Edward Kennedy: Healthcare is a fundamental right, not a privilege

Some tributes to Senator Edward Kennedy and some honest recollections and assessments.
Ezra Klein in The Washington Post:
“Year after year, decade after decade, he labored to pass health-care reform. He sought deals with Republican presidents, with Democratic presidents, and even pursued the office himself. He tried to cut out the health-care industry and bring them to the table, to move forward on a bipartisan fashion and on a Democratic platform, to pass single-payer and to promote incrementalist approaches. The process wasn’t the point. Nor were the people. Nor, even, was Ted Kennedy. Universal health care was the point. Helping the excluded, and the endangered, was the point.

“The loss of one man does not deny the moral urgency of achieving a ‘just society.’ Those who would use Kennedy’s absence to explain their failure do terrible injury to his legacy. The cause of Kennedy’s life was not, after all, praise or compliments. It was, as he said, to “guarantee that every American…will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not just a privilege.” That dream will never die. But by being realized, it can finally rest in peace.”
Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect.

By 2009 … Kennedy’s New Deal Democracy was new again. With Obama in the White House and the Democrats controlling Congress, the causes for which he fought are just a few maddening votes short of passage. Industrial policy has reappeared in the Democrats’ lexicon. Re-regulation is in the air. Unions and health care, the causes of Kennedy’s lifetime, are in furious battle on the Hill. The Democratic head and the Democratic heart are more closely aligned than they’ve been in decades.
More than any other American, Ted Kennedy kept liberalism’s flame burning through the dark of the Reagan era. The liberals who continue his battles will need all the wit and smarts and joy and passion for justice that he brought to those fights.

Sean Wilentz, whose article in The New Republic is called “The pride before the fall,” includes the scandals and tragedies of Kennedy’s life.

For many years, he did not understand how the incident at Chappaquiddick in July 1969 foreclosed the possibility that he would ever succeed JFK to the presidency or fulfill the promise of RFK’s presidential campaign in 1968. In part, this was because he would never be able to explain his actions and inactions of that night adequately (except, perhaps, to the forgiving voters of Massachusetts). But the events also marked the beginning of what would become a convergence of celebrity scandal mongering and cynical prurience that forever changed the rules of American political journalism–and from which Kennedy, with his personal demons, would not escape for decades. …
Kennedy’s decision to unseat the incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter in 1980 was the worst political error he ever made. … He also carried the weight of a collapsing marriage, as well as of the public’s lingering outrage about Chappaquiddick. After taking his campaign all the way to the Democratic convention, Kennedy made a strong impression with a concession speech that stirred liberal idealists–but he then spoiled the political moment by snubbing Carter. The public slight widened a split in the party that contributed both to Ronald Reagan’s victory in November, and to the Democrats’ loss of the majority in the Senate for the first time in more than a quarter of a century. …
Kennedy’s past, distant and recent, continued to dog him. (His best biographer to date, Adam Clymer, describes Kennedy’s forced silence Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991–necessitated by Kennedy’s continuing reputation for womanizing–as the worst moment in his Washington career.) But especially after his remarriage, he consolidated his national leadership. …
Unable to salvage Bill Clinton’s doomed health care plan on Capitol Hill in 1994, Kennedy fought for less comprehensive but important reforms. In 1996, he and Republican Senator Nancy Kassebaum secured passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; also in 1996, he led the way on the Mental Health Parity Act, which forced insurance companies to treat victims of mental illness more equitably. The following year, he, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, and First Lady Hillary Clinton joined forces over establishing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the largest expansion of taxpayer-supported health insurance coverage for children since the initiation of Medicare in 1965. ,,,
On health care, he tried to work with the Bush White House on extending Medicare to cover prescription drugs, only to be betrayed once again when the final bill caved in to the pharmaceutical and insurance companies. ,,,
His political longevity testified to the love of his constituents, through thick and thin, but also to his persistence, his ability to learn and to grow, and then to surpass himself. The sadness, the squandering, the might-have-beens of his life would have crushed others, but Kennedy endured, his principles intact. Of him, it could be written, in Yeats’s words, that “[b]eing Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” But also being an American, and being Edward Kennedy, he accomplished extraordinary good for the nation from a position he won because of his family’s name, but that he finally held superbly, with hard-won talents and a compassionate heart.

Finally, I recommend a post by Maggie Mahar which uses Kennedy’s 1980 Denver convention speech to trace the history of health care reform.

I recall the slogans of the Reagan years: the conservatives’ insistence that “growth is good” -that even “greed is good.” For growth and greed lead to prosperity–at least at the very top of society, and the chimera of “trickle-down” prosperity for the rest of us.
Today, conservatives insist that we want health care to continue to be a growth industry. They applaud the pharmaceutical industry’s double-digit profits – unless profits grow, how will drug-makers produce more new drugs? They want more hospitals, more surgical centers, more diagnostic testing equipment, more diagnostic tests . . . more and more, and more. “Plenty” is never enough. More is always better–whether it’s a bigger car, a bigger home, or more health care.
Progressive healthcare reformers understand that, when it comes to health care, less can be more. Better, safer care is usually less expensive. And, most importantly, progressive reformers realize that if we want “economic justice” in the form of high quality, affordable care for all Americans we need to eliminate the waste in our healthcare system. Granted, someone is profiting from that waste, but as Kennedy observed later in the [1980] speech: “Finally, we cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society. So I will continue to stand for a national health insurance.”
Here I would repeat what I have said in the past: only national health insurance–i.e. a public-sector plan–can be trusted to reduce spending without lowering the quality of care. For-profit insurers lack the standing, morally and politically to make these decisions. A public sector plan does not have to worry about shareholders; its only allegiance is to the public good. And, as Kennedy understood, the public good requires that we rein in health care spending:
“We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level. Let us insist on real control over what doctors and hospitals can charge, and let us resolve that the state of a family’s health shall never depend on the size of a family’s wealth”
It’s surprising how little the issues have changed in 29 years. In 1980, Ted Kennedy understood that health care inflation was the inflation to fear most. Looking ahead, he could see that if everyone continued to charge whatever the market would bear–healthcare would soon become unaffordable for many middle-class Americans.
And this, of course, is precisely what has happened.

Related posts:
Coughing Up Blood Money: Taxing tobacco, taxing credibility
Should Obama have pitched health care differently? Will Kennedy’s death make a difference?