A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books by Christopher Hitchens

Author:Christopher Hitchens [Hitchens, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838956011
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd.

Quigley was alluding principally to the durable consensus on grand strategy, military alliance and trade, but his argument applies with equal force to the home front. Here, the Clintons only ever made one challenge to the status quo. Inspired by the obvious popularity and also the electoral potential of the idea, they proposed a system of universal healthcare. Now it may be true (as I think) that nothing could have saved George Bush in 1992. But the change in the political tempo began with a remarkable Democratic triumph in Pennsylvania, orchestrated by James Carville and based like all good campaigns on the ceaseless iteration of a single note. There were forty million Americans without health insurance. No comparable society except South Africa lacked a health system. (Or, as Carville put it with a clever appeal to a different kind of populism: ‘If a criminal has the legal right to a lawyer, working Americans should have the legal right to a doctor.’)

Of course, the cry of ‘socialised medicine’ is one of the hoariest slogans of the American right, so it had to be expected that there would be a political confrontation. But for once, the all-important opinion polls were aligned solidly and consistently with reform. There was expertise to spare among specialists on the subject. One group in particular, based at the Harvard Medical School, proposed the equivalent of a Canadian ‘single payer’ or National Health plan, combining a wide repertory of benefits with a range of choice between different physicians. The Congressional Budget Office furthermore certified such a plan as the most cost-effective, not least because it would end the fantastically wasteful duplication and competition spawned by America’s insurance racket. At an early White House meeting between the Harvard group and Hillary Clinton, the case for a straightforward National Health Bill was put by Dr David Himmelstein. As he recalls the exchange:

It was evident Hillary was thinking a lot about politics. Can you realistically tell me, she asked, that there are any big powers that support ‘single payer’ and that can take on the insurance industry’s lobbying and advertising budget? I said: ‘About 70 per cent of the people in the US favour something like a single-payer system. With presidential leadership, that can be an overwhelming force.’ She said: ‘David, tell me something interesting.’

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