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We need a better healthcare system -- and Republicans have been fighting it for 25 years
for purely partisan reasons
The Rise and Resounding Demise of the Clinton Plan
Theda Skocpol
PUBLISHED:SPRING 1995
... end of 1993 right-wing Republicans realized that their ideological fortunes within their own party, as well as the Republican partisan interest in weakening the Democrats as a prelude to winning control of Congress and the presidency, could be splendidly served by first demonizing and then totally defeating the Clinton plan. William Kristol of the Project for the Republican Future started to issue a steady steam of strategy memos urging all-out partisan warfare. Public support for the Clinton plan had begun to erode since September, Kristol pointed out, and “an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy” by the Republicans could ultimately kill the plan, if it convinced middle-class Americans that there really was not a national health care crisis, after all. Noting that polls showed most Americans to be satisfied with their personal health care, Kristol argued that Republicans should “insistently convey the message that mandatory health alliances and government price controls will destroy the character, quality, and inventiveness of American medical care.”
During 1994 the hard-line conservative attack on the Clinton plan brought together more and more allies and channeled resources and support toward antigovernment conservatives within the Republican Party. Ideologues and think tanks launched lurid attacks on the plan. Small-business members of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and other associations mobilized against the proposed employer mandate. 35 Portrayals of the plan as a bureaucratic takeover by welfare-state liberals were regular grist for Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing hosts of hundreds of news/talk radio programs that reach tens of millions of listeners (indeed, more than half of voters surveyed at polling places in the November 1994 election said they tuned to such shows, and the most frequent listeners voted Republican by a three to one ratio). 36 Similarly, Christian Coalition groups, already attacking Bill and Hillary Clinton on cultural issues, began to devote substantial resources to the anti-health care reform crusade. 37 Moderate Republicans who had initially been inclined to work out some sort of compromise began to backpedal in the face of such antireform pressures from within their own party. And interest groups whose leaders had been prepared to bargain over reforms soon were pressured by constituents and Republican leaders to back off from cooperation with the Clinton administration and congressional Democrats. 38
Despite all of the resources—money, moral commitment, and grass-roots communications networks—that the conservative right could mobilize, the question remains of why such attacks proved to be as influential as they were. Middle-class Americans were (and remain) concerned about both the security of their access to affordable health care and the overall state of the nation's health care financing system. Centrist Democrat Bill Clinton had done his best to define a market-oriented, minimally disruptive approach to national health care reform, and his plan was initially well received. Nevertheless, by midsummer 1994 and on through the November election, many middle-class citizens—Independents, moderate Democrats and Republicans, and former Perot supporters—had come to perceive the Clinton plan as a misconceived “big-government” effort that might threaten the quality of U.S. health care for people like themselves ...
Theda Skocpol
PUBLISHED:SPRING 1995
... end of 1993 right-wing Republicans realized that their ideological fortunes within their own party, as well as the Republican partisan interest in weakening the Democrats as a prelude to winning control of Congress and the presidency, could be splendidly served by first demonizing and then totally defeating the Clinton plan. William Kristol of the Project for the Republican Future started to issue a steady steam of strategy memos urging all-out partisan warfare. Public support for the Clinton plan had begun to erode since September, Kristol pointed out, and “an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy” by the Republicans could ultimately kill the plan, if it convinced middle-class Americans that there really was not a national health care crisis, after all. Noting that polls showed most Americans to be satisfied with their personal health care, Kristol argued that Republicans should “insistently convey the message that mandatory health alliances and government price controls will destroy the character, quality, and inventiveness of American medical care.”
During 1994 the hard-line conservative attack on the Clinton plan brought together more and more allies and channeled resources and support toward antigovernment conservatives within the Republican Party. Ideologues and think tanks launched lurid attacks on the plan. Small-business members of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and other associations mobilized against the proposed employer mandate. 35 Portrayals of the plan as a bureaucratic takeover by welfare-state liberals were regular grist for Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing hosts of hundreds of news/talk radio programs that reach tens of millions of listeners (indeed, more than half of voters surveyed at polling places in the November 1994 election said they tuned to such shows, and the most frequent listeners voted Republican by a three to one ratio). 36 Similarly, Christian Coalition groups, already attacking Bill and Hillary Clinton on cultural issues, began to devote substantial resources to the anti-health care reform crusade. 37 Moderate Republicans who had initially been inclined to work out some sort of compromise began to backpedal in the face of such antireform pressures from within their own party. And interest groups whose leaders had been prepared to bargain over reforms soon were pressured by constituents and Republican leaders to back off from cooperation with the Clinton administration and congressional Democrats. 38
Despite all of the resources—money, moral commitment, and grass-roots communications networks—that the conservative right could mobilize, the question remains of why such attacks proved to be as influential as they were. Middle-class Americans were (and remain) concerned about both the security of their access to affordable health care and the overall state of the nation's health care financing system. Centrist Democrat Bill Clinton had done his best to define a market-oriented, minimally disruptive approach to national health care reform, and his plan was initially well received. Nevertheless, by midsummer 1994 and on through the November election, many middle-class citizens—Independents, moderate Democrats and Republicans, and former Perot supporters—had come to perceive the Clinton plan as a misconceived “big-government” effort that might threaten the quality of U.S. health care for people like themselves ...
Republican anti-government ideologues have finally produced a crisis that, so far this year alone, has cost us two trillion dollars
4 replies
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