The New Health Dialogue

When Howard Dean was running for president, I had a chance to interview him at length as part of a team of reporters in 2003. We went over many topics, foreign and domestic. I asked him -- again and again -- about his national health policy. After all, he was a physician, his wife was a physician, and he had expanded children's health coverage in Vermont. No matter how I sliced and rephrased the question, and believe me I tried, I got the same answer. "We need a national conversation." Or "We need a national dialogue."

As has been widely reported this week, when Dean did outline his health platform, it was more modest than the Senate bill in even its most modest manifestations.

So we are now having a national conversation. Howard Dean is not listening. We posted yesterday on some of the critiques of Dean's critique -- as if it were really possible to start over again on health reform and have a better result. Or have any result at all. As if reconciliation was some kind of simple magic bullet solution (Don't you think the Senate Democrats would have used reconciliation if it would have solved their problems?) So here are some more voices:

Ron Brownstein

Yet the bill that Dean so casually dismisses would spend, according to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly $200 billion annually once it is fully phased in to help subsidize insurance coverage for over 30 million Americans now without it. That's real money--the most ambitious and generous expansion of the public safety net since the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson. And that money, based on the Census results, would flow most into minority and working-class white communities....

No president has ever come as close as Barack Obama is today to moving the nation toward universal health coverage; no universal coverage bill had ever before passed the House, nor has one ever advanced as far in the Senate as the bill now under debate. For Dean to insist that Senate Democrats start over after that grueling struggle is a little like suggesting that American troops on the outskirts of Berlin in 1945 should have retreated back to France because D-Day wasn't choreographed just right.

Paul Krugman

Sen. Jay Rockefeller on MSNBC

Dean's call to scrap it is "nonsense. And it’s irresponsible. And coming from him as a physician, it’s stunning. And he’s wrong. Does that answer your question?"

“Am I angry that the public option appears to have been dropped? Of course I’m angry about that,” he said. “Was I for the Medicare buy-in? Of course I was…So what do I do? Do I take my football and run home and sulk?”

 “I’m a grownup, you’re a grownup,” he said. “We’ve been around this business for a long time. And you never get everything you want. You don’t sulk about it. You try to keep improving the bill.”

John Podesta

Change of the magnitude envisioned by health care reformers does not come easily. There have been many frustrations and there will be more. But, as a senior White House staffer with a ringside seat for the slow death of comprehensive care in 1994, I am keenly aware of the real alternative to the bills now before us: millions more Americans without health care and billions more for health care spending as the same challenges President Clinton tried to resolve continue to metastasize unchecked.

We could go on (click here for Andy Stern   -- and read down into the Stern item because it gets more positive -- Jon Cohn, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein...)  But let's end on this note fron John McCain (courtesy of Dana Milbank)

Republicans on Thursday delighted in the assistance they had received from Dean. "If you live long enough, all things can happen," McCain told his colleagues. "I now find myself in complete agreement with Dr. Howard Dean, who says that we should stop this bill in its tracks. . . . Dr. Dean, I am with you."