Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism
Now that the Republican Health Care Reform legislation of the early 90’s has been passed with no Republican votes, I’ve been musing on the Path Ahead.
The path ahead for health insurance reform seems straightforward, at least for as long as the Republicans remain trapped in a strict “Repeal” stance by the angry and noisy opposition to health insurance reform that corporations have stirred up in their base.
It has always been a misnomer to call the current legislation “health care reform” when it has always been primarily health insurance reform. Yet there is a necessary-through-not-sufficient relationship that applies here. Just as arriving at a less broken health insurance system was necessary to even apply bandaids to the health care system, a not-at-all broken publicly administered, not-for-profit health insurance system will allow actual reform of the health care system to proceed.
But then, thinking about how to organize to work for progress on Health Insurance Reform leads to thinking more broadly about achieving progressive social change in the face of our thoroughly corrupted political establishment