What went wrong last time the dems held the white house and health care reform? This might help

[The Straight Story]

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/may96/background/health_debate_page1.html

here is but a SMALL snippet - it is no wonder nothing has been done...


August 30, 1992 - Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller gets wind of Clinton's waning support for "pay-or-play" and fires off a memo arguing against any change of direction. He also tells Clinton that his statement that "Americans deserve or have a right to health care" might present problems for the candidate in the future. "Although many Americans may initially react positively to this statement," he writes, “over time it can make them uneasy. Before long they will be asking: How would we pay for all that care for all those people? Won't it require a huge new government bureaucracy?"

September 24, 1992 - In a speech before some two thousand employees of the Merck Pharmaceutical Co., Clinton unveils a revised version of his health reform policies. Without ever using the term "managed competition," he contrasts his approach with that of President Bush. The speech receives favorable coverage.

November 1992 - Clinton wins the election. Polls indicate that voters rank health care far behind the economy and slightly behind the budget deficit in importance. The majority of the public has only the fuzziest notion of what Clinton has in mind for health care reform.

January 25, 1993 - Clinton announces the formation of The President's Task Force on National Health Reform. The job of the task force, he says, is to "prepare health care reform legislation to be submitted to Congress within one hundred days of our taking office." He also announces that his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will head the task force and that Ira Magaziner will be named its day-to-day operating head. A blanket of secrecy is imposed on task force operations. Magaziner objects but is overruled by George Stephanopoulos and others on the White House communications team.

The appointment of the First Lady sends a clear signal to all in the administration and players in both parties on Capitol Hill that Clinton places great importance on Health Care. It also serves instantly to limit how far cabinet secretaries and White House aides can go in pressing their views. One person watching from close range will later tell Johnson and Broder: "They went about this exactly in the right way, with one exception. The person who's in charge shouldn't sleep with the President, because if you sleep with the President, nobody is going to tell you the truth." Key economic advisers who have grave reservations about the direction of Clinton's reform plans from the very start are forced to ask themselves, "Do I want to take on the President's wife?"

In order to meet their hundred-day deadline and win swift congressional passage the Clintons intend to fit the health care proposal into the presidential budget and pass it all in one gigantic package. An advantage to this strategy is that under Senate rules the reconciliation bill can be debated for only twenty-four hours before it comes to an up-or-down vote.

Early March 1993 - Sen. Robert C. Byrd, chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, and a recognized guardian of Senate procedure, blocks the Clinton reconciliation bill strategy. He is convinced the strategy amounts to a "prostitution of the process" by pushing through "a very complex, very expensive, very little understood piece of legislation."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/may96/background/health_debate_page1.html

[babylonsister]

1. Please. Hillary didn't want to compromise.

For a guy who doesn't care, why do you suddenly?

[The Straight Story]

2. Not sure what you mean by that

I deeply care about health care - and even if one sees her in the wrong on her approach, there are a lot of educational material there about how the politics of health care work in DC (and probably applies as much to other issues too).

My wife was taken by ambulance to the hospital today, the second time in a month, and I have no insurance. I care deeply about health care and having people covered.

There are a lot of stupid politics behind the scene, and it is a damn shame that people aren't really focusing on the need as much as other things (people on the hill I mean).

(edited to change is to are :)

[babylonsister]

4. The Straight Story...I don't have

a wife like that but I have a stepson who has Freidriech's Ataxia, so I know the hurt and the anguish. I'm very sorry, and that's all I can say.
Peace to you both.

[The Straight Story]

5. It's ok, just been a hard few days for us health and mental wise

I just wish she had the care our govt does, and it pains me to see folks in both parties fighting change based on this that or the other. Get something in place, get it started, and we can make improvements over time (like we do with defense, education, etc and so on).

We can't take the second step until we take the first.

[napi21]

3. I think a lot has changed since 1993. Back then, yes there were

people who were uninsured, but the real pressure from the public has come since then. HC costs have risen rapidly. Employers are passing more and more of those costs on to their employees. Many self employed people can't afford any policies at all! Drug costs have skyrocketed and these things have all come front an center.

I don't think there's ANYONE in the House or Senate who hasn't received pleas, and demands that they DO SOMETHING about health care in the US. Much different today than back then.

[McCamy Taylor]

6. The difference is that the AMA and doctors were not on board last time.

That is what went wrong with health care the first time. Hillary could not have passed it even if Democrats had controlled ever single seat in Congress. No medical legislation can get passed in their country if the AMA is against it. Hell, even the insurance companies can not battle the pr clout of the medical establishment. If doctors (I happen to be one) start telling their patients and their communities that such and such legislation will be bad for their health, people are going to listen to the doctors and to no one else.

The difference this time is that almost all the doctors I know have been ready for national health insurance of the type they have in Canada for several years now. While the AMA will not take an official stand (they do not want to give the appearance of backing the Democrats), their members want it.

This time around there will be no unified opposition from the medical establishment. Instead, doctors will be all for it. And in a war of words between doctors and insurance companies, doctors always win.