Nineteen Ninety Two

Posted on April 23, 2003 in Campaign 2004 Insurance

Raye never responded (that I saw) to my earlier note explaining why I didn’t trust the Democrats any more than I trusted the Republicans. (If I missed it, I am sorry and will answer it.)

In that note, I called on Democrats to “field a candidate who unites my interests and concerns with those of the rest of the nation’s people” if they wanted to keep me from bolting the party and voting my conscience. War wasn’t the only thing that moved me to state that: there’s also the issue of guaranteed health care for all Americans.

Most Demo-pundits say that they believe in national health care but they don’t think it is an issue that they are going to win by. In 1992, the DNC made it a major part of their platform and it won them the election. I certainly voted for Clinton because of the promise. Two years of unprecedented Democratic control of the Congress and the Executive Branch passed: no national health care program appeared. A few minutes of commercials from the insurance industry distorting how the very successful Canadian health care system worked went unchallenged. The Democrats knuckled under. In 1994, the Republicans promised “change” and they threw out the do-nothing Democratic Congress. Since then, they’ve changed and changed the face of America for the worse, unchecked in the last three years.

I blame this on the Democrats. If they’d delivered on national health care, there would have been no Republican victory in 1994. Now the Wimpocrats don’t want to raise health care as an issue because they say “it’s a loser cause”. They’re right. The American public doesn’t think they will deliver and they won’t come out for a party that breaks its promises.

But without a national health care platform that the Democrats will carry through, they’re not getting those votes either. If they want to get power, they must work towards it. If they want to stay in power, they must deliver it.