Will the government delay comprehensive health reform?

February 7, 2009

With the economy worsening, health reform appears to be taking a back seat.

Or is it?

Bob Doherty sounds the alarm, citing the contentious opposition to reauthorizing SCHIP, which once enjoyed bipartisan support.

Several outlets are also reporting that prominent politicians, including Pete Stark and Max Baucus, have privately admitted that comprehensive health reform will be pushed back until 2010.

MedPage Today somewhat concurs in their report, acknowledging that the economy may force health reform to take a more incremental approach.

This essentially reinforces what Atul Gawande wrote in his recent New Yorker piece, where he argues that it’s likely that we have to build upon what we already have, despite the flaws.

Mr. Doherty implores the Obama administration to “strike while the iron is hot,” but with almost daily reports of layoffs and bankruptcies, does Washington have the foresight to realize that repairing health care should go hand in hand with repairing the economy?

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Tagged as: health reform, Obama

{ 3 comments }

1 Anonymous February 7, 2009 at 5:34 pm: While it is hard to see it this way if you are a physician or if you are sick, they are right to put it lower on the priority list. It really isn’t that important.

Whatever is done will also have flaws. Things aren’t going to be perfect. Being sick will still suck, and the country will go on no matter what happens. Babies will be born, people will reproduce and die, etc.

A nation needs two things to survive: reproduction and defense. The rest is needed only to the degree that those two require it, otherwise it is dispensible. The country can thrive with no health care system at all or die with the best–in geopolitical terms, it isn’t nearly as important as nuclear profiliferation, Islamist aggression, currency stability, freedom, or energy.
2 Deron Schriver February 7, 2009 at 6:00 pm: Health reform doesn’t need to cost a dime. It involves each and every one of us taking better care of ourselves. Our healthcare crisis is more of a societal problem than a healthcare problem. If you want to find the guilty parties in our healthcare crisis, look in the mirror before you point the finger at others.

French healthcare doesn’t cost less because their system is so much better than ours. It costs less because they are healthier than we are. Why are we looking for a complex answer to a problem that is so simple?
3 Imee February 9, 2009 at 1:59 am: i hope it doesn’t get pushed back. after obama’s schip signing, i think it’s just going to be a wrong move to delay anything else health related.