Letter - Schumer Health Care Plan - NYTimes.com

Letter - Schumer Health Care Plan - NYTimes.com:

"Re “Schumer Points to a Middle Ground on Government-Run Health Insurance” (news article, May 5):
There are a number of problems with Senator Charles E. Schumer’s so-called middle ground on universal health care. While your article acknowledges some of the structural ones — like whether a federal program could ever be subject to state laws — it doesn’t acknowledge the major issue: What is best for health care consumers?
What system is going to provide the best care? How can we provide meaningful health care to the greatest number of people with the resources available? What policies can we carry out now to ensure that there will be sufficient caregivers to meet our needs in the future?
These are the questions that we should be asking. As an advocate for consumers, I am distressed to see yet another health care discussion that focuses on the impact on insurance providers’ bottom line. The fundamental purpose of the health care system is to provide health care, not to protect and perpetuate an industry.
Richard Mollot
Executive Director, Long Term
Care Community Coalition
New York, May 5, 2009"

Well said. I was listening to a Center for American Progress Podcast of a talk given to them by Max Baucus, and I kept thinking, where is the vision? It was mostly about how we were stuck with working with our current system and tweaking it into some public-private amalgam that would be "uniquely American." This is disappointing in many ways, but I primarily am disappointed that he reflects that stubborn conservative world view that we cannot learn from other countries, that their experiences mean little or nothing to us. If you take that view, then transformational change is impossible to envision, and you are stuck with timid change.

But also troublesome is the complementary idea that America cannot do this, because we must think so timidly, in such limited ways. JFK said, "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Where is THAT America, Senator Baucus, Senator Schumer?

Sphere: Related Content