Overdue health reform receives overwrought response in D.C.

President Barack Obama signed into law a historic revision of health-care policy Tuesday, but it is obvious that deep divisions remain. Those divisions can be seen in the opposing cartoons and columns on this page. They can been seen in the celebratory atmosphere at the White House signing ceremony Tuesday and in the action by 13 state attorneys general who announced they’ll mount a constitutional challenge to the law. They can be heard on the street and on talk radio.

And, frankly, those divisions exist more along the lines of politics and ideology than on the lines of type included in the health-reform bill. This bill is far closer to the 1974 reform proposal of President Richard M. Nixon than it is to any socialist manifesto, and the Democrats rejected Nixon’s plan as too little, too late. Given that, it’s difficult to imagine why the Democrats are ecstatic and Republicans bereft. One explanation is that the parties are becoming dysfunctionally polarized — and certainly it can be argued that the roots of that polarization can be traced to Democratic threats to impeach Nixon over Watergate and the Republican impeachment drive against President Bill Clinton 20 years later.

In his statement to Congress in February 1974, Nixon said: “One of the most cherished goals of our democracy is to assure every American an equal opportunity to lead a full and productive life. In the last quarter century, we have made remarkable progress toward that goal, opening the doors to millions of our fellow countrymen who were seeking equal opportunities in education, jobs and voting. Now it is time that we move forward again in still another critical area: health care.”

There are those in the arena today who would characterize without hesitation those sentences as a peon to socialism. And there are those to whom socialism is no different than communism and communism is no different than demonic possession. In that arena, every fight becomes a fight to the death.

More than a hope

It will take action from responsible leaders in each party to ratchet back the invective. To say we are less than confident that will happen is an understatement, but it must be said.

It is going to take time to sort through all 2,409 pages of the bill, and about a 150 pages of possible amendments are still working their way through the Senate. But the public is getting a better picture of what’s involved (see the Associated Press coverage on A11), and what is emerging is a bill that will contain some needed provisions in short order and more ambitious changes over 10 years.

That time line illustrates why it was necessary for Congress to act now, even on an imperfect bill. Health-care spending has grown to be a sixth of the national economy — a far greater percentage than is spent in any other Western democracy — and there was no sign of abatement in that growth.

How much this bill can slow the growth isn’t known, but clearly few families and few companies could look ahead 10 years with any confidence that their budgets could absorb another doubling of health care costs over that next decade.

The uninsured faced a choice of avoiding treatment or facing economic ruin if catastrophic illness struck. Those covered by insurance, faced an increasing burden as the unpaid costs of the uninsured were shifted to them and their employers.

That Republicans and Democrats could not agree on the need for dramatic action and find a way work together is a sad commentary. To be sure, each side will blame the other for their collective failures. But when every political act requires an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the Congress will have an acute need for specialized health care — ophthalmologists and dentists — and even so will eventually be left blind, toothless and of little value to the nation and the American people.