“In fact, Mrs. Clinton was accurately repeating the story as it was told to her — and it turns out that while some of the details were slightly off, the essentials of her story were correct. After all the fuss, The Washington Post eventually conceded that “Bachtel’s medical tragedy began with circumstances very close to the essence” of Mrs. Clinton’s account. And even more important, Mrs. Clinton was making a valid point about the state of health care in this country.
In other words, this was a disgraceful episode. It was particularly sad to see a number of Obama supporters (though not the Obama campaign itself) join enthusiastically in the catcalls against Mrs. Clinton’s good-faith effort to put a human face on the cruelty and injustice of the American health care system.
Look, I know that many progressives have their hearts set on seeing Barack Obama get the Democratic nomination. But politics is supposed to be about more than cheering your team and jeering the other side. It’s supposed to be about changing the country for the better.
And if being a progressive means anything, it means believing that we need universal health care, so that terrible stories like those of Monique White, Trina Bachtel and the thousands of other Americans who die each year from lack of insurance become a thing of the past.” (Paul Krugman in the New York Times)
Yes.
I am more and more firmly convinced that the lack of universal healthcare is the biggest problem of U.S. society today. It exacerbates economic issues - large numbers of small and medium-sized businesses can’t really take off because they can’t afford to provide their employees with health insurance. It’s one of the causes of prostitution. It’s bigger than the Iraq war, or rather, it’s a motivating factor: it gives disproportionate power over the lives of middle-class Americans to employers like the large corporations to whom the war’s been subcontracted, and to the military. And it causes the U.S. to spend more federal dollars on healthcare per capita than any other industrialized country.
Maybe I don’t like Hillary Clinton’s style much these days but I can’t fault her for continuing to point all this out, over and over and over again. Because people, this point needs to be gotten already.
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