Dems and health care early 1990s....from Dean's new book. Alarming.

[madfloridian]

I am not reading this book in order, and tonight I happened on this part. I never was really that aware of how it went down about health care in the early 1990s. Seems to me there was no excuse for not getting something passed. I am typing the sections from the book, so forgive mistakes.

In Howard Dean's book, "You Have the Power", he talks about trying to get help from congressional Democrats in 1991 for the states to pass health care bills on their own. He and several governors went to talk to the House leadership. They asked for changes in federal laws that were keeping states from working out their own plans for universal health care. The leadership refused to help on the grounds, he says, that many had waited their whole careers to pass it, and they did not yet have the votes....and they did not want to states to do it. (Page 62)

And a paragraph from page 63 that just makes me furious. Again from 1991 and early 90s.
SNIP.."Many of the congressional Democrats wouldn't take a risk on anything that might be unpopular, be subject to attack, or allow other people to outshine them in getting some actual work done. So they wouldn't give a green light to the governors in 1991; and a few years later, they wouldn't hear the signals coming from Bob Dole that he was willing to compromise on Clinton's health-care plan. They were paralyzed between their fear of losing an election and their fear of change. In the end they lost and became the victims, in 1994, of the most sweeping congressional changes in sixty-two years. They set the table for Newt Gingrich. It was an awful irony: After decades of domination by the so-called party of the people, the party of FDR and Harry Truman, America continued, at the turn of the millennium, to be the only country in the industrialized world that didn't have health insurance for all its people. "

"The Democrats, who by the early 1990s had been in power in Congress without interruption for forty years, became so obsessed with keeping their seats and staving off challenges that they forgot why they were there."

I would call most of what he writes "constructive criticism", something that our party needs, calling attention to things we need to be on guard against.

PS...I am not trying to hog this forum, I am just not posting in the general forums for a while. Please someone else post things.

[Cheswick2.0]

1. I hope you don't mind but I have been putting your posts in GD politics

it's pissing off the usual suspects who have to come to the thread and make statements about how conservative Dean is. It is amusing me to no end.

[madfloridian]

2. Don't mind.

I am just tired of going there myself. Anything I post is public info and usually sourced well. I agree with Dean's practical ideas so often, and I like the fact he just says things.