The Center For American Progress Action Fund I hope that C-span will air it again soon.
Voters need more forums like this that give us the opportunity to actually hear what candidates are planning to do to solve the most pressing problems of our nation. It really frustrates me that so much money is being raised by candidates, but their campaigns and the mass media offer voters so little information about what they actually plan to do about the problems.
One thing voters can do to change our politics is to inform themselves by listening to broadcasts like this. Who knows, maybe the next election will be decided based on a candidate's plans instead of their ability to amass cash for negative campaign ads? Wouldn't that send a message to Washington!
2 comments:
Hi Cee Jay ... your discussion topics are always current and encourage us to think creatively about solutions to societal problems that beset us.
In my view, most of the Democrats attending the Health Care forum didn't have any answers and the suggestions they put forth were without substance.
Take the media's two current darlings, Hillary and Obama.
Clinton was great about telling us what she wanted in a universal plan but vague about how to pay for it and couldn't tell the audience how long it would take to make it a reality. Obama was even less impressive having no plan at all. All he could do is rely on catchy slogans designed as soundbites to be circulated by the media and promise to publish a plan soon.
Bill Richardson talked about a market based approach requiring Americans to purchase a plan guranteeing coverage for all Americans. I'm sure that pleased the insurance company crowd but it smells like a centrist solution allowing them to continue reaping hugh profits. To his credit, he acknowledged the war in Iraq must end because it was draining the Treasury.
Now to the more practical candidates.
Chris Dodd was the only one that outlined specific goals but like Clinton couldn't come up with a cost estimate. He did cite the need to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy but never took a pledge to do this.
John Edwards approach sounded remarkably like Richardson's all inclusive single payer philosophy designed to win him campaign contributions from the insurance lobby. He put the cost estimate somewhere between $90-120 million. What I liked about his solution is he admits taxes will have to be raised. Like Dodd though he never commits to how much of this will come from the upper 1 % of Americans.
The best line of the night came from Dennis Kucinich who also favors a single payer system.
“What if Lincoln had decided there was just too much resistance to emancipation?” he said. “Think if suffragettes said there was too much resistance to women voting. Think if Martin Luther King had said we can only push so far for civil rights.”
Well said Dennis and the type of rationale that aptly describes the current negative thinking on the healthcare subject by the neocon opposition.
Finally there was some fellow named Mike Gravel from Alaska running as a Democrat. When asked to explain what he would do, his response was, “I don’t want to take the time to go through the whole process. It is a national ballot initiative."
Imagine that ... a candidate that doesn't have time to define his plan. At least Obama admitted he didn't have one and would provide it in a couple of months.
There you have it. Democratic candidates with fancy rhetoric, no cost estimates or in Gravel's case no clue at all. Kucinich is the only one in the group to acknowledge the truth that Universal Health Care won't happen at all until we reform campaign finance and eliminate the bribes from lobbyists to keep the present system in place.
At least it's a start to the discussion about an issue as critical to us all as this and hopefully the candidates will develop positions with more substance in the near future.
Thanks for covering this topic for us and providing the relevant links, Cee Jay. :)
Peace,
Cosmic
Thanks for you comments Cosmic! In my view it is an excellent summation of the plans presented. I agree with you, none of them presented a realistic plan to fix our problems, and time is running out. As baby boomers reach senior citizen status, the shortcomings of the current system will become even more apparent. Dennis came closest in saying that we need to have a national health care system that is totally divorced from the insurance industry. I was particularly disappointed, but not surprised by the leading candidates' proposals that would give more government money to private insurance plans.
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