this article is from 2007 - pintoWhy 2009 Is the Year for Universal Health CareIt's not 1994 all over again. The next president can get the reforms that Harry Truman and Bill Clinton couldn't. Ezra Klein | December 17, 2007
The 1994 health-reform fight was a tremendous, courageous undertaking that the nascent Clinton administration approached seriously, substantively, and stupidly. Its defeat, which preceded an election in which the Democrats lost 52 House seats and control of Congress, inflicted enormous psychic trauma on every level of the Democratic establishment -- the politicians, the political consultants, the advocacy community, and the hundreds of wonks and experts who participated in the plan's creation. It taught many that health care is simply too big, too complicated, too dangerous to touch. Since the drubbing, Democrats have been afraid, as former Sen. Bill Bradley put it, "to go back into that room where that bad thing happened."
But Democrats need to return to that room -- and bipartisan universal health-care campaigns in Massachusetts, California, Wisconsin, and many other states have opened the door. In the Congress, Sen. Ron Wyden's Healthy Americans Act has attracted 10 co-sponsors, six of them Republican. In the presidential campaign, all of the major Democrats proposed comprehensive plans. Talk of reform once again floats through Washington.
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In sum, a new Democratic president should have the best shot in a very long time -- perhaps, ever -- to create, at long last, a universal health-care system in America. To do so, however, will mean avoiding the manifold mistakes of the past. And, happily, there's some evidence that health reform's champions are doing just that.
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For the first time in decades, congressional power players are talking seriously about concrete health-reform legislation. "To grow a healthy crop, you have to prepare the soil," says Sen. Max Baucus, now chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "The Finance Committee will hold an aggressive series of hearings next year <2008> on comprehensive health-care reform. … Next year can be a prime time for ideas, a time to lay the groundwork for immediate action when a new president and a fresh Congress take the field in 2009." Whatever the legislation that may emerge from this process, the momentum for change is certainly building.
Additionally, the Democrats know they need to actually pass a bill, rather than simply fight for their perfect plan. "It will take full-court press by the White House," says Rep. Pete Stark, chairman of the Health Subcommittee in the House, and a longtime champion of Medicare-for-All, "and a lot of compromise, even from people like me. It couldn't be single-payer or raise a huge amount of taxes." Seeing all this, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle can only marvel in appreciation. "I don't think there's any question that more and more members on the Democratic side are aware of, and committed to, the need for health reform," he says. "It's a better legislative environment than we had before."
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=why_2009_is_the_year_for_universal_health_care
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