Larson is persuasive on recent health insurance bill

After months of shepherding the national medical insurance legislation through the House, Connecticut (D-1) Congressman John B. Larson looks a bit tired but trim and not yet encased in impenetrable plastic from his emergence as a national leader of the Democratic Party — the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, a national fundraiser for the party and a likely future House speaker.

In a few hours Larson would be a long way from his usual haunt, Augie & Ray’s, the spartan diner outside the factory gate in East Hartford, his hometown, visiting California resorts and mansions to pitch West Coast bigwigs for donations to Democratic congressional campaigns. But the other day it was still possible to have a candid conversation with him during a tour of his district.

Larson would not respond in kind to the ordinary citizens who have denounced the insurance legislation, some of whom berated him lately as he traveled from town to town. They’re right to be angry, Larson said, but he believes that their anger really isn’t about the insurance legislation but about the general and largely unaddressed long decline in the national economy.

u      u      u

Indeed, the insurance legislation may be cumbersome, and Larson acknowledged it was the product of the usual political sausage making. But he was persuasive that the law’s major provisions are hard to argue with individually and really are not argued with much. And the supposed grand principle of the opposition to the bill — that law should not require people to carry insurance — was rejected 75 years ago with Social Security, which taxes all workers not just for retirement pensions but also for disability and survivor insurance; rejected 45 years ago by Medicare, government medical insurance for the elderly, also financed by payroll taxes; and then rejected by state laws requiring auto drivers to carry insurance.

Ironically, while it has been scorned as liberalism run amok, the medical insurance legislation greatly resembles what in 1993 was offered as the conservative alternative to President Clinton’s bureaucratic medical insurance scheme — the proposal of the Heritage Foundation to require everyone to carry private insurance and to have the government buy it for those who couldn’t afford it.

Maybe Democrats made a tactical error by framing medical insurance as a new social welfare benefit at a time of unprecedented government bloat and insolvency rather than as a matter of personal responsibility. Instead people might have been told that they are obliged as citizens to carry insurance so that, if catastrophic illness or injury strikes, they don’t risk becoming charity cases.

In any event, as U.S. Rep. Joseph D. Courtney, D-2nd District, recently noted, no major legislation is perfect at first, and Medicare has been amended 30 times. Few Republicans propose to repeal that bit of “socialism.� To the contrary, a few years ago the Republicans enacted Medicare’s extravagant prescription drug benefit.

u      u      u

The important thing now is to get everyone insured and eliminate the disgrace of having to hold community bake sales to pay for the care of uninsured people with life-threatening illness, people including innocent children. Even many angry people may concede this, and, Larson said, Republicans pledging to repeal universality soon may find they don’t have so much support.

The Republicans would do much better to try running against Wall Street, Larson said, though of course Republicans are just as much the tools of the big financial houses as Democrats are.

“People see Wall Street getting bailed out while they are struggling,� Larson said. “The middle class through this decade has been working harder while their benefits have been diminishing.�

Actually, by some reckoning real wages in the private sector have been declining far longer, since perhaps 1973, through Democratic and Republican regimes alike. Larson acknowledged that a bipartisan federal investigation of the financial system’s collapse is foundering and that the Democratic national administration has left Wall Street just as much in charge of the Treasury Department and regulatory agencies as the previous Republican administration did.

Larson could only shrug at that and hope that his support for legislation to audit the Federal Reserve would signify that he is no apologist for Wall Street. Unfortunately the legislation probably won’t even come to a vote in the Senate because it is opposed by Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who, un-re-electable as he heads toward retirement, remains Wall Street’s crucial enabler.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.