Obama's press conference: Health care as a herd of rhinos

Source: Nick Brandt

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My favorite conservative columnist, David Brooks, responded to Barack Obama’s press conference on health care this week with a piece that characterizes rising costs as a “stampede of big ugly rhinos. They are trampling your crops, stomping on your children’s play areas and spoiling your hunting grounds.”
Despite our best efforts to control cost inflation — research, legislation, corporate reform — the rhinos keep coming. “They are ubiquitous, powerful, protean and inexorable.”

They feed on fuel sources deep in our system: expensive technological progress, the self-interest of the millions of people who make their living off the system, the public’s desire to get the best care for nothing, the fee-for-service payment system and so on.
The rhinos are closing off your future.

The politicians have popgun solutions: They know the problem is ugly, but they want to leave the system unchanged and are afraid to ask anyone to make a sacrifice. Health care experts have some good ideas, but they get watered down in legislation. Legislative proposals so far are full of incompatible options.
But the situation is urgent.

[T]he point is that you have rhinos at the door! You’ll try anything that works. You want a political class that no longer perpetuates the myth that people can get everything for nothing. You know that it was political pandering that got us into this mess in the first place.
Obama is right. Things will be bad if we don’t tackle the problem this year. Things will be worse if we add to the costs without beating the rhinos.

It always makes me feel good when even a conservative agrees with me.

Americans have health care: They can go to an emergency room

In his press conference, Obama read a statement that spoke directly to the middle class Americans he needs to reassure. In both the statement and his answers to reporters’ questions, he went out of his way to be politically sensitive. But cable news networks, like MSNBC, couldn’t stop themselves from complaining about how Obama should have done so much more. Paul Krugman called them on it.

The talking heads on cable TV panned President Obama’s Wednesday press conference. You see, he didn’t offer a lot of folksy anecdotes.
Shame on them. The health care system is in crisis. The fate of America’s middle class hangs in the balance. And there on our TVs was a president with an impressive command of the issues, who truly understands the stakes. …
To see what I mean, compare what Mr. Obama has said and done about health care with the statements and actions of his predecessor.
President Bush, you may remember, was notably unconcerned with the plight of the uninsured. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” he once remarked. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

The race issue

The cable news stations immediately went on to make a mountain out of the last few minutes of the press conference, when Obama answered a question about the arrest of Professor Gates in Cambridge. The best comment I’ve seen on this is from Brent Staples:

The American obsession with people who are said to transcend race began long before Barack Obama moved into the White House — long before he even thought about running for president. Affluent, well-educated black people were being appropriated as symbols of racial progress — and held up as proof that racism no longer mattered — back when Mr. Obama was still a youth in short pants. …
“Don’t talk to us about discrimination,” the argument typically goes. “You made it. If the others got off their behinds and tried, they would, too.” In this rhetoric of race, there is no such thing as social disadvantage, only hard-working, morally upright people who succeed, and lazy, morally defective people who do not. …
Mr. Obama has refused to play this role, even though people have tried to thrust it upon him. He has made clear all along that the election of the first African-American president, while noteworthy in a nation built on the backs of slaves, did not signal a sudden, magical end to discrimination….
During the campaign, Mr. Obama tended to avoid direct engagement with racial issues until circumstances … made further evasion impossible.
He reached a similar moment when he was asked to comment on Mr. Gates’s arrest at a White House news conference on Wednesday.
In a remark that became instantly famous, he responded that the police acted “stupidly” in arresting Mr. Gates when no crime had been committed and the professor was standing in his own home. Mr. Obama further noted that disproportionate attention from the police was an unwelcome fact of black life in America.
People who have heretofore viewed Mr. Obama as a “postracial” abstraction were no doubt surprised by these remarks. This could be because they were hearing him fully for the first time.