The Healthcare Debacle
Searching for sense in reform
By Amanda Johnson
I hope I’m not the only one who wonders about the sanity of the country while watching the ongoing healthcare debacle. Much of the public debate has degenerated into absurd accusations, petty arguments, and a disturbing refusal to compromise. Clearly, our secretly Muslim president who is somehow both socialist and Hitler-like wants to kill the country’s grandmas. The town hall meetings held across the country resulted in made-for-TV outbursts. Anyone who supports healthcare reform is “un-American.” Congressmen were loudly ordered to stay away from any form of “socialized medicine.” My personal favorite was the command to “keep the government out of my Medicare!”
While I understand the importance and purpose of the town hall meetings, a part of me also hopes that the congressmen and senators will take all they hear with a grain of salt. It is true that they were elected by their constituents and they should be accountable to them. However, America is a representative democracy, which implies that the people do not directly create laws or formulate policy. Instead, they elect a representative who they hope will do a good job.
I am personally thankful we do not have a direct democracy; while I have many opinions, I certainly do not have the expertise to, say, figure out the appropriate amount of regulation for the financial industry, the most efficient way to reduce pollution, or the still-illusive fix for healthcare. No offense to Californians, but their habit of holding referendums instead of passing legislation is both cowardly on the part of their politicians and completely adverse to the country’s tradition of representative democracy.
I fear that the popular uproar heard during the summer recess will serve as an equivalent to a referendum and frighten members of Congress into not acting. They were elected to take care of our country. Healthcare spending is out of control — it is indisputable that we spend a far greater percentage of our GDP on it than is necessary with punier results than should be expected. (A University of Michigan study found that we spend more per capita on healthcare than any other country while only receiving the nineteenth-best care.) Something needs to be done, and I hope Congress has the courage to act when the correct solution presents itself instead of collapsing before populist obstinacy.
But does Congress really know what it’s doing? Most Americans would give a resounding “NO” to that question. Approval ratings are conspicuously and ironically low for the institution of government closest to the population. I certainly have my doubts about the capability of my elected officials to effectively fix something as multi-faceted as the healthcare system. It is a little ridiculous to expect a body of mostly Political Science majors and law school graduates to be experts on healthcare. Even the relatively few senators and congressmen who were medical professionals in previous lives would not understand all the subtleties of the insurance element of the issue.
Surely there are people out there who know more about the problems and better understand the possible solutions than those who are debating them now. It’s certainly not me, so don’t go ordering a referendum to determine what I think would be best. Without sounding too elitist, there has to be somebody out there, probably a group of somebodies, that have the education, experience, and intellect to identify which solution would be best for the country. (Unfortunately, many such people are benefiting from the excesses of the current system.) Such a solution may not have even been invented yet. But you can’t tell me there aren’t doctors, economists, administrators, and academics in this extremely innovative country of ours that can come up with an effective, technical solution. There are so many aspects of healthcare that require technical detail, and they cannot and should not be politicized. It is silly to debate hospital protocol on the Senate floor. Leave that to people who know more about it.
Rarely does a political discussion stay in the national consciousness for long. Soon, we will all be distracted by a new discovery about Michael Jackson and the next season of American Idol. The debate over Ellen DeGeneres’s judging capability is much more interesting to most people than the many technicalities of a healthcare bill. But, we must not lose focus. It would be sad indeed if no reform at all came out of these most recent months of debate. The system needs fixing. If nothing happens this time around, our death squad awaits.
March 31st, 2010 at 4:54 pm
Well that is silly! If the populace is not to be trusted with complex judgments why trust them—and their fickleness—to judge the politicians? Such judgments are, more often than not, superficial. Saying that Congress wrote the bill is misleading. No Congressman truly writes the bill—it is their staffers who piece it together and draw on many of the ideas of experts in the field. While the bill is not perfect. Many experts acknowledge this. In fact, Jacob Hacker, of Yale University, constructed many of the tenets of the bill. If he’s not an expert, then I don’t know who is.