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August 23, 2009
In his Obama’s Trust Problem in The New York Times Paul Krugman refers to news reports that the Obama administration — which seems to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives. Krugman adds:
A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach.
Progressives are now in revolt. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back. Krugman's argument here is similar to what is happening in Australia. There the Rudd Government is losing the trust of progressives due to its very watered down climate change policy, priorities and overall approach to energy.
Krugman's argument is part of an ongoing debate in the US about the politics of health care. "Change" is what Obama stood for. "We can do it" Change sure was needed in health care.
Glenn Greenward says that:
The central pledges of the Obama campaign were less about specific policy positions and much more about changing the way Washington works -- to liberate political outcomes from the dictates of corporate interests; to ensure vast new levels of transparency in government; to separate our national security and terrorism approaches from the politics of fear. With some mild exceptions, those have been repeatedly violated. Negotiating his health care reform plan in total secrecy and converting it into a gigantic gift to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries -- which is exactly what a plan with (1) mandates, (2) no public option and (3) a ban on bulk negotiations for drug prices would be -- would constitute yet another core violation of those commitments, yet another bolstering (a major one) of the very power dynamic he vowed to subvert.
Obama does need to toughen up given that the standard practice of the private medical insurance companies in the US is to kick people off their coverage when they get sick; to deny coverage to people who have previously been sick; to hide lifetime limits in the fine print, force people into bankruptcy if they face a serious illness; and to discriminate against pregnant women and their families. Their strategy is to squeeze every dollar they can out of patients in the current system, up until the last possible day they can.
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Gary
Rudd quite pointedly never courted the Luvvies in Australia. In fact both he and Gillard have most explicitly ignored them or dismissed them contemptuously. So there is absolutely no comparison with the US. Nevertheless, just as The Luvvies copied the Yanks by importing the phrase "Culture Wars" in the mid 1990s, now they will try and Obamahise Australian polital discourse.
Sigh.