We have nothing to fear from ObamaCare.
According to Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority
leader and one-time nominee to be the administration’s health care
guru, those who are afraid of the beneficent new law are simply
falling for “scare tactics.”
“Most Americans are happy with their health care, even if
they are sympathetic to other people’s problems,” Daschle writes in
his new book,
Getting It Done: How Obama and Congress Finally Broke the
Stalemate to Make Way for Health Care Reform. “So when reform
opponents try to tell them that reform might ruin what they like
about their health care, the scare tactics often
succeed.”
Daschle later reminds us that people “are vulnerable to
scare tactics” and that there have been “a lot of scare tactics
about how much power the IRS will have” and that right now, “Many
Republicans are doing everything they can to stoke the public’s
fears about the law…”
Instead of falling victim to these tactics, now’s the time
for everybody to embrace the new law, because it “will have the
best chance of success if the country accepts it.”
He writes that, “as patients, all of us can help by
accepting our new responsibilities…” and while the states may see
their “new responsibilities” as a burden, “For their own good, as
well as the good of millions of Americans, they should see it as an
opportunity.”
Originally appointed to serve a dual role as Obama’s top
advisor on health care as well as the Secretary of Health and Human
Services, Daschle was forced to withdraw his nomination after it
surfaced that he failed to report free chauffeur services on his
tax returns. But he still provided help to Democrats from the
outside throughout the health care debate, advising Obama, sitting
in on strategy meetings, and even lobbying members of Congress when
asked, including Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson.
Given his intimate knowledge of what was going on behind
the scenes throughout the health care debate, Daschle was in a
position of writing an interesting book. Instead, most of its pages
rehash what we already know about the events of the past several
years, from Obama’s bitter disagreements with Hillary Clinton over
the individual mandate during the Democratic primaries through Bart
Stupak’s decision to give in on abortion funding in the final
hours, paving the way for passage of the new law.
The book also serves as a defense — not only of every
aspect of the new law, and the process that led to its passage —
but of himself. In an attempt to rehabilitate his image, Daschle
explains his tax issues as an honest mistake, and his withdrawal as
a noble sacrifice because he didn’t want to distract from the
health care push. He opens the book by recounting how around this
time, he had just found out his brother had a brain
tumor.
AS DASCHLE TELLS IT, at every stage of the health care
push, Obama was confronted by advisors who were telling him to put
off or scale back the health care effort. Just after he won the
election, the Obama economic team led by Larry Summers had
questioned whether a health care push in the middle of the economic
crisis was “more than the nation could handle.” At times, even Vice
President Joe Biden and senior advisor David Axelrod expressed
doubts about the wisdom of prioritizing health care. But from the
beginning, Obama assured Daschle that it would be the defining
issue of his presidency.
“Tom, health care is the most important thing we will ever
do,” Obama told Daschle days into his presidency. “It will be my
legacy. And it is more important to me now than ever before. Don’t
ever doubt that.”
Early on, the Obama team decided on a strategy aimed at
avoiding the problems that doomed President Clinton’s health care
effort in 1993 and 1994. In addition to allowing Congress to write
the bill, the White House was determined to pass a bill as quickly
as possible “so opponents wouldn’t have time to tear the bill
apart.”
Daschle describes in heroic terms how Democrats rammed
through health care legislation in the face of overwhelming public
opposition, even convincing themselves that the hostility toward
the law was overblown. After the August 2009 recess, during which
opponents of the health care legislation voiced their concerns at
town halls, House Democrats had a meeting to discuss the where
things stood. Daschle writes:
Leonard Boswell of Iowa stood up and told his colleagues
that if the events taught him anything, it was that they had to
pass the health care bill. Others quickly echoed him. They had all
seen the protesters, but many came to see the demonstrations for
what they were: a made-for-reality-TV-spectacle. When they talked
to the “regulars” — the constituents they knew, the ones who
always come to the town hall meetings, they heard a different
message. You have the best opportunity in generations to solve the
serious problems we’re all having, these constituents said. Don’t
miss the chance.
After Scott Brown won an upset victory to take the Senate
seat once held by Ted Kennedy, giving Republicans 41 votes, Obama
decided to charge ahead on a massive overhaul anyway. This decision
came over the objections of chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who argued
for a scaled-back approach. In contrast to Emanuel, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi told Obama that she was “only a player on
comprehensive health care reform” and that “anything less is not an
option.”
Daschle defends everything that made passage of the
legislation possible, from the use of reconciliation to ram the
final bill through Congress and the special deals such as the
“Cornhusker kickback,” which gave Nebraska extra Medicaid money to
win over Sen. Ben Nelson’s vote.
“None of these deals were pleasant to look at,” Daschle
writes. “But in the pursuit of a higher goal — health care for
millions of Americans — they were a price that had to be
paid.”
THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, Daschle scoffs at charges that
ObamaCare will lead to a government takeover of health care, and
yet in all of the policy sections of the book, he eschews markets
in favor of central planning. He also argues that health care
reform will be an “ongoing process” with further government
interventions down the road.
“Even under the new law, we will have a health care
market, with generous and high-quality care for the luckiest
Americans and lesser care for everyone else,” Daschle writes.
“Instead of a market, we could have a smoothly functioning system,
with a central decision-making authority for coverage and payment
decisions.”
In the coming years, he notes, HHS will have “a heavy load
of responsibilities” to implement the law and fill in details left
open in the legislation. Among the questions HHS will have to
answer, he writes, is “How strict should we be in limiting health
plans’ profits?”
If too many people are choosing to pay the mandate tax
penalty rather than purchase insurance and too many businesses are
dropping coverage and dumping employees on the exchanges, Daschle
argues that Congress will have to pass tougher penalties. He also
sees the public option as “inevitable” and hopes that the law will
be updated to cover illegal immigrants.
For all his triumphalism, though, one can sense some
nervousness over the fierce backlash against the
legislation.
While describing what happened in the August 2009 town
hall meetings, Daschle laments that, “somehow, the energy and
excitement on the pro-reform side seemed to have been lost.” And in
his conclusion, he ominously reports on the drive for repeal, as
well as the lawsuits launched by states challenging the
constitutionality of the individual mandate.
“Even though the odds are against both efforts, they can
still do real damage to the cause of reform,” Daschle writes. “By
constantly suggesting to the public that the law is illegitimate,
they could encourage large groups of Americans to give up on the
law, or even fight it, before it has had a chance to prove
itself.”
He continues, “The biggest threat to the cause of reform
is no longer the decades of deadlock in Congress…Now, the danger is
that the critics of reform will kill it before it ever has a chance
to take hold.”
For opponents of reform, his warnings should be taken as
marching orders.
