Obama Health Speech
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Porque será que os nossos políticos perderam a capacidade de nos comover como faz Obama.
Etiquetas: USA health 2
quinta-feira, setembro 10
Porque será que os nossos políticos perderam a capacidade de nos comover como faz Obama.
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Falta espontaneidade e sinceridade aos nossos políticos. Até o modelo de debates aprovado o demonstra ao privilegiar o monólogo à troca viva de opiniões. Vai tudo estudado de casa ao milímetro, como quem se preparou para disputar um jogo de xadrez com um jogador que se conhece bem de mais. E saem do debate como entram, com as suas inabaláveis certezas debaixo do braço na esperança de ter dado xeque-mate ao adversário.
Barack Obama is considered a great speaker. But he's not typically been great at giving this kind of nuts-and-bolts policy speech. He's good at handling grand, sweeping topics. He's better at talking about how the arc of history bends towards justice than how the provisions of health-care reform bend the curve. During the campaign, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton were both more effective policy communicators than Obama. Particularly on health care.
In this speech, in fact, Obama needed to do the precise opposite of what he's best at. He needed to bring health-care reform down to earth rather than launch it into orbit. He needed to make it seem less dramatic and unknown. He needed to cast it not as change, but as improvement.
All of which he did. The vaunted specifics are not all that specific, and they seem to be getting less so by the second. In the speech, for instance, Obama gave an actual price tag for health-care reform. "The plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over ten years," he said. But the plan link released on the White House Web site doesn't include that number, or any specifics (subsidy levels, say) that would lead you to that number. But Obama had enough specifics to give listeners an idea of what's on the table.
That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Four of five congressional committees have passed health-care reform measures. The Senate Finance Committee is likely to follow next week. Obama isn't dictating whether the plan is $900 billion or $1.1 trillion at this point. That's a question of congressional votes, not presidential pronouncements. The fact that Obama could take the five proposals winding their way through Congress and settle on a single "plan" that comes pretty close to describing all of them, however, is evidence that health-care reform is quite a bit nearer to consensus than its opponents like to admit.
There were, however, some false notes. Not in the sense that they fell flat, but that they were actually untrue. Explaining the health insurance exchanges, for instance, Obama said "[This] is how everyone in this Congress gets affordable insurance. And it’s time to give every American the same opportunity that we’ve given ourselves." But under his plan, every American would not have access to the exchanges. Only small businesses, the self-employed, the unemployed, and the uninsured would have that right.
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Later in the speech, in one of his great applause lines, Obama stared into the camera and declared, "I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can’t find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice." But because the $900 billion plan isn't enough to guarantee every American access to affordable health care, it includes an exemption freeing people from purchasing care that they can't shoulder. You can't choose what you can't afford.
But if Obama hasn't created the perfect plan, he's created something arguably more impressive: a plan that actually might pass. That plan might not do enough to change the system, and it may not spend enough to protect everybody, but there is plenty in the proposal that will better the lives, health coverage, and financial security for millions of real people. It will insure around 30 million Americans and protect tens of millions more from insurer discrimination, medical bankruptcy and rescission. It will bring more evidence to medicine and more competition to the insurance market. That may not be perfection, but it is improvement. And it is achievable.
At the beginning of the speech, Obama said, "I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last." That too was false. He will not be the last to take up this cause. Reform is a process. This plan is not perfect, or anything near it. But it is better than what we have now. And stacking a lot of "betters" atop each other is the nearest we're likely to get to perfection. After all, as Candidate Obama would have told us, the arc of history is long. All President Obama can hope to do is bend it a bit toward justice.
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