Comparing the 2009 Health Care Agenda with the 1993 plan

About 16 years ago, on September 22, 1993, President Clinton delivered an address to the nation outlining his plans for health care reform. It was based on "The Task Force on Health Care Reform," organized by his wife Hillary in January 1993 who appointed 550 persons to 35 different working groups, each focusing on one specific feature of reform. One working group addressed the ethical foundations of the new health plan. Some members of that ethics group say there were 14, some say 15 ethical values and principles submitted. It was reported in the Feb. 1994 issue of the Journal of Family Practice and the HEC Forum 1995 and in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy in 1994 as “Ethicists and Health Care Reform: An Indecent Proposal?” by Laurence J. O'Connell, Ph.D. (a Lutheran) who then contributed his views on the 15 ethical values and principles to the “Special Report: Health Care” in The Lutheran, December 1993.

Hillarycare was a lot shorter, clearer and better researched than any of the present House and Senate versions (Obamacare), and involved much more input from the general public and specialists as opposed to just staffers and lobbyists writing what Congressmen needed to say. However, the public didn’t like an unelected official taking over their health care, and disliked her personally, although in hindsight and considering what we’ve got today from a group of Marxist and socialist advisors in the White House, her version seems much less bureaucratic and cumbersome. In any event, within a year, it was dead. Obama and friends think it was talked and debated to death, and that’s why they’ve renamed a crisis and tried to ram jam cram it down our throats in the dead of night during a recess period in August. The Republicans have been helpless to stop it; it's all in the Democrats' lap now. The start date for Obamacare is so far in the future there is no way to know what diseases, technology or cures may be on the horizon by then, so cost projection is just a fantasy. Think what has changed just within the technology of medical records, surgery for obesity and the treatment of AIDS since 1993.

But essentially the ethical underpinnings of Obamacare is unchanged Hillarycare. It has just grown to obese proportions.

The 15 ethical values as the base of the Clinton Plan as printed in The Lutheran, Dec. 1993 p. 32. These will look very familiar.

1. Health care is a fundamental human right.
2. Access to health care must be universal.
3. Benefits must be comprehensive and basic.
4. The benefits must be distributed equally to be a fundamental social good.
5. No pre-existing conditions can deprive a person of this community good.
6. It will be supported in a proportionate way by those most able to pay.
7. It will be intergenerational without weighting toward the elderly.
8. It will be rationed in a prudent and humane way because resources are finite.
9. Only truly effective treatments will be offered.
10. It will be high-quality.
11. It will be streamlined and will simplify the bureaucracy.
12. Individual choice will be evaluated and balanced against the community good.
13. Each person will contribute to the common good by being responsible and not wasting health-care resources.
14. Physicians will not be asked to engage in activities that are inconsistent with their professional commitments and their integrity will be protected.
15. There must be an effective appeal mechanism to protect individuals.

Folks, there is NO CRISIS. About 10% of American citizens (30,000,000 according to the President's last speech) do not have adequate health care. We have a huge government medical program now which covers some very well, and others very poorly, and some have chosen to not have either government nor private insurance. Under the "new" improved plan, there will still be about 5% not covered. This is a power grab. Not a reform.

Report on Health care, 1993 edition

The apple cake tasted a bit dry, so I decided to go through my files to see if I could find the source sent to me in 1993 (3 different relatives). Didn't find it. But I did find a letter I'd written in 1993, when I was still a Democrat (but obviously catching on) to "The Lutheran" magazine about health care. It had a special report on Universal Coverage in the December 1993 issue which included 15 ethical values and principles. It reminds me of something I heard this summer from the Catholic priest who lectured at Lakeside on religion and the civil war. He said the churches had split up long before the regions went to war. In my letter I addressed the draft on sexuality (homosexual marriage and gay pastors), so you can see how long that's been dragging on. The ELCA hierarchy split from the people in the pew years ago.

First, I don't have the entire report--I apparently photocopied just enough to attach to my copy of the letter. But here's the gist--the classic leftist, cop-out. . . "Others are dying because we have too much." The specific phrase on p. 32 was, "When we see our brothers and sisters dying on Chicago's South Side due to the lack of prenatal care there's something wrong--because too many of us have too much."

Many Americans, including some minorities, immigrants and native Americans, have cradle to the grave government health care, food stamps, housing allowances and/or public housing and still, nothing is healthier for a baby or assures a climb out of poverty like having a married mother and father. (And first they have to make it through the birth canal, something the liberals don't necessarily support if it's an inconvenient truth.) Married parents--you would think that would be a natural for a church magazine to point out--it's a big deal in both the Old and New Testaments. Its imagery is the foundation of God's relationship with Israel, and Christ's relationship with the church. But no. More government reassignment of wealth is their plan. "The resources are available here--they just have to be redistributed. And we have to distribute them justly. . . Justice in the deepest most fundamental biblical sense refers to balanced relationships. Relationships between individuals, between individuals and community, between individuals an communities and their God. That's what I see in health-care reform. It's an attempt to do justice, to balance the relationships."

Now, I have no idea who Laurence O'Connell is (or was), but he was obviously reading Saul Alinsky, not the Bible, because there's nothing in the Bible about the government taking from one and giving to another and renaming it justice. Here's my letter, November 28, 1993.

With the coverage given the disastrous sexuality draft in the December 1993 issue, it would be easy to overlook an equally suspect document--the Health Care 15 values and principles published on p. 31-34. Instead of placing personal responsibility for good health as the first principle, the task force put it as number 13. We would not have a need for such a document or billions spent on health care if it were not for abuse of alcohol, cigarettes, food and sexual behavior. Once those health problems, all of which are personally manageable, are set aside, we can afford the rest with pocket change.

How can Laurence O'Connell decide it is ethical for me to pay the social and economic costs of someone else's abortion, drunk driving, obesity, STDs, or even failure to floss? Where are the Judeo-Christian values and traditions to back up rights with no responsibilities? He needs to study American religious history and see that it was the strength of the moral values of the Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals and Presbyterians that pulled people out of poverty and degradation and cleaned them up, educated and sanitized them and pushed them into the middle-class (where they have forgotten that it wasn't government programs that got them there).

Where is the justice in "redistributing" our resources? Hasn't socialism, which is what "redistribution" and "communal sharing of risks" means, shown itself to be a complete failure in Eastern Europe and the USSR in the past 80 years? Would O'Connell ever want to have a blood transfusion in a Russian hospital? O'Connell claims the 15 principles "resonate" with the Christian message (p. 32) I didn't hear a single jingle, clink or tone that sounded like the Gospel."

Note, the reason I didn't include Lutherans in my list of which religious groups pushed people into the middle class is that I was referring to the various "great awakenings" or revivals that swept the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the most part, Lutherans stayed within their ethnic communities and just helped each other. I'm not a cradle Lutheran, but I don't recall them being a part of those revivals.

Hillarycare 17 years later

Here’s a good analysis of Hillary care of 1992 (as it was known by its detractors) written in 2007. I was looking through it to see what the reasons were that it went down. The author, Paul Starr, was an insider, having been brought into the process by Ira Magaziner. He sites:

• right-wing misrepresentations
  
• malicious personal attacks on Hillary
  
• reporters and the public thought that Bill Clinton had handed over the policy to Hillary
  
• false charges
  
• misunderstanding the politics behind the plan
  
• distrust of the Washington bureaucracy
  
• no positive consensus about what to do among Democrats
  
• change in priorities by President Clinton
  
• charges of heresy from the Left and Right alike
  
• accusations of secrecy (30 working groups)
  
• began with a huge program that could be bargained away by layers
  
• lurid fears from talk radio that the federal government would control every detail of medical care

It all sounds quite familiar given what we've been going through since Obama tried to ram jam the mega-health bill through in August. Apparently, some of his supporters are too young (or too old) to remember that many of us remember 1992!

But in that entire list, which could be ripped right out of a report from Katie Couric this evening, there's not a single charge of racism. Odd isn't it? I'm sure personal animus toward Mrs. Clinton was part of it, particularly since she wasn't elected and according to Starr her role was misunderstood, but apparently no one said the conservatives dislike for her plan was based on her race. Yet faced with many of the same arguments, and an even bigger, more complicated and confusing plan/bill, now we're racists.