama zeroed in on one single essential element and singlemindedly pursued it as the key that would unlock everything else.
The president chose to legally elevate health care to a right of existence rather than a privilege of wealth and power. That simple fact is the fulcrum to slowly modify the clumsy opening framework of federal mandates and corporate insurance. It would have been impossible to engineer a functional healthcare system in one fell swoop, not because we couldn't have simply established Medicare for all, but because society itself is unfortunately too fragmented and fragile to survive such a monumental change all at once.
By simply creating a right to health care rather than a national health care system, it will be almost impossible to undo this legislation. Putting all of the moving parts together will take time anyway, and the distraction caused by the creation of a massive national bureaucracy from whole cloth would have made it difficult to pass such a cultural transformation.
Once again, I have no choice but to admit that I'm impressed at how targeting the crucial strategy and the crucial tactic out of the myriad choices in the battle for healthcare permitted our president to produce change equal to or greater in importance than emancipation, women's suffrage, Social Security, civil rights, and Medicare.
Bravo, Mr. President. If you left office tomorrow your legacy would still place you in the top ten of our nation's leaders, which is pretty good company. And to the rest of the world, take heed. The man that is in charge of the United States now is dangerously smart and knows how to only fight battles he wins. We're in good hands again and we're nobody's fools any more.
The president chose to legally elevate health care to a right of existence rather than a privilege of wealth and power. That simple fact is the fulcrum to slowly modify the clumsy opening framework of federal mandates and corporate insurance. It would have been impossible to engineer a functional healthcare system in one fell swoop, not because we couldn't have simply established Medicare for all, but because society itself is unfortunately too fragmented and fragile to survive such a monumental change all at once.
By simply creating a right to health care rather than a national health care system, it will be almost impossible to undo this legislation. Putting all of the moving parts together will take time anyway, and the distraction caused by the creation of a massive national bureaucracy from whole cloth would have made it difficult to pass such a cultural transformation.
Once again, I have no choice but to admit that I'm impressed at how targeting the crucial strategy and the crucial tactic out of the myriad choices in the battle for healthcare permitted our president to produce change equal to or greater in importance than emancipation, women's suffrage, Social Security, civil rights, and Medicare.
Bravo, Mr. President. If you left office tomorrow your legacy would still place you in the top ten of our nation's leaders, which is pretty good company. And to the rest of the world, take heed. The man that is in charge of the United States now is dangerously smart and knows how to only fight battles he wins. We're in good hands again and we're nobody's fools any more.
posted by Milo Johnson at 3:50 AM
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