Universal Health Care--Not Universally Popular

"At no time under five separate presidents -- Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Clinton or Truman -- have you been this close on health care. It's just a fact."

--Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff

Close, but so far, no cigar. As liberal commentator Harold Meyerson more pessimistically put it:

universal health care for its citizens [seems] an achievement that the United States alone finds beyond [its] capacities . . . It wasn't ever thus. Time was when Democratic Congresses enacted Social Security and Medicare over the opposition of powerful interests and Republican ideologues.

Ah yes. Social Security—Roosevelt’s signature achievement. And Medicare—the centerpiece of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. So, naturally, Obama wants Universal Health Care, which will place his bust next to Roosevelt’s and Johnson’s (none for Truman, Carter, or Clinton) in the pantheon of great Democratic social reformers.

Obama, as the Washington Post’s Michael Fletcher writes, is going all-out to make the case for health reform. On his radio address last Saturday, Obama said:

It's about every family unable to keep up with soaring out of pocket costs and premiums rising three times faster than wages. Every worker afraid of losing health insurance if they lose their job, or change jobs. Everyone who's worried that they may not be able to get insurance or change insurance if someone in their family has a pre-existing condition.

But as Fletcher counters, “many of those problems are not obvious to everyday Americans, the vast majority of whom have coverage.” [my emphasis]

This is the big, glaring difference between Social Security and Medicare on the one hand, and universal health care on the other. Both Social Security and Medicare help everybody who anticipates living to retirement age. Before Social Security and Medicare, I didn’t have coverage. After, I now have protection for my “golden years.” Naturally, the programs are popular, even if they may be bankrupting the treasury.

Universal health care is completely different. The elderly, the poor, children, and over 5/6ths of Americans already have health insurance. Obama’s program seeks to cover those in the “doughnut hole” between employer-based insurance and Medicaid—people who’ve lost their job or have a pre-existing condition insurance won’t cover, but only those not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. This isn’t “everybody.” It’s a select population. The rest of us don’t care, unless the new program hurts us in some way.

Obama senses the problem he faces. In his prime-time news conference today, the president sought to address the average person who already has insurance, promising the listener universal care wouldn’t make things worse, and could provide significant cost savings. We’ll see shortly how well Obama made his case.

Anyway, Washington Post reporters Shailagh Murray and Ceci Connolly say that on Capitol Hill, conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats in the House now explicitly favor a bill like the one the bipartisan Senate Finance Committee is attempting to put together, a process that as we suggested earlier, may offer Obama his best path to success.