Doing the right thing

Tuesday, March 23, 2010 | 2:07 a.m.

Forty-five years ago Sunday, John Lewis joined a group of people peacefully marching through Alabama to support civil rights. The group faced not only the taunts and jeers of those opposed to civil rights but also violent opposition. Lewis was savagely beaten by police.

Lewis is now a Democratic congressman from Georgia, and this Sunday he marched with a group of House colleagues to the Capitol to cast their votes to pass historic health care reform legislation. The group was met with jeers and venom from people protesting the measure.

Lewis told The New York Times that the major difference between the marches is that this time “we had the protection of the Capitol police.” Has health care really split the American public to the point that members of Congress need police protection?

It has become contentious because Republicans have done quite the job spinning tales about the health care legislation, offering fictitious accounts of a government takeover or federal bureaucrats intervening between patients and their doctors. They spent this weekend offering Democrats advice, telling them not to vote for health care reform to protect their jobs. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said health care “will be the defining issue in November 2010, and if it passes, in 2012 when the president runs for re-election.”

Please. Health care reform is a defining issue but it shouldn’t be a defining political issue. The Senate is scheduled to take up the final piece of the reform legislation this week, and lawmakers should move quickly to pass it.

This is a moral issue. Is it right that millions of Americans can’t get proper health care because they lost a job or were denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition like asthma or hypertension? Not that insurance is a cure-all. The number of bankruptcies due to medical bills is up, even for those with insurance.

The current system is broken. It costs Americans more than $2 trillion a year with costs growing at a rate of 7 percent. With the number of uninsured growing, the costs are increasing as well. When the uninsured go to the hospital, the cost of care is passed on to people with insurance through higher premiums and the taxpayers through payments for public hospitals.

The Republicans don’t seem to care. Instead, they have stirred people up and obscured the real issues in the hope they can win an election.

Contrary to what Republicans have said, the proposal in Washington ultimately would provide access to health care to nearly all Americans, including those who have been denied because of pre-existing conditions. The plan would give people who have lost their jobs the ability to buy affordable health insurance and it is expected to reduce many premiums. The legislation also provides relief for people on Medicare from the gap in their prescription coverage referred to as the “doughnut hole.”

Republicans like to point to the polls they say show that Americans don’t like the plan, and then try to reason this shows that Democrats aren’t listening to the American public. But what they won’t say is that Americans really don’t like the way Republicans describe the plan. People actually like the legislation’s major points.

Still, Republicans say they’ll work to overturn the legislation, and if this isn’t really about politics, shouldn’t they be consistent and work to overturn Medicare, Medicaid and Veterans Affairs, which all provide government-supported health care or insurance? Of course they wouldn’t dare do that. It would affect too many voters.

The times call for political courage. Republicans would be wise to recall the words of Sen. Everett Dirksen, who led the party in the Senate during the 1960s and rallied his party to deliver the needed votes for key civil rights legislation.

“We are confronted with a moral issue,” Dirksen said in a speech to break a filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Today let us not be found wanting in whatever it takes by way of moral and spiritual substance to face up to the issue.”

Indeed. It is time to step up and do the right thing by passing health care reform.