By Linda Winsh-Bolard
September 22, 2010 was to be the day when the Administration unrolls the red carpet of their health care plan. It was to be the day when the first, tiny, step towards universal, accessible health care was taken. The White House was to celebrate.
Instead, the day became the day of manipulation. On September 22, 2010 yet another book by Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington journalist who caused Richard Nixon to resign before his plan for universal health care could be implemented, was released with as much brouhaha as Washington media can manage.
It became clear that this book with its smacks of trumpeted up domestic disagreements among Obama’s administration matters more to all who want to embarrass the President than the health and well being of the nation.
As the morning dawned over the White House, health care giants Aetna, Cigna and WellPoint released statements that as of tomorrow they will sell no health insurance for children. Tomorrow being the day when the law prohibiting the well profiting insurance companies from denying health care to kids with pre-existing conditions will be implemented; or rather would have been. Rather than insuring sick kids along with healthy ones, the insurance companies decided not to insure any, just in case some sick kids require treatment which might, in some tiny way, diminish the insurance companies skyrocketing profits. The refusal to insure children affect 31 states.
I’d have imagined that this would be the breaking news all over the US. Such is the power of corporate financial backing that Woodward’s book was embraced by the media corps instead.
I have not read this book, indeed I have read little of Woodward’s work after I have realized that his “unmasking” of Richard Nixon leaves a lot to ponder. When it became clear that Woodward’s chief source of information was a disgruntled member of FBI, I was not exactly surprised, it confirmed my perception that Woodward was a young reporter on the make, willing to take chances to get where he wanted to be and not look too closely where it did not suit. It always bothered me that Richard Nixon was forced to resign just few months after he unveiled his plan for America which had, among other things, housing, living wage and health care. As a Republican President who had stopped draft and signed the Parisian Accords with Vietnam, he had every chance to get things done. Bob Woodward made him into screaming, self obsessed, corrupt idiot; an image that was never confirmed by the rest of Nixon’s life.
Woodward is not making an idiot of Obama, but screaming, cursing and disagreements are prominently cited, yet again, as “problems” within the Administration. War, this time in Afghanistan, plays major role.
Any grown-up knows that most people scream under pressure at least some times. We often disagree with one another. That’s life and there is nothing special about it. Obama is not an emperor to whom all must always bow. Good for him. He even remembers the Party who elected him, hurray! He does not like wars. And so what? What else did you expect?
Perhaps that, as it is already happening, the Republican Party jumped on the wagon of accusations and demeaning. It is unlikely that the book will become a best seller, so the sound bites used by Obama’s enemies will be the only lasting effect of this book. Not much to be proud of from where I stand.
Bob Woodward managed to deflect the first serious attempt at universal care, derailed at least temporarily by corporate greed, by focusing the public on the mundane.
In all this, the kids of America are nearly forgotten.
So, I submit a plea:
Mr. President, please do not forget the people who elected you.
Take this obstacle as an opportunity and announce that in the light of the latest developments, the federal government will insure all children who need health insurance by extending Medicare like policy to them. In preventive act, the federal government will also insure all people, who need it, 50 years and older.
The bulk of financing for this federal insurance will come from taxing Wall Street and corporate bonuses and profits.
I can assure you, Mr. President, that your rating will shoot sky high.
And nobody will remember that Bob Woodward wanted to upstage you as well as all working Americans.
