Obama in the “Docs and Cops” War

Barack Obama’s good war for a health plan, minimized to a speculation on illnesses, is now a battle for life. His own battle, to survive politically, that sees him – so newspapers say – against “docs and cops,” doctors, and now, even policemen. Cops are accused of the same insensitiveness towards minorities, seen as weak from a social and racial point of view.

This is a war to save the lives of a million Americans sentenced to death by the stinginess of companies that cover them while they’re healthy, and dismiss them when they get sick. It’s a war that everybody claims to want and that nobody ever managed to win. Now Obama is launching his offensive towards the lobbies well protected by Democratic clients as well as the Republicans. Added to the list of enemies are the cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who “stupidly” arrested an African-American professor from Harvard, accused of having screamed when they didn’t want to believe that the beautiful house he was entering without a key was really his, as documents proved.

It’s a story based on the common prejudices caused by a black man caught standing by a door. An enlightening metaphor, because the iniquities and prejudices of the private health care system are all about racial and social minorities. But the “docs and cops” are dangerous and formidable antagonists, powerful and resentful entities.

Obama’s answer to a recalcitrant Congress and to the public opinion overwhelmed with the classical ghosts that have blocked every hope for national health care coverage (the “socialist medicine,” and the taxes to finance it) over the past 60 years is that of the card player who is losing at the game table, the one who is losing chips at the opinion polls table. He’s doubling the bet to get even. The risk is high, but the daily cost in popularity is making his project and political capital bleed. He has no choice, and yet the first deadline for the commissions, that he wanted by August, has already been delayed to the end of the year. The scandal of the American health care system, today an unfair and bizarre patchwork of very high costs and insurance policies conceived not to pay, is the bet that Obama can’t lose if he doesn’t want to see his whole political agenda helplessly compromised.

No other initiative like this can reach the heart of a society that senses the cruelty of a private system where every year the insurance companies make more money on their clients, just to deny later, when they get sick, their assistance. In fact, they make more profits. But this society is also the one that gets mad facing the necessity – clear in every developed country – of rationalizing and reducing the consumption of medicines, according to the criteria of true medical need.

The Republican minority knows this as do the conservative Democrats of the South: the Blue Dogs, named after their first meeting in a room which was embellished with paintings of a painter who specialized in portraying dogs in blue. They know that this is not the usual trick on tax rates, the old law on public works. In the transformation of the American health care system from an industry that provides the best of the medicine to those who can afford it, and nothing to 47 millions of helpless people, there is a cultural change that the conservatives feel and fear. They are trying to prevent it, to the scream of “kill it,” kill the proposal, as the most hysterical neo-conservative commentator, Bill Kristol, yells.

This is an ideological war, like the ones we witnessed in the years of Roosevelt with the New Deal, and with Johnson, with his Great Society. Obama’s belief is that every citizen, regardless of his social status, is entitled – as in all civilized countries – to receive health care. If this goal is successful, something profound will change forever in America.