Froma Harrop: The real panic in health care fight

Whether Graeme Frost has an affluent father or lives in a $400,000 house with granite counters is of no consequence to me. But such details have led a right-wing attack on the Democrats’ poster family for expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which President Bush vetoed.

These charges happen to be untrue. The Frost family income is $45,000. Their Baltimore house, bought 17 years ago for $55,000, is now worth about $250,000, and the kitchen counters are concrete.

But even if the counters were gold, I wouldn’t care. America needs a universal health care plan that puts the rich and poor, young and old, sick and well into one big insurance pool.

And whether the Frosts could sell their house and use the money to obtain health coverage is irrelevant. They tried to buy a policy, but insurers wouldn’t sell them one because of pre-existing medical conditions. Graeme and his sister suffer brain injuries from a car crash.

The right does these issues on automatic pilot – and the left knows how to hit back – but the center feels conflicted. Megan McArdle, a blogger for the Atlantic magazine’s Web site, worries about forcing families to sell assets to qualify for public health care benefits. “On the other hand,” she writes, “many people, including me, don’t want to pay for the health care of someone so that they can stay in their Park Avenue mansion.”

Honey, you already do.

The taxpayers are footing the medical bills of many a Park Avenue swell over 65. There’s little means testing in Medicare, yet Bush pushed a drug benefit on top of the program’s already generous coverage. It will cost many times the price of SCHIP, even were it to cover the likes of Graeme Frost.

So let’s discuss what the panic is really about. Republicans know that once government health coverage seeps up into the middle class, there’s no stopping it.

Note how Bush does this big “compassionate conservative” thing about very much wanting SCHIP for poor people. Programs for the poor are fine, because you can always cut the living daylights out of them. Politicians who mess with middle class benefits find their heads in the return mail.

The happiest campers in American health care today are the people in Medicare, a government-run program that sets prices. Middle-class families who taste similar fruits will not say: “Please, oh, please. Send my health coverage back into the exciting free market.” And their neighbors will ask, “Where can I get some?”

As last stands go, issuing cries of injustice that an insured family making $40,000 might be asked to subsidize the health care of an uninsured family making $60,000 is neither heroic nor smart.

The more rational response would be to let the folks making $40,000 also join the program – and require employers to raise their paychecks by the amount previously taken out for health coverage. Both the family and the bosses would come out ahead.

Really, how did American workers become the last people in any industrialized democracy to be subject to such anxiety about paying for medical care? They already fund the health care of retirees, the poor, the disabled, convicts and government employees, including members of Congress. Their taxes pay for everyone’s health care except their own.

Republicans can’t possibly believe that today’s expensive and chaotic mess of a health care “system” is a “conservative” approach. They see their former business allies running into the arms of Democrats for deliverance from the unpredictable costs of insuring workers.

Right-wingers, give it up! You’re fighting a battle you shouldn’t want to win. A country without universal coverage isn’t conservative. It’s primitive.