Like Al Franken, Howard Dean is one of those progressive figures who seems to drive the bloggers and commentators on the right into screaming fits of madness – to the point where if he observed that the sun rose in the east, Erick Erickson and his cohorts would insist that the sun obviously rises in the west because all those dirty hippies like Dean are Marxist liars.
Fox ranter Bill O’Reilly becomes especially unhinged at the thought of the former Vermont governor and Democratic Party chairman. He has called Dean “an obnoxious SOB” and gone on to say: “Hate has been very good to Howard Dean. Without his animus, he’d probably be running a bed and breakfast in Bennington, Vermont. Dean broke away from the bland political crowd by being a mean guy. He relished calling people names and surrounded himself with media smear merchants. Can you imagine a responsible politician saying publicly that he ‘hates’ Republicans?”
On another memorable occasion, O’Reilly insisted: “He is a bitter and increasingly incoherent man, who is routinely humiliating his own party . . . As long as the Democratic Party embraces the likes of Howard Dean, it will not win anything. He represents the lowest form of discourse and shames a party built on the legacies of FDR and JFK.”
After O’Reilly made that declaration in 2005, the Democratic Party under Dean’s leadership swept both Houses of Congress and recaptured the White House from eight years of Republican control.
Dean dropped by Manuel’s Tavern Friday afternoon to autograph copies of his new book – Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer – and spent a half-hour talking about healthcare and politics with a small group of bloggers and journalists.
He was far from the fire-breathing ogre depicted by Fox News. Instead, Dean was engaging and civil as he talked about the healthcare reform bill being debated by Congress and critiqued rightwing ideologies. He was very intense about his issues, but always rational and surprisingly good-humored as well.
Here are some highlights of Dean’s sitdown with the Atlanta media:
Q: What do we call you? Doctor or governor?
Dean: Most anything you want – and most people do. Just not my soulmate.
Q: Are you still confident that a healthcare plan with a public option will actually pass Congress?
Dean: I am confident. You know, you’ve got to work at it every day and there’s always something going on in the Senate that gets you worried, that’s the nature of politics . . . Eventually the Senate will come around. I think the support is there, I really do. I think it will pass.
Q: Why insist on a public option?
Dean: You can’t control costs without a public option . . . We’re not forcing anybody out of what they have. If they like it, they can keep it. You’re not forcing anybody into a government health insurance program.
We’re starting from where we are, not from where people wish we were. Americans are conservative, with a small “c.” They say they want change, but they don’t want as much as they say they want.
Why shouldn’t we give people a choice? The campaign isn’t just about fixing healthcare, it’s about letting American people have a say about what they want. We’re going to give them a choice of two different systems. We have Medicare and we have private health insurance. Give people a choice. Let people decide for themselves.
The Republican Party now is clearly struggling with the fact that they’re ideological and their loyalty is more to their ideology than to their constituents. [Polls show 72 percent support for healthcare reform.] It’s a big problem for Republicans. The conservative lawmakers of Georgia are ignoring public opinion, that’s what they’re doing, because they favor ideology and the health insurance industry over what the citizens of Georgia want. Eventually, that’ll catch up to them
Q: One of the criticisms of the public option is that it will supposedly destroy a competitive private market for health insurance. Isn’t it true that there really isn’t that much competition among private insurers?
Dean: There isn’t much competition. Most states have two or three really big insurers and they’re unbelievably inefficient. You have more competition [with the Obama plan] because you’re finally going to force the private sector to stop doing things that are predatory.
We don’t have a health insurance system – what we have is a money machine that takes 20 or 30 or 40 percent off the top and puts it in their pockets and then spends the rest on healthcare. That’s a crazy system. Medicare, they take 4 percent of our money to administer the thing and 96 percent of it comes back in the form of healthcare. Republicans just want to keep the insurance companies printing money, at our expense, for their shareholders, and that’s not right.
Human beings are not always rational, logical people and they’re very not so rational and logical about healthcare. At the end of the day this is not an argument about conservatives and liberals on the public option, this is an argument about whether you want the status quo, in the insurance companies, or whether you want to let the public have a choice instead of you making it for them. The reason the public option is so popular is the public wants that choice for themselves, not let the politicians make it for them anymore.
You have a competitor [in the public plan] that doesn’t do a number of things that the insurance industry does. They don’t employ predatory pricing, they don’t take your health insurance away if you get sick, they don’t limit your ability to access the system. It’s a much more attractive plan and if the insurance companies do want to survive, then they have to become as attractive as the public plan. The public plan doesn’t pay $28 million to the CEO, they don’t have to advertise, their administrative costs – everybody has one form, not 10 different forms. There is one plan, not 10 different plans that nobody can understand. There’s a lot of savings when you have one-size-fits-all. Now, not everybody’s going to want one-size-fits-all, which is why you don’t force everybody into a government plan, you’re letting them make their own choice. I think people will go back and forth. Fine. Let them. This is not about ideology. This is about what works.
Q: Is the political landscape for healthcare reform different than it was in 1994, when the Clinton health plan failed?
Dean: The reason it’s different is that Harry and Louise have aged out and they all need health insurance. The old coalition, everybody in the medical-industrial complex who joined together to be against this, are not there. Neither is the public. The public is not scared of socialized medicine because they know their parents and grandparents have had it since 1965. The public is not scared of the government option because that’s what Medicare is. What the public doesn’t want is for the government to tell them what to do.
The plan itself is likely to look like Medicare and there’s no reason for it not to look like Medicare because their track record for coverage and costs is reasonable.
Q: What is the estimated cost for the new plan?
Dean: The cost is estimated at $100 billion a year, and that’s $1 trillion over 10 years. That’s not new money. People say, “Oh my god, we’re going to spend a trillion dollars, we don’t have it.” We’re already spending it. [With a public plan] Grady doesn’t have to worry about uncompensated care anymore, that comes out of the taxpayers’ budget right now, but that’s gone, you don’t have to pay for it because the people who show up at Grady now, whatever they have, they are insured.
Small business people don’t have to buy insurance anymore because the government picks it up. That’s essentially a subsidy to small business, it helps small businesses. We ought to be doing something for small business people because they create 80 percent of the new jobs.
A lot of this trillion dollars which Republicans scream and shout about is actually just money that’s moved from one portion of the budget, that is the private sector, to the public sector budget. It’s not money that has to be added to the gross national product. You’re just taking the responsibility away, at the request of the patient, from the private sector and putting it in the public sector. Now the government has to come up with the money instead of the private sector. I think it’s a economic boost to the private sector and I think the private sector needs that kind of boost right now.
Q: What about the “trigger” and other alternatives to a public option?
Dean: The trigger is a phony option, it’s not a public option . . . I think people see through them.
Q: What can we do?
Dean: There’s this guy that wrote this book [laughs]. What you do is all in the book, how to email people, how to join grassroots groups.
Q: What is the critical point in the battle?
Dean: October 15. October 15 is the day that if a bill isn’t passed, reconciliation kicks in and you only need 51 votes [in the Senate]. We have 51 votes.
It’s kind of sad when you think about it. We’re here in the middle of the biggest economic crisis in the last 60 years and the Republicans care so little about the country that they’re more focused on bringing a president down. It’s what’s gotten them where they are and it’s probably going to keep them where they are, a very small, shrinking minority.
Q: Do the Republicans want public option to fail so that government is discredited?
Dean: That bus has left the station a long time ago. Look at Bush trying to attack Social Security, where’d that get them? Look at every single one of them voting no on Medicare, where’d that get them? These guys, the older they get, the less relevant they get. There are not many young Republicans and that’s why. These guys, they’re totally out of touch with where the American people are. All they have is the Frank Luntzes and nasty opinions and a lot of money.
A new generation has taken over this country. This country is now run by people under 35 years old. For the first time in history, more people voted who were under 35 years old than were over 65 years old for the president of the U.S. This is not just about the first African American president, this is a fundamental generational takeover.
The reason the Republicans are screwing themselves for the long term is because there’s no currency among people under 35 for this kind of behavior. They’re sick of it . . . I just don’t think the tactics that have worked for the Republicans for 30 years of “divide people and make everybody mad at each other,” that’s not how you build your party. I just don’t think hate’s going to sell anymore with this younger generation. . . . The new generation is center-left socially, which is why the older Republicans have no traction, but it’s center-right financially. Young people are not big spenders . . .
What they’re [Republicans] going to have to do is stress their fiscal credentials and get away from the social issues, and that’s not going to be easy to the people who’ve been in power for the Republican Party for a long time. It’s going to be a bitter, ugly, inter-party fight.
Q: Could there be a split in the Democratic Party if it grows larger?
Dean: There’s always a huge potential for screwups for the party in power. Everybody specializes in that and that’s why you get changes.
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