Hit the Reset Button

I’m probably contradicting myself here. I told you earlier that health care was the angel that we had to wrestle with, like Jacob in the Bible, until we got the blessing out of it. The angel, though, may not be Senator Baucus and his bill. Or maybe he’s Jacob and the bill is the angel. I’m confused.

The bill does good things and bad things -- but if it’s hundreds of pages long, it’s doing too many things. It’s just going to be another big game to play, like the tax system. But the bottom line is, this country isn’t ready for full health care reform.

We’re just too used to putting up with abusive systems, on the grounds that it’s the way life is. Most of us just aren’t dissatisfied enough. We’re not mad as hell, and we’re still OK with taking more of it. While insurance companies screw a lot of people, they perform a great service for others – they shield them from having to deal with costs. If your insurance company pays off on the $40 your hospital charges for a toothbrush, it’s not your problem – that’s what you pay premiums for. As long as you have a job and you’re covered, other people’s problems aren’t yours.

This will only be solved comprehensively when enough people demand that it be solved. We’re just not there yet. If we begin from the premise that there is a moral obligation to provide health care for all with a reasonable set of rules, we can make it happen, but most Americans just don’t feel that way about it yet.

The President is trying to argue that reform can be accomplished without raising taxes. It’s beginning to rhyme with READ MY LIPS, and he’s painted himself and this effort into a corner. If we really want reform, it will likely involve raising taxes. If there’s a real commitment to reform, that wouldn’t be an obstacle. But we’re not ready. The declaration “We can’t afford it” can be easily translated: that’s not a priority now.

The perfect doesn’t have to be the enemy of the good, but with all due respect to the legislators who have worked so hard on trying to reach a compromise, it certainly should be the enemy of the s—tty. I say, hit the reset button and start over on this, and bite off what we can really chew.

Choose Your Words

In a recent post, a fellow blogger I know expressed concern about “defeatist” Democrats in Congress who favored a U.S. pullout from Afghanistan. Personally, I don’t care for terminology like “victory” and “defeat” in the kinds of conflicts we find ourselves involved in today. Even “mission accomplished” has a bad sound now.

When it comes to Afghanistan, it seems to me there are two reasonable goals. The little one is whacking Osama bin Laden. I’ve heard all the arguments about how Al-Qaeda is a hydra-headed entity and that taking him out wouldn’t accomplish anything. I disagree. Such an act would have a tremendous symbolic impact around the world. Of course, it would have had a much greater impact if we’d done it in, say, 2002.

This can be done with relatively few operatives. When the Israelis want to track down international terrorists who have done bad things to them, they put teams together, send them into whatever countries their targets are living in, kidnap them or kill them, and apologize for it later (if they even bother).

The big goal in the region is keeping the terrorists away from the nukes in Pakistan, and the question is, how do you do that? Is it by nation-building in Afghanistan – or should we really be nation-building in Pakistan – or both?

So how many troops does it take to destroy the terrorist elements in those places and help stabilize the governments involved? I’m no military strategist, but based on what’s happened historically, the U.S. is not going to accomplish these ends with 10,000 or 20,000 more troops. This is a commitment that would seem to involve hundreds of thousands – a Vietnam-level commitment at least.

And as I’ve said before, if you really want to go to war, the whole country has to be involved – basically every American family – and that involves re-instituting the draft. It’s not fair to be sending the same people over for five our six tours. With a draft, if the President and Congress really wanted to fight a war, they’d have to bring the country with them.

I don’t envy the President having to make a decision about how to proceed. But instead of dealing with “victory” and “defeat” and all the emotional baggage packed into those terms, I hope he works with colder terms like “cost-benefit ratio.

In the end, “victory” means, to me at least, that we can answer yes to the question, “Are we safe now?”