Between my serious Internet activities of looking up hilarious new image macros and updating my Twitter feed, I noticed that some politician in the US talked to other politicians to tell them that people dying is a bad thing. Since I agree that people dying is indeed a bad thing, and didn’t know it would be necessary to convince people of that, I decided to read what he said. He talked a lot about, under their current system, some companies in the US make millions of dollars by letting people die, and that is really fucked up, and he wants to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore. But then he talked about how he was going to make sure, and it all fell apart. It seemed like he didn’t want to take any actual risks in fixing things; he just wanted to patch the holes in the current system until it wasn’t as bad, and reward the same companies he was complaining about, and do it all over several years, by which point a lot more people will have died from the same broken system. And his own supporters totally fell for it.

Of course, I’m talking about President Obama’s speech to Congress last night (Sept. 9th if you’re reading from the future). If it sounds like I’m being overly hard on him, well, I think he deserves it. I’ve been following the health care debate all summer, partly because I feel this is the real test of whether the Obama administration is good at anything other than giving speeches, and partly out of the same sick fascination that makes people slow down to look at car crashes. Obama said “During [the past several months], we have seen Washington at its best and its worst.” I don’t know where he’s getting the “best” from, but this is definitely the most bipartisan, hostile, reactionary and insane I’ve ever seen American politics behave. And I remember the Clinton affair!

I think what people are slowly realizing about Obama and the Democrats is that just being good at giving speeches and motivating people isn’t enough. Part of being a good leader is knowing when to compromise, when to back down, and when to take a stand and say “We’re doing this, and people on the opposition may not like it, but our citizens do and they’re the ones who we’re supposed to be doing this for.” Imagine yourself leading a group of people lost in the woods and you come to a fork in the path. One path leads to a bright sunny clearing and you can hear cars and civilization just past it, and the other leads to a dank and smelly swamp full of spikes and poisonous things. Half of your group wants to go one way and half wants to go the other. What do you do?

You could put it to a vote and take whichever path has more support, however slim. You could suggest that everyone goes which ever way they want. Or you could man up and say “We’re going towards the clearing, because that swamp is dangerous and anyone wanting to walk into it cannot be trusted to make good decisions for the rest of us.” But there are a few things I bet you wouldn’t do; you wouldn’t try to blaze a new trail directly in between the two existing trails. You wouldn’t sit at the fork in the road for months debating whether the swamp is really that bad. You wouldn’t trust the opinions of people who have been paid by the snakes and spikes to lead people down that path. And you definitely wouldn’t say “OK, let’s take the clearing path, but only after spending a lot of money and time turning the clearing into a swamp.”

The Democrats raised health care reform as an issue, and decided that instead of laying down a clear set of minimum requirements that any bill would have to include before it counted as “reform,” they kept it vague and allowed the House and Senate to fill in their own details. And predictably, the Republicans seized on that ambiguity and came out swinging with ridiculous lies, slander, and threats of death panels, government-sponsored abortions, rationing care, Medicare cuts, and socialism. When you read some of the charges levied against the proposed health care bills, it’s difficult to understand how any reasonable person could take them seriously. It would be easy to dismiss this as “Well, Americans aren’t reasonable hurr hurr”, but there’s more to it than that. People wanted a simple, clear-cut, explanation of what was wrong with the current system and why the new system would be better, and the Democrats didn’t give them one, so the Republicans did, and by the time Democrats woke up and said “Wow, people are totally believing all these lies, we should set the record straight”, it was far too late.

Obama’s speech last night was excellent; it was to the point, passionate, exposed the problems in the system and gave an understandable list of ways to solve them. If he’d given that speech in June, when the debate was just heating up, there would have been no debate at all. But he gave it in response to a solid month of right-wing drum-beating about how he will abort your children and pull the plugs on your grandmothers, and there is a very real possibility that a lot of people simply won’t believe him (including the very congressmen he was speaking to). And what do you do then? When you give a calm, rational explanation of the facts surrounding health care, and your opponent’s only retort is “he’s lying,” how do you establish that you aren’t? If people won’t listen to the facts, what will they listen to?

The health care debate is only barely about health care; everyone knows it needs fixing, and the only real debate is how many fixes each congressman can get away with supporting without losing the millions of dollars of funding provided by insurance and pharmaceutical companies. But I think this debate will answer a lot of questions about the entire American political system. Can the Democrats run an effective government when the Republicans have perfected their ability to stand in the way of progress for political gain? Do the American people really support Obama as much as they said when they voted for him, or was his victory a result of finally becoming jaded with the right wing? And the big one (in my mind), what will it take for the Democrats to stop capitulating to the right? If there is as much support for a public option as the Democrats claim, and they enjoy a majority in both the House and Senate, why do they feel the need to work with and gain the support of Republicans who have explicitly said that they will not support the bill no matter what it contains?

There are legitimate complaints to make about the proposals Obama put forward. The insurance exchange that he wants to set up to lower prices will take four years, which is a long time for a project of that to fester in Washington without being subverted. The consumer protections for insurance companies only apply if they choose to offer services in the marketplace. The co-op plan touted by Sen. Max Baucus may have been co-written by an ex-insurance industry VP. It may take years to identify and cut out all the bloat from Medicare, and until then the money to begin setting up this system is going to have to come from somewhere. Taxing insurance companies for their high-cost plans will only cause them to increase the prices of all their plans. And most worryingly, mandating that everyone must have insurance is effectively rewarding the insurance companies that have caused this entire mess, by giving them 46 million new customers. But very few Republicans are focusing on those; instead of playing the hand they’ve been dealt, they went and got a deck that hasn’t been used since the Cold War, when anything resembling socialism was the greatest perceived threat to American values. Never mind that every other industrialized country has adopted aspects of both socialism and capitalism to great benefit; giving towards a common goal for the benefit of all is apparently anti-American.

And if your head isn’t spinning yet, consider this: the constitution of Iraq provides single-payer health care for the Iraqi people.  That’s right, America invaded another country, established universal health care as a right, then denies that same right to its own citizens. And the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan is far beyond what health care in America would cost. And in supreme irony, many of the senators and congressmen who voted for the war are voting against health care reform.

Now, full disclosure; as a Canadian, I have single-payer health care through my government and I am very happy with it, and I’ve never been in a situation where I literally could not afford to go to the doctor. So I cannot wrap my head around the fact that so many Americans are so dead-set against it. I can only attribute it to the people running their country remembering the time when the Russians were the bad guys, which should mean it will get better as they make way for the younger generation to take over. I’ve been told that back when Tommy Douglas brought UHC to Canada, the conservatives made all the same arguments about cost and reduced care, and yes, even accused him of being a secret socialist. But he stuck to his guns and pushed for it, and now no politician would ever dream of repealing it, (although Harper’s been dancing on that knife-edge for a while now in the form of two-tier care). Our system isn’t perfect, but it’s miles beyond what America has, and even beyond what they’re planning.

I have friends in America, some of whom are not insured, and the idea of the most affluent country in the world failing to support them when they need it most because they’d rather spend the money on the military and corporate bailouts sends a chill down my spine. I want everyone in America to have health care, I really do. But speeches and warnings aren’t going to accomplish that, actions are, and so far their actions (or lack of them) are speaking volumes. Hundreds of people in America die every day because they cannot afford life-saving treatments, and any person who is against health care is saying that they would rather let their own citizens die than see one extra dollar added to their tax. I can’t understand that, and I really hope I won’t have to for long.

america, politics