And you get to see some amazing ironies. For example, let’s take our Time Machine back to 1994. Bill and Hillary Clinton were desperately trying to get national health care reform. And they were being defeated by a coalition led by the wily House Minority Leader, one Newt Gingrich. That fall he would head a smart and successful campaign to take control of both houses of Congress for the Republican Party, which he pledged to a “Contract with America.”
I remember the scorn and disdain Gingrich heaped on those backing universal health care. I can just imagine what he would have said if some pointy-headed liberal had proposed, for example, paying teenage girls not to get pregnant. What if the girls did anyway?
Well, then our bleeding heart wants to pay them to take prenatal vitamins, and pay their toddlers to read, and maybe pay them not to smoke.
Boy, the old Newt Gingrich would have had a field day beating up on that guy. Well, someone did come to Michigan this month, toured the Henry Ford hospital in West Bloomfield, and spoke in favor of doing all of that and more. That someone, by the way, was Newt Gingrich, who seems to have had a change of heart.
Today, he says health care should be accessible to all, though it is not at all clear how Newt would get us there. His sincerity may strike some as dubious, since he no longer holds office, and is hinting about running for president.
Gingrich also said there is too much focus on the problems of financing health care, which is a little like trying to tell your creditors that they are obsessed with money instead of paying them.
But if even Newt is on the health care bandwagon, it is clear something is happening. The White House, for example, is holding a series of major regional health care forums.
The first of these was in Dearborn last week. Melody Barnes, who heads President Obama’s domestic policy council, started things off by saying, “We can’t afford NOT to reform our health care system now.”
Despite the economy, despite everything else, we need to start, because the situation will only get worse. Before the sweeping layoffs of the last few months, experts calculated there were about 47 million Americans without any health care at all.
That number is certainly higher now. Congressman John Dingell, a longtime advocate of universal health care, told the forum that health care woes cause a bankruptcy every thirty seconds.
Health costs will cause a million and half Americans to lose their homes this year. Something has to be done to take care of our citizens and to make our industries competitive again.
We‘ve got a lot of deep tissue work to do on this nation’s faltering economy. One sixth of that is our faltering $2.2 trillion health care system, which is equally in need of an overhaul. Long as the patient is on the table anyway, we might as well start.
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