Jennifer Foster: How to clean up the health care reform mess

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a big project that has become a big mess?

You realize through your ill-fated efforts all the things you could have done differently and better. You know more about what works – and what didn’t.

It’s often a better strategy to start over, armed with all that knowledge, and create something you know will work rather than spend time trying to salvage something decent from the mess.
So it is with President Obama and health care reform.

Some three months after efforts to overhaul America’s health care system began in earnest, even some Democrats are now floating the idea of a do-over.

If we are really going to address health care reform the right way, a strong case exists for scrapping the current bill garnering so much consternation around the country and starting from a clean slate. There have been plenty of mistakes to go around.

Here’s how to fix them:

* First, we need to determine what we’re trying to address. Is it the quality of health care, or is it health insurance? Is it the high cost or the availability of health insurance? Is it uninsured Americans, or uninsured people in America? It’s a fool’s errand to try to map out a route without knowing where you want to end up.

* President Obama must step up and show some leadership – and I’m not talking about speeches at town hall meetings. If the current reform effort has fallen victim to misinformation, it’s because he opened the door to confusion with his equivocation – or just plain evasion – on all the key points. Foremost among these is the absolute imbroglio that has become of the public option question. Six months into his presidency, we still don’t know whether Obama will insist that a public option be part of any bill he signs. And how will we pay for it? What about individual and employer mandates? As it is now, lawmakers have been left to flounder through everything on their own. The president must set some broad guidelines – boundaries, if you will – making it clear to them what must be in (or out) the bill, then let them figure it out from there. Obama is a big-picture guy; this should be right up his alley – if he is willing to risk leaving the political safe waters of non-commitment. Yes, it’s risky. But that’s why it’s called leadership.

* The president and liberal Democrats have to understand and accept that Republicans and conservative Democrats have serious philosophical concerns about the public option. That doesn’t make them heartless, anti-reform insurance lobby lapdogs. It just means that they have a different idea about what the government should be doing. Demonizing and vilifying them for that perspective only serves to fuel the flames of suspicion and fear among millions of Americans.

* Republicans and conservative Democrats must learn how to be a productive minority. Areas where they can have an important impact abound; it is their responsibility to engage and make those impacts. But in doing so, they must also stand up against fearmongering and misinformation spread solely to derail the overall effort. If they want to have any credibility, they can’t be sitting in bipartisan negotiations in the afternoon and winking at shady efforts to scuttle the bill at night.

Elections have consequences, as we have so often been told in the past few weeks. Yes, that’s true. But as policy initiatives are the consequences of elections, so elections themselves are the consequences of those initiatives – and how they were advanced.

Midterms are coming.

Jennifer Foster is a political enthusiast who lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.