Mobs, Shouting and Nazi Comparisons

Health Care Reform in America

By the first weekend of the Congressional vacation, the debate on American health care reform has already reached a new political fever pitch. One telling example is that the Americans are talking about Germany, even Nazi Germany. Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh inferred a similarity between Nazi symbols and the logo of “ObamaCare,” as the reform plans of the White House and Congressional Democrats have been called.

This speculation is really unfounded because Obama’s people chose the winged caduceus of two serpents wrapped around a winged staff, symbolic of the medical profession, as their logo. This emblem has little to do with the Nazi symbol of an eagle with outstretched wings atop a swastika. The politically charged attempt to compare Obama’s logo to Nazi dictatorship is meant to appeal to the deep-seated mistrust many Americans have of every form of government bureaucracy. With conservative mobs shouting at the first town hall meetings in an attempt to derail the efforts of Obama and the Democrats to save their reform plans, a political fringe group may make itself felt just by shouting the loudest. The problems facing Obama and the Democrats in their struggle to win over the American people for their goal of universal medical insurance go much deeper.

Bad News from Polls

Recent polls have borne bad news for Obama. Pollsters at Quinnipiac University, located in Hamden, Connecticut, have determined that the more Obama talks about his most important domestic issue, fewer and fewer Americans have confidence in his ability to lead the health care policy debate. At the beginning of August, 52 percent of those questioned disapproved of the way Obama was handling the issue and of his plans for reform, while only 39 percent approved. One month earlier, 46 percent of those questioned approved and 42 percent disapproved. Among independent voters, who usually determine the outcome of presidential and congressional elections, 77 percent did not believe Obama could achieve his goal of reforming the health care system by extending insurance coverage to 47 million uninsured people without increasing the deficit even more.

One more problem for Obama and the Congressional Democrats is the fact that a large majority of those Americans who do have insurance are content with both their insurance and the medical care they are entitled to according to their insurance plans. In a CNN poll, 83 percent of those questioned considered their medical care to be good or excellent and 74 percent were satisfied with their insurance.

Four of Five Persons with Insurance are Satisfied with their Medical Care

Yet, many Americans do feel, like their president, that it is scandalous that more than 15 percent of people living in the United States do not have medical insurance (and are taken care of in hospital emergency rooms at the expense of taxpayers and policy holders). Conversely, this really means that the remaining 85 percent of Americans are medically insured. Just over 75 percent of these insured Americans are satisfied with their coverage and over 80 percent of them are content with their medical care. As a result, the majority of Americans do not want to change the status quo or, at least, not very much.

There is an apparent, growing belief among the people that health care reform and, especially, the introduction of a wider public insurance program cannot be achieved in a cost neutral fashion, as the White House believes. The American health care system is already more expensive than in any other industrialized country and very confusing, with overlapping state and federal responsibilities. When de facto mandatory insurance was introduced in Massachusetts as recently as 2006, there was already a State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) operating in other states. All low-income people and seniors, on the other hand, are already insured by the Medicaid and Medicare federal insurance programs, respectively, both of which are administered to some extent by state governments.

Most notably, the planned introduction of a “public option” is arousing growing suspicions. This is another government insurance program meant to cover the uninsured without burdening the budget or competing with private insurance companies. Suspicion provide an outlet for both the real and imagined fears Americans have of “socialized medicine,” where government bureaucrats have the power over life and death, and where comparisons are made to health care in Canada, Britain and even Nazi Germany. The possibility of an objective debate on this issue is long gone.