Health reform is about national defense, not welfare

Before President Obama meets with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders at Blair House Feb. 25 to hammer out a bipartisan health reform agreement — or at least to argue over one — I would suggest that he first hold a news conference to reframe the health care debate.

I’d suggest that Obama scrap not the health reform plans already passed in Congress, as Republicans are calling on him to do, but rather the notion that public health care is a social service. Instead, the president should focus on health reform as a matter of national security — that is, of protecting American lives.

Traditionally, Americans have seen public health programs — especially for the poor — as welfare. That, in large part, is why Republicans have succeeded throughout the decades in roiling the debate over a national health plan, especially when they’ve had big insurance companies pumping millions of dollars into soft-money slush funds to assist them in making their case.

Americans, generally speaking, loathe the very thought of welfare. We work for our money. We provide for ourselves. We are pioneers fulfilling our manifest destiny.

And so, each time health reform is proposed, an unspoken undercurrent runs beneath the debate line: The poor — and not-so-poor — should get jobs that would give them health insurance. Then we wouldn’t need the government to intervene.

What the public hears is Democrats and Republicans arguing incessantly as the issue is debated. Eventually, most Americans throw up their hands in disgust, saying enough is enough, as we’ve seen in the past year. And health reform dies the same way every time: Nothing gets accomplished.

My fear is that it will end the same way this time around. The stars had appeared aligned to finally bring universal access to health care to the U.S., the only major industrialized nation without it. But, increasingly, it appears that we will wind up where we began 12 months ago — nowhere.