Sick and Wrong : Rolling Stone

Excerpt from a great article by Matt Taibbi:

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It's a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that's what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players — from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus — found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

via www.rollingstone.com

Comments

[pds]

but will the obama-zombies ever awake?

[Dave M.]

Why exactly is this a great article? If there's no bill by December, it would perhaps make sense. But 5 committees have passed something and now we're looking at a House-Senate negotiation over the final details. What should we have expected to happen?

Pushing the meme that government is a failing enterprise only gives succor to Glenn Beck loons who are busy putting razor wire around their property lines. If the left gives up on democracy (which does not mean that the left will always get what it wants), then those who could care less about it will (again) take power.

[Alain]

Dave, I generally agree with your sentiments but the point of Taibbi's piece appears to be that the "reform" we are likely to get may in fact make things worse. Whether he is correct it is a reasonable issue to raise - if "reform" actually makes the conditions of a majority of Americans worse will it not hurt the democrats more in the long run?

[Dave M.]

I agree there is a chance that things will get worse. But at the very least reigning in some of the worst insurance practices is a step in the right direction. Of course in the long term rising costs are the larger problem. A focus on prevention and competition isn't a magic bullet, but it might do something. Frankly when you're working with something this complex, I think estimating what is going to happen after any aspect of reform is incredibly difficult.

The larger point is that we shouldn't give up on democracy because it's slow, inefficient and ugly, or because it produces results that we don't like. Either there is a normative defense for democracy or there isn't. I think there is and hence we have to find ways to make it work as best we can. Waiting for the revolution is a losing strategy for the left, because frankly we don't have the guns. Come out to NC and you'll quickly realize that a failure of government on a large scale would not herald peaceful, 'back to the land' cooperative society. It would be an ugly ugly fight, and we (the left) would lose.