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Sun Times Columnist Calls for Quick Federal Action on National HealthCare Crisis

Similar to Fannie-Freddie Nationalization/Seizure

Mortgages are important. But nobody ever died from a bad mortgage. The same cannot be said about deficient health care. Only in a nation where the political discourse takes place on such a silly, superficial level could we nationalize one industry without warning before or discussion after, while the very idea of fixing a massive, perennial problem in another industry, using the same technique, is demonized and discarded.

 

BY NEIL STEINBERG Sun-Times Columnist here.

Opening shot... 

It isn't often that the particular verb in a complex financial story grabs you. But did you notice the exact action the government took regarding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this week?

It "seized" them. The government seized the private mortgage giants to save them from collapse. The financial markets heaved a sigh of relief and soared in approval.

This was done by the Bush administration, which is ironic. These are the same people who call Barack Obama a socialist because he wants to do something far less abrupt with our wheezing health care system.

Fannie and Freddie control, we are told, $5 trillion worth of mortgages, while Americans spent $2 trillion a year on health care.

Yet the feds seizing the mortgage sector is a necessary measure, while the government managing health care is socialist folly.

The Republican Party, in its core belief, claims that government is the problem, that it can't fix things and shouldn't try. The Democratic Party believes that when the private sector fails, the government must step in.

This is one of the key, basic issues at stake in the coming election, shorn of all its sideshows, freed of Sarah Palin's eyeglasses and Barack Obama's faith and all the other tangential nonsense that we use to distract ourselves.

Mortgages are important. But nobody ever died from a bad mortgage. The same cannot be said about deficient health care. Only in a nation where the political discourse takes place on such a silly, superficial level could we nationalize one industry without warning before or discussion after, while the very idea of fixing a massive, perennial problem in another industry, using the same technique, is demonized and discarded.

 

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