US Congress Stalling on Healthcare Reform, Despite White House Push
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Related subjects: Denver Lessing, Healthcare Policy, Legislation, Media, Opinion, Transparency Yield, U.S. Economy, U.S. Law, U.S. news, U.S. Politics Comments (5)
The United States Congress, in both houses, has entered August recess without passing a comprehensive healthcare reform package, setting the stage for a withering month-long national debate, in which opposing sides are likely to attack each other as threatening to undermine the nation’s future. Anti-reform groups, reportedly linked to the Republican party, have orchestrated interruptions and heckling of officials seeking to explain the grave need for proposed reforms.
Republican figures like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) have have pitched some of the most extreme lies openly and without nuance, alleging that reforms would lead to euthanasia for the elderly or for children with birth defects. Such totally untrue statements have become hallmarks of the opposition to comprehensive healthcare reform, and there is mounting speculation that the Republican party is collaborating with political action groups that seek to spread the rumors in order to kill reform by sowing confusion.
The White House has spent significant political capital on pushing for comprehensive healthcare reform, with Pres. Obama’s job-approval rating slumping, down 10 percentage points in just six weeks, despite his personal approval rating remaining high. The intense multi-media effort to explain healthcare reform proposals to the public and to calm fears that are spreading among the public about what reforms might mean to them and their families, has not put a stop to the smear campaign.
Republican leaders appear emboldened by their success in spreading false allegations about the proposed reforms, and the national media continue to treat as legitimate certain claims that are entirely fabricated and irrelevant to the four actual proposals under consideration in the House and Senate. Even CNN is running nakedly interested faux “policy” ads that include abject falsehoods about spending cuts aimed at curbing quality of care to the elderly.
The propaganda mill is spinning at full speed and the national media are AWOL from the job of investigating questionable assertions and refusing to report lies as fact or opinion. The opinion/fact divide has been so blurred that Republican leaders are now actively promoting the idea that citizens who express entirely false misapprehensions about reform designed to kill the elderly or children with birth defects are justified by their right to express “opinions”.
The healthcare reform debate is highlighting a consciousness divide that has grown deeper in recent years across the United States, where guesses and ideological bias pass for legitimate commentary, due to the blurring of opinion and fact. Reporting about the fact of certain opinions existing has come to pass for serious journalism, where TV reporters proudly tout their knowledge and awareness of opinion-based groups which are actually telling lies, not expressing opinions about fact or policy.
The US Congress has shown itself to be unwilling or unable, as an institution, to take on the toxic consequences of this blurring. Individual members of Congress have shown real electoral fear at the very idea of speaking truth to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, who are actively mythologizing the entire process of debate about healthcare reform, speaking of Stalinist conspiracies and Nazi-like eugenics programs.
Only now, after the failure to pass reform before the August recess, are Democratic members of Congress going out into the country, to interact with constituents in town hall meetings and to counter the lies that are being told and try to steer debate back toward the practical issues around which it has actually been playing out in Congress and in talks with the White House.
The goal of reform may in fact now be in jeopardy, due to the mainstream media’s taste for spreading vitriol and fabrication as if it could pass for fact. Members of the Republican party need to start disavowing and denouncing the hostile and in some cases violent —there have been reports of death threats to members of Congress and to the president— mob-like activity being orchestrated in opposition to even debate on the substantive issues of reform.
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