Health Care on Whitehouse.gov: In Your Face

Change has come to the White House.  Less dramatically, change has come to whitehouse.gov.  Sure, it’s a beautiful site which deftly blends the overall aesthetic of the transitional team’s change.gov (now defunct) with the traditional trappings of the White House.  In a few places, this move gives President Obama’s team the ability to shift the emphasis around on how they choose to define his agenda.  It’s a subtle change, but the tenor of the health care debate has a new emphasis.  It can only be called “in-your-face.”

The Whitehouse.gov page on health care now begins this way:

On health care reform, the American people are too often offered two extremes -- government-run health care with higher taxes or letting the insurance companies operate without rules. President Obama and Vice President Biden believe both of these extremes are wrong, and that’s why they’ve proposed a plan that strengthens employer coverage, makes insurance companies accountable and ensures patient choice of doctor and care without government interference.

This language isn’t new.  It’s been on the Obama-Biden campaign site since the general election, albeit under the three bullet points of what Obama-Biden would do on health care.  Unless you read every word on that page, it would be easy to miss.  It was maintained on change.gov, again under the three bullet points.  But it is more prominent than ever now.  It clearly changes the emphasis, more so than  other issues on whitehouse.gov have been changed through editing.   “Urban Policy” still begins with soft language about the President’s time as a community organizer, “Energy and Environment” still begins with a description of the problem, “Women” still begins with a speech excerpt and some mentions of past accomplishment.  In contrast to these, health care now jumpS right from describing the problem (lack of access to 47 million, skyrocketing costs, insufficient quality) to describing the meta-problem:  the old thinking of our debate on health care is part of what makes it difficult to solve.

People on the right and on the left likely didn’t expect that the lead sentence on health care to be the equivalent of “A pox on both your houses,” or a pre-emptive rhetorical attack at the policy name-calling that we suffer through every time we try to reform health care.  I was certainly surprised.  This is rhetoric for the heat of the campaign, not for governing from hope.  What’s going on here?

Keeping in mind that that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, this may reveal two insights into how serious President Obama is about health care:

1.)    When it comes to health care, the fight is already here.  In many ways, John McCain’s health care plan was never the real enemy.  It had elements to make it favorable to his base, like tax credits and further de-regulation of the insurance industry, and solid platitudes about individual responsibility and leaving it up to a consumer.  But it was also a sinking ship, not the least of which was because the arithmetic – both in the total costs and in the tax credits to individuals and families – just never worked out.  When push came to shove in the debates, it all came down to the chimera of government run health care vs. an individualized free market.  And that’s likely to the case all the more so now that Obama has taken office.

2.)    The Obama Administration is in “game on” mode.  They’re calling out false choices, and puncturing chimeras.  If you’re coming to the White House Web site to find out how the President wants to control your choice of doctors, let this be the first sentence you read.  If you define the terms, you win the debate.

Those looking for an explanation as to why our health care system is so bad will be disappointed – there isn’t any.  (For that, you’ll have to come back here!)  Those looking for a complex write-up of the President’s proposal will need to go to barackobama.com.  But those who are looking for a sign that the White House understands health care is not the place to don kid gloves, look no further.