Elephants and Mice,

Republicans and Change

Elephants aren’t afraid of mice – it’s a myth.

But Republicans are afraid of change – it’s a fact.

That’s the only explanation for the strident and premature Republican attacks on health care reform triggered by a Congressional Budget Office reaction to a draft not yet completely written.

The CBO said the plan it saw would cost $1 trillion over ten years and still leave about two-thirds of those without medical coverage on their own. That set the Republicans into a group moon-howl, with South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham widely quoted as saying the CBO figures were a “death blow to a government-run health care plan."

Republicans are clearly opposed to government-run anything, unless it’s something essential like torturing suspects, or spending $680 billion and more than 4,300 American lives to swap one group of corrupt Iraqi thugs for another.

Of course, we do have a government-run health plan already. It’s called Medicare, and it’s tax-supported help for those 65 and over. Medicare has been successful in keeping most retirees from having to choose between health care and bankruptcy. President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965.

Where were the Republicans on Medicare in the years prior to 1965?

Republicans were opposed, of course. It was change, and they had barely recovered from the change trauma of Social Security, which they had also opposed. Besides, Medicare would cover all alike, rich and poor, and that made it socialized medicine.

Even hinting at socialized medicine guaranteed opposition from the American Medical Association, then as now a group concerned mostly with those medical standards relating to forms of payment. But the AMA had the Republican party by the ears (or perhaps other body parts).

And private health insurance companies had little interest in upsetting a business plan that allowed them to collect premiums from the healthy until they became old and ill, at which point premiums would rise beyond reach or policies would not be renewed. They helped tighten the AMA’s grip.

All the Democrats gripped was Congress, with the 1964 elections giving them a 68-32 majority in the Senate and a 295-140 majority in the House.

And so Medicare became law on a House vote of 307-116 and a Senate tally of 70-17. Half of the House Republicans saw the light – or more probably, the next election in two years – and voted for the bill More than half of Republicans in the Senate opposed Medicare, six-year terms making votes in line with purchased principles easier.

The health care politics now are pretty much as they were in the early sixties. Republicans are opposed, screaming in horror at the costs, socialized medicine and all the other monsters living under their beds. The AMA remains concerned about the doctor/patient relation$hip, and the private insurers don’t want to compete with a government plan that might give the customers an even break.

I’ll predict a health reform victory before the end of the year, but offer this bit of comfort to the Republicans mortally afraid of change. Republicans opposed Social Security and got creamed in 1936. They opposed the reform that became Medicare and got creamed in 1964. And if they continue to oppose health care reform mindlessly, they’ll get creamed in 2010.

Which should make them feel good, because there’s no change involved.

###

Strange Washington Signals – Things Getting Done

Something out of the ordinary is almost always a sign that trouble may be afoot. That scratchy feeling in your throat, the car that chugs instead of purrs, the clothes dryer that sounds like The Incredible Hulk – all are signals experience has taught us to handle.

But there’s something extraordinary happening in Washington lately, and it’s so strange that most of us have no idea what to do. Difficult as it is to believe, it must be said in the open:

Washington is getting things done.

Now that’s not supposed to happen, of course. Washington in general and Congress in particular is where good ideas and citizens go to languish and fade. It is supposed to be a place of bitter partisan strife and naked personal ambition where duty and expediency are synonyms.

So how did it happen that the United States Senate passed a bill allowing the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco at last, giving it broad powers over the product that kills 400,000 Americans a year? The bill is expected to be accepted by the House, which passed a similar measure earlier. President Obama, himself a struggling sometimes smoker, is eager to sign it.

This 79-17 Senate vote ends more than four decades of malign neglect after the first warnings that smoking cigarettes could kill you. And it happened in Washington.

That’s the same place where Congress and regulatory agencies nodded complacently while corporations floated all sorts of financial balloons and paid lavishly for the executive hot air that filled them. Or it was until the balloons popped. Now Washington is into regulation, whether by public law or public shame, to curb the worst excesses.

Corporate fat cats coughing up compensation hairballs are only part of the picture. Washington seems determined to do something about the national health system.

Started by employers trying to compete around World War II wage freezes, employer-provided health insurance became an assumption for most Americans – except those who didn’t have it.

As the have-not numbers increased and American health standings fell to a par with former Soviet republics, insurers and doctors wrapped themselves in the banner of free enterprise and fought off all attempts at change with the mighty club of “socialized medicine.”.

Now Washington is not talking about whether we will have health care reform, but what it will look like – an earthquake change in assumptions. “Socialized medicine” is now not so much a club as one of several proposals. That overdue earthquake follows economic legislation and other action that happened with a speed and sense of purpose not seen in Washington in decades.

Since any president’s administration takes lumps for things it couldn’t have controlled and accepts bouquets for being just plain lucky, it’s too soon to hand laurels for this change of tone and pace to an Obama administration yet to celebrate its first anniversary.

But it’s not too soon to say that a Washington where more problems are solved than are caused could get to be a pretty comfortable thing.

Let’s see if it continues.

###

Barn Doors and Newspapers

 

 

Alarmed after finally noticing that readers and advertisers were out of the barn, the American newspaper industry has thought long and hard about what to do.

 

The emerging consensus is that it needs to design a better barn door.

 

Most designs lean heavily on subway turnstiles for inspiration – no pay, no service. It’s a concept simple enough for most newspaper executives to understand, which is a large part of its attraction.

 

Where the emerging designs are weakest is in a nagging little detail – getting readers and advertisers now frolicking in the fields of hypertext to want to come back in the barn.

 

As posted on Poynter Online’s Romenesko, a May 8 MediaNews memo from Dean Singleton and Judy Lodovic to their many minions embraces the turnstile, noting “First, we continue to do an injustice to our print subscribers and create perceptions that our content has no value by putting all of our print content online for free. Not only does this erode our print circulation, it devalues the core of our business - the great local journalism we (and only we) produce on a daily basis.”

 

Although coming from MediaNews brass, the sentiments are a safe bet to get embraced at other media companies, where doing an injustice has also become unpopular at about the same pace as it became unprofitable.

 

The memo goes on in MarketSpeak, but one quote stands out “To be clear, the brand value proposition to the consumer is that the newspaper is a product, whether in print or online, which must be paid for.”

 

Newspapers are compilations of the news of the day, whether that is a change of government or the price of broccoli. For readers, they compiled events and information that would be difficult or impossible for most readers to match. For advertisers, they compiled an audience, some of whom might be thinking of broccoli with dinner tonight.

 

Both readers and advertisers might grumble, but they paid up because there was no other practical way.  They stayed in the barn, and when they strayed with alternative media or direct mail, they came back.

 

That’s changing.

 

For readers, gathering – and often, publishing -- information is easy, quick and cheap. The old saw “Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one,” is true with a vengeance. Just about everyone owns the means to distribute information widely, which is the same tool used to gather it.

For advertisers trying to peddle broccoli, it’s no longer required to pay for all the readers who don’t cook, or those who do but hate broccoli. Online ads after the first click are by definition viewed by those who might be interested in whatever you’re trying to sell. And if you have your own web site, regular customers will come to you for information instead of you sending it unbidden to them.

 

Newspaper brass should ponder that scribes in centuries long past once had a lucrative trade, since they could both read and write and a largely illiterate population had to use them to communicate at a distance. And then change in the form of widespread literacy came along.

 

Scribes disappeared.

 

Change has come again.

 

Newspapers. . .?

###

Back To Top