The Contrarian

We’re having the wrong conversation about national health care reform.

Much of the debate has centered on how reform would affect those of us with health insurance. (Will we keep our plans and our doctors? How much will it cost?) Don’t get me started on the town-hall outbursts and the euthanasia talk. 

Quite a few Republicans have said they would prefer to maintain the status quo than pass the current Democratic reform plan.

We’re not talking enough about those who need health care reform — the nearly 50 million Americans who lack health insurance.

They include the uninsured 24-year-old in McAllen who struggles to find cancer treatment.

And the dozens of uninsured waiting 15 hours for care in a San Antonio emergency room last week. (And the many in Houston suffering the same fate.) 

Then there are the millions more who are under-insured.

In March, Karen Tumulty wrote this must-read story. Tumulty, a veteran reporter for TIME, has covered health care policy for more than a decade. Her older brother Patrick, who lives in San Antonio, began to suffer from kidney failure. He had a flimsy, catastrophic-care policy, and his insurance company refused to pay for care. Before long, Patrick was very sick and broke.

Tumulty writes:

Confident of my abilities to sort this out or at least find the right person to fix the problem, I made some calls to the company. I got nowhere. That’s when I realized that the national crisis I’d written so much about had just hit home.

Later she notes that many other Americans experience what her brother went through:

They are the underinsured, who may be all the more vulnerable because, until a health catastrophe hits, they’re often blind to the danger they’re in. In a 2005 Harvard University study of more than 1,700 bankruptcies across the country, researchers found that medical problems were behind half of them — and three-quarters of those bankrupt people actually had health insurance. As Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law professor who helped conduct the study, wrote in the Washington Post, ‘Nobody’s safe … A comfortable middle-class lifestyle? Good education? Decent job? No safeguards there. Most of the medically bankrupt were middle-class homeowners who had been to college and had responsible jobs — until illness struck.’

There are many more stories. Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic has been compiling tales from the health care crisis. You can read them here.

A lot of people in this country receive good health care. But too many Americans do not. We can’t lose sight of that.

Over the weekend, Obama merely mentioned the thought of the possibility that maybe he would consider removing the so-called public option from the health care reform bill.

And almost instantly left-wing lawmakers and advocates went apoplectic.

Now the White House is backtracking furiously. The White House says it hasn’t changed positions. I think that’s true.

This story is more media creation than policy change. Obama has said all along that he wants a public option, but it’s not a must-have and that he would be willing to negotiate on it. Obama said as much in his comments at a townhall meeting over the weekend.

So calm down, folks. He didn’t back away from the public option.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius did get a little off-message when she told CNN the administration would be willing to negotiate on the public option and would consider some hazily defined nonprofit, co-op idea.  She’s made similar comments before.

But let’s get one thing straight: The public option isn’t going anywhere for the moment. Obama still supports it, and most Democrats in Congress want it.

I would bet that when Congress returns from its recess that the House will pass a health care bill that includes a public option. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

It’s not clear if Sebelius was floating a trial balloon to gage people’s reactions to removing the public option or if she was just speaking off-message. But administration officials got a hint of the outrage that would tumble down on them from the left if they ever do axe the public option.

Liberals don’t seem to trust Obama on this issue (and given his past statements, maybe they shouldn’t) and they’re morbidly waiting — indignation at the ready — for the worst to happen.

Which is all well and good. But they should save the mouth-frothing anger until the worst actually does happen (if it happens). And nothing that Obama said over the weekend makes it any more likely to happen.

Ken Herman’s column today on Kay Bailey Hutchison’s campaign kickoff is a must-read.

If things don’t improve, the post-mortems of her campaign will begin by rehashing how at yesterday’s kickoff rally, the announcer mispronounced the name of the candidate’s own high school:

The disembodied announcer voice at Kay Bailey Hutchison’s gubernatorial campaign kickoff event was mispronouncing the name of her high school.

La Marque (la mark) High School had been fancified to La Marquis (la mar-kee) High School.

Yikes.

Then the candidate herself called for a return to the kind of education system that she experienced. We know what she was trying to say, but Herman notes:

Yes, 1961 was a great time to be in Texas public schools — if you were white and didn’t face learning disabilities. La Marque High School was segregated when Hutchison attended.

Double yikes.

Her event in Austin wasn’t as disastrous, but the crowd was sparse there too, as the Observer’s Josh Haney reports.

This morning, Perry flack Mark Miner gleefully sent an email to reporters entitled “Kay’s Follies: Day 1″ with links to the unflattering news coverage.

This is really going to be fun.

Business was slow on The Contrarian the past few days while I finished a story for the magazine and then flew off to Yankeeland to visit relatives. Now I’m back and will be posting regularly again.

When I returned to the office today, I was shocked to discover that Kay Bailey Hutchison has decided — quite out of the blue — to run for governor. I had no idea she was even considering it. And it’s amazing she kept quiet about that for so long without letting word slip.

At Hutchison’s campaign site, you can read the text of today’s surprise announcement.

The senator is delivering this speech in Austin as I type this — her third stop on today’s campaign-kickoff tour. (Intrepid Observer reporter Josh Haney is there and will file a dispatch later today.)

Looks like a good speech to me. I have one question, though.

She bashes Perry for presiding over a state that leads the nation in dropouts, uninsured kids, college tuition, among other things.

She promises to rectify these ills — “In my administration, we will tackle these challenges,” reads the prepared text. Yet several lines later, she also promises: “For starters, I will spend less, tax less, and borrow less.”

So: How can you insure more kids and improve schools when you’re taxing less and spending less?

It seems the lady doth promise too much.

State lawmakers in Texas receive free health insurance from, ahem, the government.

Lawmakers in 11 other states also get free health insurance, the Associated Press reports today.

Irony alert: Quite a few of those Texas legislators — 36 of them, in fact — who receive free government health care are openly opposed to the Obama health care reform. They just don’t want more government messing around in, um, health care.

Here’s what Weatherford Republican Phil King wrote in a letter earlier this week to Texas’ members of Congress, urging them to vote against the reform bill:

People are demanding health care reform; not a government takeover of health care. There is a major difference between the two…. I strongly oppose more government spending and even more government intrusion in the name of health care.

So, government health care: a terrible, terrible idea…you know, most of the time…for other people.