Harold's Left:

Sometimes I sit back and wonder what the rest of the world thinks about our great nation in light of our nearly eight month debate on the future of the health care insurance system. On the one hand, every other country in the industrialized world has adopted some form of universality in their coverage, many of them using Medicare type plans while others rely on a private insurance system that is regulated in a way that Americans could only dream of. Subsequently back in the States, we have a system that is twice as expensive as any other industrialized country and significantly less efficient and effective. However, rather than take heed when Obama implies that there is indeed a link between universality and low cost, as exemplified by the rest of the word having costs that are less than half of ours on average, the Right freaks out that because of reform America will have a 'broken ' system like Europe. Which is odd because not only are European systems categorically better than ours on cost, the belief that somehow they are less efficient because of their government influence is also false. So how did we get here and what does all of this say about who we are as a people?

Although some of us on the Left would love to move to a system that looks more like Japan or Europe, the one important caveat we must remember is that Americans are a much different group of people culturally than the rest of the world. A special distrust of government has been intrinsic in the fabric of this nation since it's inception. Not only that, on the international political spectrum America is much further right than others in the G20. So, keeping those things in mind, this is part of what has made reform become "reform". The other part is a series of missteps by the Obama administration and a blatant misinformation campaign by the right-wing (which is their strategy for nearly everything).

The Obama administration made two crucial mistakes. The first is that they made the public option the liberal position from the get-go when the liberal position should have been a single-payer system. The reason this is a mistake is because if we would have spent the last eight months arguing about whether a single-payer system is plausible, perhaps a public option would have ended up being the compromise instead of the left position. The second mistake is that the administration let the summer recess fester with no clear bill on the table. This in turn allowed the misinformation gurus like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Sarah Palin feed their followers with bundles and bundles of manure that they goggle up like hogs.

Currently, we have a bill that has been gutted to a level that should indeed be sickening for most Americans. Public Option? Gone. Trigger? Gone. Medicare Buy-in? Nope. Anti-Trust Exemption? Still there. Does this bill cover more people than ever before? Sure. However, it covers more people than ever by forcing them into a broken, for-profit private insurance system then should be an embarrassment to this country.

This bill went from reform in the House to "reform" in the Senate. Which may have more to do with how the Senate has become a nearly defunct institution (which I will expand on tomorrow) than the political boxing round that has shaped this bill. More importantly though, this year has exposed who we have become as a people. Just 12 months ago we were a nation on a high of emotion. A nation who believed again that we could come together in even the toughest of times. Yet, a year latter we are as divided as ever, which both sides spewing contempt for the other. 2009 seemed to be rock-bottom on the scale of partisan disagreement, let's see if 2010 can be any better.

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