People often say “politics is a contact sport”. That’s true as far as it goes. Politics is zero sum game: someone wins and someone else loses. But the uglier part of politics is the morally repaginate things one has to do in order to do the right thing. Take for example Social Security:
No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.
Today, all of that has changed, Social Security is the bedrock of the American welfare state. It affords Americans who have worked hard all their lives, the opportunity to live comfortably. But in order to get Social Security passed, FDR made concessions that were morally wrong. Or were they? Was it okay for FDR to sign New Deal legislation that excluded African Americans? Should we take the view that he did the best he could within the constrains of the politics of his time? And if so, is that the marker of a just action?
All this comes to mind after reading a masterful account by Jane Hamsher of how the Obama administration has systemically cut deals with the for-profit medical industry in order to get health reform passed. It’s so good I’m going to paste a chunk of it here:
On May 11, “stakeholders” including the AMA, PhRMA, the hospitals and the device manufacturers delivered proposals to the White House promising to “voluntarily” reduce cost increases over the next 10 years. In an effort to keep them “at the table,” Baucus’s Chief of Staff Jon Selib and Finance Committee staffer Russell Sullivan told stakeholders at a May 20 meeting that their participation in the process of crafting a health care bill was contingent on them “holding their fire”
The goal of keeping stakeholders at the table was threefold:
- Keep them from advertising against the White House plan
- Keep them from torpedoing vulnerable Democrats in 2010 so there isn’t a repeat of 1994
- Keep their money out of GOP coffers
You can see the fingerprints in the deals that they made: the $150 million PhRMA was spending on ads for health care reform, the $2.5 million they spent helping vulnerable freshmen…[The] primary objective would be to keep anyone from funding a GOP ascendancy
You should really read the whole thing to get an idea of the back room deals the White House has made in order to achieve two key political goals: 1) Keeping the for profit medical industry from using their wads of cash resources to defeat reform b) stopping these same industries from handing money to Republicans during the next election cycle. It’s really quite ugly stuff, and President Obama is responsible for it. In addition, the President has made deals with the pharmaceutical lobbyist he repeatedly denounced, going as far supporting the removal of cost controls on the pharmaceutical industry from legislation.
But then you read things like Families USA’s 10 Reasons to Support Health Care Reform and see what a significant step in the right direction the President’s proposal would be. Make no mistake, if Obama is successful in getting reform through Congress, the lives of millions of Americans would be improved. Sick people would no longer be told they couldn’t get insurance because they had a preexisting condition, and in turn go bankrupt in an effort to save their life. Insurers could no longer dump people from coverage plans once they became too ill and too costly. Small business firms would be able to provide their employees with health insurance.
But at what cost? Is the White House wrong for cutting these deals? It’s easy to conclude yes, but we can just as easily imagine a world in which the these deals weren’t struck. We can imagine a world in which the insurance industry pours its resources into defeating reform. We can imagine a financially rejuvenated Republican Party taking back the House and Senate in 2012. But mostly we don’t need our imaginations, because thats what happened in 1994. Moreover, we live in a world where reform may not happen despite the fact that the President has made these concessions. In light of this, what can we conclude about these arrangements?
I mean this not as a defense of the President, but only to point the complexity and ugliness inherent in the political process. The flip side of the question “At what moral cost?” is “What would you be willing to do provide every American health care?” Politics is much more than a contact sport, it is a case study ethics and morality.
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