Obama group seeks ‘stories’ of healthcare

The group Organizing for America is headquartered only two blocks from the Capitol, but when horse-trading over healthcare legislation intensified there this week, Barack Obama’s grass-roots advocacy operation turned its attention away from Washington.

Yesterday, the group recruited thousands of its volunteer members to gather in farmers’ markets, rehab clinics, parks, and libraries nationwide as part of a National Health Care Day of Service. It was a do-gooder occasion with a blunt, short-term political objective: calling attention to the administration’s “work to reform America’s healthcare system,’’ as Michelle Obama put it in an e-mail to supporters.

The push for a major healthcare overhaul presents a significant test of the president’s ability to harness grass-roots energy and convert it into governing power. Obama is counting on having his activists promote healthcare as a two-sided choice - either take urgent action now or lose the opportunity for a long time - even as congressional negotiators, and other interest groups, haggle over the policy specifics that drive the lawmaking process.

“Every American is going to have a different opinion about what should be in the plan,’’ said Paul Tewes, who served last year as a top campaign strategist for Obama. “What they’re doing is what they did during the campaign. Once you’re listening to people and respecting people and inviting people into a conversation, individuals will be empowered to play a part.’’

After being elected, Obama took the remnants of his campaign structure and reinvented it as an activist arm of the Democratic National Committee. As it works to influence the healthcare debate, Organizing for America has downplayed the typical tools of legislative activism: bombarding congressional switchboards, mail rooms, and computer servers - or local newspapers with letters to the editor - as a show of force.

Closely followed by unions:

Excerpt from Obama's curiously close labor friendship - LAT, June 28, 2009

They led the most powerful forces in healthcare -- the trade groups representing doctors, insurance companies, hospitals and drug makers. Any one of them could stall, if not derail, President Obama's hopes of overhauling the U.S. healthcare system.
Instead, they stood with Obama before TV cameras at the White House and pledged their cooperation. For Obama, the show of unity gave momentum to perhaps his most ambitious domestic goal.
But the moment was a victory, as well, for another man invited to the event that morning in May. Andy Stern heads the SEIU, the union that helped corral the industry groups, and his presence at the White House was a fresh sign of his formidable clout with Obama.
When the president met privately with the health industry leaders that day, Stern and a second Service Employees International Union official were the only labor representatives in the room.
In a fractious labor movement fraught with rivalries and mutual suspicion, Stern's close association with Obama has given him cachet that may prove important in the fierce competition to lure new members.
But Stern's access to the White House has also provoked jealousies. His opponents paint him as a polarizing figure that Obama elevates at his own peril.
The Obama-Stern relationship has emerged as one of the most curious within the young administration.
The SEIU spent $60 million to help elect Obama, according to the union. Stern said the group deployed 100,000 volunteers during the campaign, including 3,000 who worked on the election full time.
Now in the White House, Obama has continued to derive political benefits from the union. It was the SEIU's health chief, Dennis Rivera, who helped bring industry to the table to start talks on a healthcare overhaul.
With nearly 2 million members, the SEIU says it has people in 13 states whose senators are considered important targets in the lobbying effort behind the emerging Democratic healthcare bill. The union wants to coax those senators into voting for the bill. .....

Legislation by anectdotes.

Yep, pretty much like everything they do, including stories of "polar bears" and "melting polar caps" as "proof of man-made Global Warming / climate change:

..... “When I look at what other groups have done, it’s not going to be effective if you’re just an e-mail list or a paid service that puts in calls that aren’t really from the grass roots,’’ said Jeremy Bird, deputy director of Organizing for America.
Instead, the organization has used its supporter base - culled from the millions of names Obama collected during the presidential campaign - as a source of what it calls stories: first-person accounts of travails faced under the current medical system.
On Friday, the latest of them found its way to YouTube, featuring an unemployed Florida woman unable to secure insurance because of a preexisting condition. .....

How can you fight “free medical care” with the status quo?

You can't. But you could fight it with truth and freedom. Obama is trying to find people with "horror stories" about their existing medical problems.

The GOP could fight it with "utopia" stories about how wonderful medical care in the United States was before Medicare and Medicaid or the government linking of medical care with employment (an artificial construct of the tax code that is responsible for much of the current dysfunction in our medical system).

Did you know that back then, doctors would actually come to your house to treat you instead of having to wait for hours, while ill, in a waiting room? The additional cost? One dollar.

Back then, even the poorest American could afford medical care, without having to degrade themselves by taking a government handout.

Trying to defend the status quo is insanity, because the status quo, with its combination of government socialism (Medicare and Medicaid) and government fascism (medical coverage engineered around the tax code) is insanity.

Government can't solve this problem. Government caused it, and the best solution is a complete dismantling of Federal involvement in medical care.

I saw Eric Cantor on an interview....pathetically trying to articulate some undefined alternative that sounded like the status quo.

That's the problem. I generally like Cantor and Jindal and some others, but we have to admit that when it comes to articulating ideas mostly what Republicans have in leadership is poodles, and what we need is more pitbulls.

Even without an alternative "plan", just stating that a simple devolution of most current federal government functions to the states would [re-]introduce the competition for lower cost between the states. Expanding and making HSA plans easier and cheaper to get would go a long way to incentivize those who now don't want to spend money on insurance. Allowing people to buy insurance from other states would also help the competition.

Or how difficult is explaining and putting in one or two page literature some of this? Kudlow: We Don’t Need Big-Bang Health-Care Reform: A Small-Ball, Targeted Plan Would Do The Trick

..... In a recent column, Larry Elder points to an ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey that shows 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That means up to 250 million people could be happy with their plans. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place? .....
In a new Pew Research Center poll, only 41 percent of those surveyed believe the U.S. health-care system needs to be completely rebuilt. In early 1993, when Mr. and Mrs. Clinton started on health-care reform, 55 percent said the system needs a complete overhaul. So something has changed.
In a new CBS/New York Times poll, 38 percent say the economy is the most important problem facing the country, 19 percent say jobs, and only 7 percent say health care. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on the same question, 24 percent say the budget deficit is today’s most worrisome problem while only 11 percent say health care.
There’s more. According to the U.S. Census Bureau we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who choose not to sign up for a health-care plan, roughly 20 million people are removed from the list of uninsured. After that you can remove the 10 million who are not U.S. citizens and the 11 million who are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but for some reason have not signed up for those programs. .....
Instead, we can give the truly uninsured vouchers or debit cards that will allow for choice and coverage, and even health savings accounts for retirement wealth. According to expert Betsy McCaughey, rather than several trillion dollars and socialized medicine, this voucher approach would cost only $25 billion a year -- with no socialized medicine. .....
"Nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely as he spends his own," said Friedman. He also fingered the tax code, which allows for an exemption from the income tax only if health care is employer-provided. This is a free-lunch syndrome, one that removes incentives for competition and cost-control because we’re all playing with somebody else’s money. And in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, caregivers have become employees of insurance companies and the government.
A new government-backed insurance system will intensify this free-lunch syndrome. It also will surely lead to a government takeover of what’s left of our private-enterprise system. .....

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.