Sunday, July 1, 2012

from the New York Times

Subject: Re: from the New York Times

Ted,
Certainly every "reform" program has had to undergo back room deals.  What price did Americans of Color pay because Roosevelt was forced to play ball with the Dixicrats? 
Perhaps as time goes by, the Obama Health Care will be modified to a place where it really lives up to its name.  In its present toothless form it is merely Hope Deferred. 
 
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, June 30, 2012 9:42 AM
Subject: Re: from the New York Times

Carl:
One of the terrible truths that few on this list are willing to face is that if those backroom deals with the insurance industry hadn't occurred, there most likely would not have been any health care reform at all.
--
Ted Chittenden

Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Carl Jarvis <carjar82@gmail.com> wrote:
I'll need to read this again and think about it.  At first blush, I don't
see Obama's health reform in the same league as Roosevelt's Social Security,
or Johnson's Medicare.  There were too many backroom deals that watered down
and enriched the Health Privateeers.

Carl Jarvis
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: alice dampman humel
  To: blind democracy List
  Sent: Friday, June 29, 2012 7:39 PM
  Subject: from the New York Times


  A Vindication, With a Legacy Still Unwritten.

  By MARK LANDLER. WASHINGTON -- For Barack Obama, who staked his
  presidency on a once-in-a-generation reshaping of the social
  welfare system, the Supreme Court's health care ruling is not
  just political vindication. It is a personal reprieve, leaving
  intact his hopes of joining the ranks of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
  Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan as presidents who
  fundamentally altered the course of the country.

  For all its weight, however, the judgment does little to settle
  the bitter debate, spanning decades, over the proper role of
  government in American life. That debate rages on, with the next
  acid test only four months away -- an election that will give
  voters the chance to render their verdict on Mr. Obama's
  ambitious legacy.

  What the Supreme Court's decision does do is preserve Mr. Obama's
  status as the president who did more to expand the nation's
  safety net than any since Johnson. It preserves a bill intended
  to push back against rapidly rising income inequality. And for a
  self-consciously historic figure, it allows Mr. Obama to argue
  that he has delivered on the most cherished goal of his 2008
  campaign: 'Change we can believe in.

  Historians will compare this to F.D.R.'s Social Security and
  Lyndon Johnson's Medicare,' said the historian Robert Dallek, who
  has written about both presidents. This is another step in
  humanizing the American industrial system.

  In political terms, said Douglas G. Brinkley, a professor of
  history at Rice University, 'It's the cornerstone of what could
  turn out to be one of the most extraordinary two-term
  presidencies in American history.

  Beyond his legislative agenda -- not just on health care, but on
  education and Wall Street regulation -- Mr. Obama has sketched
  out a view of government as a force for good, a great leveler and
  a protector of the middle class. That view stands in stark
  contrast to the Republican mantra, articulated by Reagan, who
  headed in the opposite direction in his first inaugural address,
  saying that 'government is not the solution to our problem;
  government is the problem.

  Republicans, including the president's challenger, Mitt Romney,
  have largely hewed to the Reagan script in the decades since, and
  have met with considerable success doing so. Polls show
  continuing skepticism of government -- especially of the health
  law -- and Republicans captured the House of Representatives in
  2010 with a small-government message.

  But Mr. Obama has constructed his political career on the notion
  that Americans are ready for something different after three
  decades of rising inequality and slow-growing incomes for the
  middle class. While still a candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama declared
  that Reagan changed history more than either Bill Clinton or
  Richard M. Nixon. The planets, he said, were once again aligned
  to make a transformative presidency possible.

  The Republican approach, I think, has played itself out,' he said
  to the editorial board of The Reno Gazette-Journal.

  Health care has been Exhibit A in that argument, a project he
  undertook at the cost of other ambitious efforts like curbing
  climate change or rewriting the tax code. While Mr. Obama will be
  remembered for bailing out the auto industry, winding down two
  wars and dispatching Osama bin Laden, health care was his play
  for history.

  Not just Roosevelt and Johnson, but Harry S. Truman, Nixon and
  Mr. Clinton all tried and failed to move the country toward
  universal health coverage. Mr. Obama and the Democratic leaders
  on Capitol Hill succeeded, passing a bill that, through an
  expansion of private and government insurance, seeks to end the
  status of the United States as the world's only rich country with
  millions of involuntarily uninsured citizens.

  Health care has been a squabble without end since the beginning
  of the progressive era, since Theodore Roosevelt,' Professor
  Brinkley said.

  In addition to broadening the safety net, the law also seeks to
  alter a tax structure largely created by Reagan. To pay for the
  expanded insurance, Mr. Obama and Congress raised Medicare taxes
  on high-income households, as well as on medical companies.

  We've entered an era of zero-sum trade-offs, and Obama is trying
  to dramatize those trade-offs,' said Theda Skocpol, a professor
  of government at Harvard. The health care law really symbolizes
  that; it's a really redistributionist law.

  Had the justices struck down the law, they would have dealt Mr.
  Obama a crippling blow in the midst of a hard-fought campaign.
  Knocking down the central pillar of his legislative agenda would
  have called into question not only his judgment, but his very
  legitimacy, according to the presidential scholar Michael
  Beschloss.

  Mr. Obama briefly found himself contemplating that fate just
  after 10 on Thursday morning as he watched live coverage of the
  ruling on a bank of television screens outside the Oval Office.
  Two cable TV networks, CNN and Fox News, erroneously reported
  that the court had struck down part of the law, before correcting
  themselves.

  If Mr. Obama and his opponents can agree on one thing, it may be
  that he is trying to move the country away from a laissez-faire
  period. The rise of the Tea Party movement and the Republican
  takeover of the House were a backlash against what his opponents
  saw as an arrogant overreach by the president. The fact that he
  did it while the country was mired in a recession, and without a
  single Republican vote, compounded the outrage.

  That changed the entire tenor of politics,' said Sean Wilentz, a
  professor of history at Princeton. It took a while for the White
  House to figure out that post-partisanship didn't fit the
  realities of Washington. They may have misjudged the political
  situation.

  More broadly, Mr. Obama may have misjudged the readiness of the
  country to accept an expansion of the government after decades in
  which Reagan's conservative credo had come to be embraced, even
  by Democrats like Mr. Clinton, who declared in 1996 that 'the era
  of big government is over.

  As Steven F. Hayward, an expert in the presidency at the American
  Enterprise Institute, pointed out, Mr. Obama promoted his health
  care bill in conservative terms. While still a candidate, he
  resisted proposals for a mandate to buy insurance. He saw that as
  the kind of big-government idea that doomed Hillary-care,' Mr.
  Hayward said, referring to the reform championed by Hillary
  Rodham Clinton when she was the first lady.

  Historians liken Mr. Obama's challenge to Roosevelt's, who had
  parts of his New Deal struck down in his first term. The lesson
  for this president, said David M. Kennedy, a historian at
  Stanford, is to forge a coalition robust enough to change the
  political landscape. Roosevelt was elected to a second term in a
  landslide in 1936, cementing the New Deal.

  Even if Mr. Obama is re-elected, he could face further legal
  challenges to the health care law from the states. Likewise,
  changes in the nation's political landscape could render this
  week's ruling less definitive than it now appears. But the
  Supreme Court has given the president crucial standing to make
  his case.

  It's not so much that the court has, in one stroke, affirmed his
  legislative legacy,' said Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard
  constitutional law professor who taught both Mr. Obama and Chief
  Justice John Roberts. That will depend on what happens down the
  road. But there is an interdependence here: the court's decision
  to say, 'this is not an un-American act' is critical.

  alicedh@verizon.net

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