Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I kept an appointment we’d made through Organizing for America to see an aide to Jim Moran’s (D-VA) in order to discuss health care reform. When we walked into the Congressman’s office, one of his aides, a gentlemen by the name of Andy, was talking with another constituent, who, as it turned out, worked for Kaiser Permanente’s education and training branch. My wife and I agreed to join the discussion, and, for some time we listened to the Kaiser employee’s strong and enthusiastic pitch for the Congressman to support a meaningful public option.
When an opening developed in the conversation, we asked Andy whether the Congressman would support HR 676. Andy answered by saying that Jim had been a co-sponsor of John Conyers’ bill in previous years, but that presently Jim favored a strong public option, but intended to support whatever health care reform bill coming out of the Congress won the support of the Administration. My wife and I, along with the increasingly vocal support of the Kaiser employee, expressed our misgivings about and dissatisfaction with the bills that were being seriously considered by the Congress, as Andy grew increasingly restive. He tried to come back with a variant of “the perfect is the enemy of the good” position. But it became increasingly apparent that he did not know a great deal about the issues surrounding the legislation himself, or about any of the specifics of the bills under consideration, and that about all he did know was that Jim was firmly in back of the idea that he was going to vote for the President’s bill, whatever that turned out to be, and not develop an independent position of his own supporting a bill that might be more in line with the interests of his constituents. Whatever had motivated him earlier to co-sponsor Medicare for All, he had now put aside in favor of loyalty to the President.
Hearing this, I figured it was time to stop talking and deliver my message in another way, so I left Andy, and the Kaiser employee, with copies of three posts you can find here, here, and here, and my wife and I took our leave, after promising to attend the Congressman’s town hall meeting in Reston on August 25. My final impression was that Jim Moran will vote for anything the President agrees to, whether it is an improvement to the health insurance system or not. The way things are shaping up that probably mean a $1.5 trillion health insurance industry giveaway and probably means that I’ll be working for his defeat if there’s a primary in 2010.
5 responses so far ↓
1 A Visit to Jim Moran’s About Health Care Reform | Recent Health News // Aug 14, 2009 at 9:09 pm
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2 Henk Hadders // Aug 15, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Joe,
What a sad moment for your wife and you, that you both may have to decide to depart from your own Congressman Jim Moran, but ….what about Obama which he seems to follow with his eyes closed. One of my American friends recently told me, that he couldn’t figure Obama very well. For a guy who tells stories about how his Mother died fighting with an insurance company over her cancer treatments, he’s sure friendly to that industry now.
My friend’s theory is that he’s caught up in the community organizing thing, and thinks that his community is the Congress and the various interest groups continuously working with it or on it as the case may be.
“Unfortunately he needs to be community organizing Americans like FDR did and then bring that community down on the Congress and the interests. That’s the only way you get real change in America”. That’s what my American friend said to me. Do you think, there’s any truth in this ?
Best,
Henk
3 Joe // Aug 15, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Hi Henk,
Thanks for your comment. Am I not the very American friend who suggested this? If not, I’m sure I offered exactly that conjecture somewhere along the line. One of the WaPo staff writers, Ann Kornblut, appearing on MCNBC this morning, just stated that the President is getting ready to agree on a compromise that takes even the highly inadequate public option in HR 3200 “off the table.”
So, it looks like the “smart alecs” who thought it would be better politics to back the PO, rather than “Medicare for All,” have accomplished nothing by doing so, and may have sacrifice a great opportunity to get Medicare for All passed.
4 Henk Hadders // Aug 16, 2009 at 6:24 am
Yes Joe, it was you as you were also the one who taught me about knowledge claim evaluation, single and double loop learning etc. at an organizational level in your KMCI program in Washington.
The US seems to be a maladaptive giant indeed looking for single loop adaptation and change within the present insurance system, or looking for a second order change with a public option. But what is needed is triple-loop learning or a third order change – a paradigm shift- in the sense of Medicare for All. But how to realize such transformative learning at a societal level ? I think the term “transformative learning” is equivalent to others, like third order change, triple-loop learning, deep learning, or epistemic learning. I think such a quality of learning is essential to the realization of a new postmodern ecological paradigm – in individuals, organizations, healthcare systems and in society as a whole. At the same time this transformative learning is unlikely to occur beyond a ‘significant minority’, but this may be sufficient to help generate wider second order learning, a questioning of values, in a particular learning context, in this case healthcare.
As it’s always about learning, I love to see “theory in action” at a societal level. So keep up the good work. You’ve got my greatest respect.
Henk
5 Joe // Aug 17, 2009 at 2:07 am
Thank you, Henk, I really appreciate your comments and your friendship. I agree that a deeper level of learning is necessary to meet our problems.
I was a boy when FDR was President, during WWII. But I still remember his voice and the trust in him my family had. He had done so much to change things for people and to fulfill the promise of American Democracy. When I was young I don’t think I appreciated how rare it is to have someone like that lead one’s country. But after all these years and much reading of the history of that time, I know now, and Oh how I miss him. My country so badly needs someone like him now.