"What Massachusetts Got Right" by Robert Scheer on The Nation

[alp227]

The president got creamed in Massachusetts. No amount of blaming this disastrous outcome on the weaknesses of the local Democratic candidate or her Republican opponent's strengths can gainsay that fact. Obama's opportunistic search for win-win solutions to our healthcare concerns and our larger economic problems is leading to a lose-lose outcome for the president and the country.

The two issues that mattered on election day were the economy, which Obama has sold out to Wall Street--as quite a few disgruntled voters pointed out--and his plea to save healthcare reform, which the voters who had backed him for the presidency with a huge majority now spurned. It is significant that it was the voters of Massachusetts who have now derailed the Democrats' efforts to revamp the country's healthcare system by denying them the necessary sixtieth vote in the Senate, for these voters know the subject well.

The federal proposal is based on their own state's model requiring people to obtain health insurance without the state doing anything to effectively control costs through an alternative to the private insurance corporations. Lacking a public option, the cost of healthcare in Massachusetts, already the highest in the nation at the time of the plan's implementation, has spiraled upward. Services have been curtailed, and many, particularly younger people, feel they are being forced to sacrifice to pay for a system that doesn't work.

Instead of blindly following the failed Massachusetts model, Obama should have insisted on an extension of the Medicare program to all who are willing to pay for it. He squandered the opportunity to bring about meaningful healthcare change that the public would have supported had it been kept simple and just. Instead, Obama gave away the store to medical profiteers. They, in turn, hopelessly muddied the waters with well-funded scare advertising tactics that principled leadership on Obama's part could have thwarted.

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/scheer

[Cleita]

1. Yep, Scheer is one of my favorite OpEd authors.

Of course we here at DU said the same back when we saw whom he was picking as his staffers and when Nancy Pelosi said he would govern from the center. We knew it back then. Now the proof is here.

[elocs]

2. The economy: anyone who thought giving hundreds of billion$ to Wall Street and big banks

and believed that the millions of struggling Americans would be happy with that choice is dumber than a bag of rocks and will be rewarded accordingly by the voters.

[flyarm]

3. I Rec'd this but it said i had already done so..I HAD NOT..so please count me as a K&R !

[SaveOurDemocracy]

4. K&R

[alsame]

5. So basically, Mass is a microcosm of what the entire country

would be like with the Senate bill. This helps explain why some people would want Brown to be GOP 41.

[Vidar]

6. K&R.

[Douglas Carpenter]

7. kick and recommend