If a majority of Congressional Democrats were as clear and forceful about their convictions as 19-year veteran Maxine Waters (D-Playa Vista), President Obama’s healthcare reform attempt might be sailing confidently through calm waters instead of looking as if it could capsize.
When U.S. Rep. Waters, one of the fieriest of all Congress members, spoke to the Westchester Rotary Club for 35 minutes this afternoon, she was a model of public comportment, with an accent on succinct clarity.
Since community service club members traditionally are reputed to lean right or center, but not left, it may be assumed most of today’s audience philosophically opposes the very liberal Ms. Waters.
But she satisfied their expectations with a crisp presentation, even though she did not break new ground or issue inflammatory declarations.
Ms. Waters did not venture a prediction on whether healthcare reform will pass or how it ultimately will be configured — just that it better happen because the country and its recovering economy cannot afford the alternative.
She did say that soaring healthcare costs are the No. 1 cause of individual bankruptcy in this country.
Employing favored catch phrases of the White House, Ms. Waters said the healthcare system is broken, mainly because “greedy” insurance companies have usurped too much power.
Three of the driving motivations for passing healthcare reform, she said, are to force insurance companies to accept all applicants, especially those with pre-existing conditions, to forbade them from dropping a client and to establish badly needed competition for all private insurance entrepreneurs.
Negative Drug Image Vanishes
Until recently, critics of the healthcare system routinely had aimed their fire at twin targets, the drug industry as well as insurers. Loudly, they faulted both as equally at fault for the present crisis. They said the two villains were an inseparable, overlapping cause for creating the healthcare emergency.
However, after leading pharmaceutical companies agreed earlier this summer to spend $150 million in advertising dollars to promote Mr. Obama’s plan, criticism of all drug representatives swiftly ceased. Ms. Waters did not even hint at the existence of drug companies.
But she did label insurance corporate giants as villains for accumulating disproportionate profits at the expense of luckless, vulnerable consumers. Step by step, she identified the bulging salaries of CEOs at the top 10 insurers, although she did not mention how they compared with the compensation packages doled out in other fields.
Using a statistic that is in dispute, Ms. Waters said that 47 million Americans are uninsured due to unaffordability, “and that is a danger to all of us.” She did not say why or how.
Even though 90 percent of Americans are covered by health insurance and 84 percent of them say they are satisfied their deals, the Congresswoman said insured Americans “are not safe” as long as any of the “47 million” remain outside the fold.
She characterized the still far-from-formed final healthcare legislation as effective, relatively cost-free and harmless to the national economy.
Turning to Lawyers
A sizable number of leading Americans have argued in the last 6 months that tort reform is needed far more than razing the healthcare system. They say healthcare only has problems in certain places but does not require a teardown. Tort reform, they claim, is a system that needs to be overhauled because it is rotting at the core.
A trial lawyer asked Ms. Waters why tort reform has not been addressed. The lawyer was thinking of ballooning, world-record compensation awards that have rocked some companies and ruined others.
For one of the only times, the Congresswoman gave a vague, meandering, heavily clouded response that yielded her opposition without being forthright.
When she reached the bottom of her rhetorical well, Ms. Waters rationalized, in gray locution, that she opposes tort reform because somehow —she did not explain — it would hurt consumers.
