Health care, not Hillary

When Hillary Clinton recently botched the details of a tragic story about a young pregnant woman who died as a result of inadequate health care coverage, the media made the story du jour about Hillary and the botched details. No one thought to engage in a thorough discussion about the essence of the story (which she got right)- our botched health care system.

Krugman at the NYT has a thoughtful piece today on the sad state of affairs of America's health care system. He tells the stories of two women who have fallen through our system, whose deaths could have been prevented with better coverage. Their stories are not exceptions or rare cases. According to a recent estimate by the Urban Institute, the lack of health insurance leads to 27,000 preventable deaths in America each year. Their research shows that currently, 46 million people (or nearly one in five nonelderly adults and children) lack health insurance in the United States, an increase of 6 million since 2000.

He simultaneously calls out the media for their behavior, and Obamicans for participating in the sport of giving Hillary a hard time for missing some details instead of acknowledging that she's trying to highlight the fact that our country's disaster of a health care system is directly contributing to deaths of our fellow citizens.

"In other words, this was a disgraceful episode. It was particularly sad to see a number of Obama supporters (though not the Obama campaign itself) join enthusiastically in the catcalls against Mrs. Clinton’s good-faith effort to put a human face on the cruelty and injustice of the American health care system.

Look, I know that many progressives have their hearts set on seeing Barack Obama get the Democratic nomination. But politics is supposed to be about more than cheering your team and jeering the other side. It’s supposed to be about changing the country for the better.

And if being a progressive means anything, it means believing that we need universal health care, so that terrible stories like those of Monique White, Trina Bachtel and the thousands of other Americans who die each year from lack of insurance become a thing of the past."