Book 2 CH. 1

As I doubt is surprising, I am struck by the similarities between the major deathblows to national insurance in the 1910's and what I believe to be the underlying strategies against national health care reform today. Starr describes the panic and paranoia of the war effort against Germany being one of the criticisms of health care reform, in some cases taking the form of pamphlets decrying it as insidious and evil because its country of origin, Germany, was also "evil."

In many ways, I think this speaks to the history of xenophobia and a fear of some ever-present and yet non-existent Big Brother figure that thrived back then and continues to thrive today. The spin placed against health care reform in early 1917 was that it was a deviant foreign strategy and that American should have no part in replicating the actions of such a country as Germany. Likewise, the assertion that national insurance would result int he population being at the mercy of panel doctors who were the puppets of political figures played on the public fears of the Big Brother government, who would abuse the people for its own gain and cause harm to their most precious asset: health.

Today, this is the same. One of the most publicized and vocal criticisms of health care reform is its purported expansion of government, or the further empowerment of "Big Government." While this has been largely unfounded, former Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's irresponsible and unfounded statements on "death panels" managed to channel the same panicked fears of the people--that governments would insidiously decide the health and fate of the people. The testament of this comment's ability to tap into the archetypal fears of the populace is obvious in its ubiquity in the media and the resulting protests by uninformed individuals over the "fascism" and "murderous" nature of the Democrat-controlled government.

initially, xenophobia was also exploited to support anti-health care reform arguments. Dissenters looked to the states of other countries, the people's ignorance of the systems beyond the US border, to attempt to draw conclusions that health care reform would not work and that it would cause damage to the safety of the people. However, the interesting difference in this parallel is that the countries used in comparison were allies such as the UK, and at that, ones that could demonstrate theoverwhelming benefits of health care reform. An editorial in Investor's Business Daily claimed that national health insurance such as the NHS in Britain would potentially deem individuals such as renouned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking as "worthless" and leave them for dead had he grown up under nationalized health care. But Stephen Hawking stepped into the debate to point out that he is a citizen of Britain it was NHS itself that ensured his surivial as a disabled individual where no commerical insurance company would have. I wonder if the landscape will change if these parallels cannot be maintained. If the effectiveness of nationalized health care in foreign countries, allies at that, is overwhelming, will it contribute to the solidification of reform?

Clearly the debate requires even more assistance than that. History, as Starr has shown, has defeated health care reform many times over for a variety of reasons (the largey oblivious outcry over "socialism" in today's debate compared to the assessment of Progressives and socialists in 1912 and 1916 come to mind), but I wonder when that mirage will transform into an oasis.