Expose the Right and we win health care
Posted on November 25th, 2008 by Jason Rosenbaum in Profits Before People
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Health Care for America Now held a retreat last week. Via Greg Sargent at TPM:
I'm told that dozens of the heaviest hitters from the health care reform world met for a private retreat in Virginia last week and spent two days girding for a major battle with the insurance industry, hashing out specific messaging, discussing organizing goals and planning a major fundraising drive to blanket the airwaves with ads next year.
At the retreat — which was organized by Health Care For America Now, the major umbrella group of unions, reform advocates and providers — the group agreed that they were aiming to start next year with at least $25 million for ads and field organizing, with the hope of raising many millions more.
Lots of elements of health care reform and how to win were discussed, but one of the most important was taking on the opposition. Specifically, if we want to win health care reform, we have to not only prove the insurance industry and the right-wing of this country wrong, we have to make them untrustworthy.
Case in point, as I wrote yesterday, conservatives and the industry will use all their resources to "kill" health care reform to preserve their own interests:
As this debate moves forward, keep a close eye on who's making arguments. If it's the insurance or pharmaceutical industry, you can bet their argument helps or protects their bottom line. If it's conservatives, you can bet it helps their political viability. Don't ever assume these groups have the public's interest at heart.
Having arguments is one thing, and yes, reasonable people can disagree on issues like health care. But it's important that the general public understand who's pushing arguments like "We can't afford health care in an economic crisis" or "big government health care is not the solution we need" and why they are pushing those arguments. As conservatives are making clear, they aren't against health care for ideological reasons so much as for partisan reasons:
Amidst the usual scary phrases like "government takeover," "Marxist," and "Obamacare" (what does that even mean?), Pethokoukis comes clean about his real problem with health care reform - people will like it and they'll like Obama for making it happen. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute agrees. His message to Republican lawmakers: Blocking Obama's Health Plan Is Key to the GOP's Survival.
The country needs to understand why the right-wing is against health care reform. You can help make that happen.
SEIU has put together an online letter writing tool for folks to write letters to the editor to their local paper. All you have to do is input your zip code and write a letter and it will be automatically submitted to all the local papers in your area.
So, please take a moment and write a letter to your local papers. Expose the reasons why conservatives oppose health care reform. Make their arguments untrustworthy. That way, we'll be able to win quality, affordable health care for all in 2009.
I would like to correct the assumption arising from the title of the article written by Michael Cannon, who is with the libertarian Cato Institute, which is NOT conservative.
Cannon's point is that conservatives and the GOP have frequently portrayed themselves as the party of "limited govenment". If they ever were, it has been many, many years since that has been manifest and their stand on questions of health care policy is just one more example.
There are many market-based solutions to achieving more cost effective and equitable health care in this country. I would hope that people would actually look at some of those for themselves and judge on that basis, leaving aside puerile partisan jousting. The Cato Institute's website is a wealth of resources.