Obama Mistakes in Marketing Health Care Costly
20 July 2009 12:27 pm by Taylor Marsh
“If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo,” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said yesterday during a conference call with conservative activists. “It will break him.” – Alliances Splinter
This video brought to you by America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), taking advantage of Pres. Obama’s fumbling of the health care reform debate. But when someone isn’t driven by a policy passion for universal health care, what do you expect?
Putting it bluntly, if the Obama administration had embraced the progressive new media coalition (Health Care Now, SEIU, Firedoglake, OpenLeft, Digby and others) driving the universal health care debate from the start, he wouldn’t be in this mess right now.
But since Pres. Obama is so sure of himself, letting his poll numbers go to his head, someone should remind him that on an issue that has scuttled every single president who’s tried it before him, it’s embarrassing it took him this long to come to the rescue of something that a plurality of Americans want done. The progressive new media coalition knew what was coming, from our own Democratic coalition as well. Obama just now getting the message shows a president way behind the curve.
There has been a lot of stupidity on our side in making health care reform a reality, but the marketing and effort from the White House has been the absolute worst.
“The bottom line is that I think the president believes that the richest 1% of this country has had a pretty good run of it for many, many, many years.” – Robert Gibbs, White House spokesperson
Whether The Rich have had a “pretty good run of it for many, many, many years” is immaterial, especially if you’re trying to sell something that is critically important to this country, businesses and our health as a nation, but also by the way, The Rich. That Gibbs’s statement sounds like petty punishment born from envy, which is an appallingly bad reason to make the foundational plan for paying for health care reform a surtax on the wealthiest 1%, should have dawned on Gibbs immediately. It’s not that The Rich can’t afford it. Nobody is going to argue that, least of all them. It’s that if this is the best idea Obama’s got for paying for health care, as he continues to plead that reform won’t increase the deficit, it’s simply not going to sell, because there aren’t enough rich to pay for what Obama’s proposing. It’s the math, stupid.
Even Speaker Pelosi has blinked. That she did so on the very idea of what the House passed should not go unnoticed.
The bill now moving through the House would raise taxes for individuals with annual adjusted gross incomes of $280,000, or families that make $350,000 or more.
“I’d like it to go higher than it is,” Pelosi said Friday.
The speaker would like the trigger raised to $500,000 for individuals and $1 million for families, “so it’s a millionaire’s tax,” she said. “When someone hears, ‘2,’ they think, ‘Oh, I could be there,’ because they don’t know the $280,000 is for one person.
“It sounds like you’re in the neighborhood. So I just want to remove all doubt. You hear ‘$500,000 a year,’ you think, ‘My God, that’s not me.’”
This was all so predictable. Letting the fundamental necessity of health care reform get hijacked by a talking point that gives ammunition to others hoping to change the subject. Brilliant. Because the moment you get away from the urgency of health care reform you’ve lost the thread.
Steve Benen floats the idea that this was the idea all along. If so, Democrats are even dumber than I thought, which I really didn’t think was possible.
If you’re sensing annoyance here, well, that’s putting it mildly.
After the debacle of “Hillarycare,” that Pres. Obama and the Democrats have allowed “Obamacare” to sink, with the notion of universal health care now sounding like a sickness instead of the cure, makes you wonder if they actually believed that because Obama is who he is and he has a Dem majority in Congress that he wouldn’t face the traditional head winds against health care reform, just like Clinton. Bill Kristol now offering the same thing that we heard in the 1990s: “kill it, and start over.”
Now the AP is reporting that the midsummer budget numbers are being delayed until August, making last week’s “no” on health care reform cost cutting from the CBO reverberate even louder.
