Support for health care reform is building … from the right

Brian Till

Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Bill O’Reilly supports a public option in the health care debate, given that it will provide cheaper insurance to those who can’t afford it and isn’t intended to replace insurance providers as the status quo for the majority; Tommy Thompson, W.’s secretary for Health and Human Services and a former four-term governor of Wisconsin, has praised the Senate’s proposed reforms.

Dr. Bill Frist, the former Republican leader of the Senate and a surgeon, has said that he would vote for health care reform if he were still in office. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have also joined the building chorus from the right that supports reforms, even if from the more moderate corner.

It’s been clear to everyone close to this debate for some time that some measure of health care reform is bound to pass this year; the question has always been how effective those steps would be.

To all those proclaiming that the American people know what they want in this argument, and that they don’t want the president’s reforms — including you, Gov. Bobby Jindal — please, let’s be frank: It takes full-time devotion to understand the complexity of this system and the proposed reforms. The broader public knows that the system is broken, and that it wants the problem fixed. And it doesn’t know much more than that.

A New York Times-CBS poll taken at the end of September shows that 59 percent nationally were willing to admit they were confused by the debate.

But, if the federal government were to craft legislation based on public opinion rather than informed opinion, it’s interesting to note that, as of that Sept. 25 poll, 65 percent of the public approved of a public option.

Nate Silver — the young statistician who rose to “boy wonder” status on the accuracy of his models in the past presidential election — has also laid out convincing numbers to show support for the public option in the majority — 34 of 52 — of conservative, blue-dog Democratically held districts, where, in theory, opposition should be the most fervent and disconcerting.

And that’s where leaders come into play. They’re hired to deliver, as Bill Clinton is fond of saying. They’re elected to power to make the unpopular decisions knowing that if they deliver, they’ll be rewarded.

Silver’s results aren’t surprising — though, given the tone the debate has sometimes taken, it’s understandable to feel misled — but they match the underlying, ever-present current to a debate that has seemed tempestuous and rudderless.

And that current is moved by a sturdy understanding — perhaps the same that is bringing so many closeted Republicans forward with support. It has to do with the fact that they understand, as well as most steeped in this debate, that the cost of doing nothing is astounding. The president’s words about health costs bankrupting the country are in no way hyperbole.

In 2006, according to the House Ways and Means Committee, the economy lost $200 billion because of poor and shorter life spans of the uninsured. The same report argues that spending, if unchecked, will reach a fifth of the federal budget, $4.4 trillion, by 2013.

The health care system in the United States today is so plagued by manipulations that comparing it to a free market would be a bit like trying to contend that the Soviet system had competition. These reforms won’t be able to make it a perfect market — we’re too far from the mark to dream of that. But they move us in the right direction, something the Republican Party, with eight years of power and stacked congressional majorities, didn’t lift a finger to attempt.

Brian Till, a columnist for Creators Syndicate, is a research fellow for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington.