This year’s State of the Union speech promised little and delivered less. Bush has no domestic policy clout with which to press the few wan policies he mentioned — and no more intention of pushing for “energy independence” now than the previous five times he’s mentioned it — and his credibility in the arenas where he continues to enjoy considerable power, foreign and military policy, continues to fade; the most recent polls show even his most dependent supporters are beginning to peel off. That makes him more dangerous rather than less, but it moves his comments on the subjects from the category of rhetorically crippled into white noise.
Health care reform was supposed to be a significant part of the speech. It wasn’t. The reason is that the administration’s proposal is sketchy, weak and curiously vindictive.
According to the White House, the tax cut for individuals and families with health insurance will bring fewer than 10% of uninsured Americans into the fold. They acknowledge that rising costs will eat up the entire break within a decade or less, and that the likely immediate result — the intended immediate result — is that Americans who get their health insurance through their jobs will switch to high-deductible, less comprehensive insurance, leaving themselves open to the sort of back-breaking medical expenses that insurance is at least in theory intended to ward off. What numbers they have in support of the presumed beneficial effects are tentative and unsubstantiated. So it’s no wonder that the initiative got a scant 350 words in the 5500-word speech.
The best indication that health care was meant to to take a higher profile in the State of the Union speech is that it received top billing in Bush’s Saturday radio address and a lengthy Monday background briefing for reporters. None of the other elements of the speech were done those honors.
The briefing did not go well in any respect. Briefers and reporters alike were confused, and, as is customary, reporters seemed unready to recognize and respond to official contradictions and absurdities. But the questions raised by even that lackluster journalistic performance may have been enough to scare the administration off devoting more SOTU time to the proposal; a good half of the responses were some variation of “we’ll have to get back to you on that.”
In his radio address, the president said that “Americans are fortunate to have the best health care system in the world.” During the Monday briefing, Katherine Baicker of the president’s Council of Economic advisors said that “nobody in the country can afford to keep spending more and more and more money on a health care system that’s broken.”
You’d think that the contrast between “best” and “broken” would arouse some curiosity among the crack Washington press corps. Not so. Possibly this is because no one listens to or reads the Saturday missives. Possibly it is because reporters were distracted by the question of why they were summoned on short notice to attend a briefing on a proposal that seemed almost as mysterious to the administration officials selling it — Baicker and Bush economic advisor Julie Goon — as it did to the reporters.
Neither did any of the reporters react when, in response to a question about why the proposal would bring health insurance to perhaps 3 million of the 47 million Americans who are at present uninsured, Baicker said that “because it’s a very heterogeneous group of people who are uninsured, it’s hard to find one magic bullet.” A reasonable reporter might have noted that most of the developed world resolves the thorny question of how to provide health care coverage to everyone by providing health care coverage to everyone.
Again, no. If the press were forced to hunt down and kill the obvious and live off its flesh, many of them would starve.
If the president doesn’t go violently nuts between now and next year, the 2008 speech is likely to be even worse. But help could be at hand.
Here’s an idea, maybe next year, can we surround Laura Bush with performers from Cirque du Soleil, maybe they can build some sort of human pyramid over her?
President Bush Faces State of the Union Challenges
In his sixth State of the Union speech, President Bush addresses — for the first time — a Congress
Something that caught my eye was Joe Scarboro’s comment when asked what part of the speech was most likely to resonate with Americans. Joe said something to the effect of “the President spoke with extreme confidence” and then went on to say that it was “Bush’s best speech since September 20, 2001″. But what is that saying; I remember nothing from the 09/20/2001 speech.
On health care, even people with “full” coverage can have substantial portions of their health expenses not covered by insurance. Every where you look there are cracks for people to fall through. A recent rejection refered me to page 78 of my policy. Those 78 pages aren’t telling me what is covered. Those “cracks” cost me tens of thousands of dollars last year for treatment of my teenage daughter. And the IRS will not treat me any better as they will surely reject those expenses as not falling under their definition of “medical”. There is no safety net, even with insurance. We are in worse shape today than we were on January 20, 1981 (and we all know what that date represents).
An addendum to my paragraph on Joe Scarboro.
And what does it say that a conservative could not find anything of substance in the speech to praise.