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Saturday, August 15, 2009

This Week's Presidential YouTube Address



Calmly dispelling the healthcare lies of the Right and insurance industry flacks of both parties again this week. Obama is taking great care to debunk crazy frames without explicitly repeating and therefore activating them, and he is trying to provide analogies and historical contexts via comparable battles around Social Security and Medicare in order to re-open minds that have hardened through the cynical mobilization of their fears and resentments in opposition to reforms from which they would almost inevitably benefit. This is delicate and necessary, but I also notice that while Obama and his team are managing these feats in a more masterly way than most people advocating in public for healthcare reform, he is still on the defensive, devoting less time to making his positive case than he would surely like to do. It's good that he has fixated on the Big Bad Insurance Industry as an opponent with which to battle the targeting of Big Bad Government by incumbent and right-wing foes. If you have five minutes to make your case, that's a good way to map the terrain. One would like more faces of folks harmed by the status quo whose lives will be made better by reform -- faces that will provoke identification from those who dis-identify with the faces of reformers who might seem patronizing or bureaucratic to those who are ignorant or fearful -- but these moves are nudged to the side by the need to respond to deceptions and misinformation that gain credibility precisely through their outrageousness (eg, where there's smoke there must be fire... if there were no truth to them would elected officials be saying them...? insinuating themselves via mass-mediated repetition into the shorthand formulations even of those who disapprove and disagree with them... and so on).

It seems certain that Obama is going to get healthcare reform and that whatever reform he gets is going to get spun as an historic achievement for his Administration. The only worry is whether or not what we get will constitute real reform that addresses the real problems. This will likely depend not on what the President is doing but on whether or not the Progressive Caucus plays hardball and really refuses to allow any "reform" to pass that does not include the public option. Obama may content himself with a wedge he thinks can be elaborated into real reform in the coming years of his Administration (which almost certainly will be eight years long and retain the support of Congress given ongoing Republican self-marginalization), but my own fear is that this would be a mistake, that one only gets one bite at this particular apple a generation, and that reform either gets locked in now or not right here right now. I'm optimistic but it's a real nail-biter, and the players who matter most and the language that matters most are not finding their way to our tee vees for the most part.

1 comment:

Dre said...

"The only worry is whether or not what we get will constitute real reform that addresses the real problems."

Indeed. In consideration of the description of a proposed aspect of health-care "reform" (as reported on by the NYT's live-blogging the Prez's Montana town hall mtg.) as a "marketplace" in which folks can choose the kind of insurance they want, I notice that, particularly in the private sector, this is how it is already and it sucks ass. What most folks don't realize, because we commonly, fortunately, get our h.c. from our jobs and don't have to turn to the private market, is there are tons of plans to choose from. For instance, in CA alone, depending on your zip code, a search at ehealthinsurance.com yields over 100 options. (I worked for eHealth for nearly two years as a sales agent who assisted usually about 80 callers, families and individuals, per day in choosing a health care plan.) Far more often than not, the caller was totally overwhelmed by all the options and would call for help in navigating the site and discerning the myriad choices only to realize upon decoding the technical jargon that each plan was shittier than the next and you would have to pay a lot just to get co-pays on common needs such as office visits or annual physical exams, as opposed to first having to meet a deductible (my healthy, 29 y.o. partner pays $168/mo. for a (B)lue (S)hield plan with which she still has to pay $35 per visit and has to meet a $1500 ded. for anything else).
The point is that touting the word "marketplace" and "choice" does not actually connect to another oft touted word "change". If the choices suck such as they do now, then we have not moved forward. Duh. Obviously, the choices themselves have to be reformed and we cannot leave it to the carriers to define the terms of the plan.