The morning after health-care reform

Since before Heath Shuler officially announced his candidacy, I attempted to educate him about health-care policy with books like Universal Health Care: What the United States Can Learn from the Canadian Experience by Pat [and Hugh] Armstrong (also see About Canada: Health Care) and The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point by Haynes Johnson and David Broder. Last summer, after hearing Shuler speak, I invited him to be a leader on health-care reform. Those efforts of mine and others have failed, and Shuler has decided to wait for others to lead.

Part of the challenge has been that the public, free marketplace of ideas really failed to produce a citizen's image of what the options actually are. The CBO never scored "the public option," and no one really explained what it meant. One of the few halfway decent media pieces on the Democratic health-care policy package is the Christian Science Monitor's series "Health Care Reform Bill 101." Granted, some of the pieces of the puzzle only recently emerged. And yet the House bill that passed Monday [March 22] mimics the Republican alternative to President Clinton's Health Security Act — 15-year old ideas.

What happened the morning after? The American economy has already been strengthened — at least on Wall Street. The Associated Press ran stories after the House bill passed, like "Health care companies pull stock market higher." The private health-insurance companies so many seemed to be aligned with were quoted in other AP stories, like "Blue Cross and Blue Shield praises health care overhaul bill."

— Grant Millin
Business Design Project Manager & Writer
The SPS/EarthSync Companies
Asheville