I am student at the University of Miami in biology and pre-med, and up to this time I have paid very little attention to the State of the Union Addresses or to political rhetoric and public policy in general. Since I plan to become a physician, however, I thought I should know far more than I do about these issues, although I found that in this speech President Barack Obama hardly focused on healthcare issues at all. I did go back and look up one of Harry Truman’s State of the Union speeches, where he also mentioned the need for a system of comprehensive national health insurance. This also took up only a small part of his text, which dealt mainly with the economy and foreign affairs, although I noticed that his proposal for major healthcare reform (which was never passed) was very different from Obama’s Affordable Care Act of 2010.
In January 1948, President Harry S. Truman also addressed health care reform in his State of the Union Address, in which he said that the lack of national health insurance was the worst failure of the Social Security system. He went on that even though “we are rightly proud of the high standards of medical care we know how to provide in the United States. The fact is, however, that most of our people cannot afford to pay for the care they need” (Truman 1948). During his time as president, he always supported a system of national health insurance, which was the original Medicare idea, so that no one in the U.S. would go without medical treatment because they could not afford it. Congress did not pass this in the 1940s, although Canada eventually did put such a system in place. In the 1960s, the Great Society legislation passed under Lyndon Johnson included Medicare for people over 65 and Medicaid for those who were at or near the poverty level, but it was far from a system of comprehensive medical care and still left millions of people with no coverage, such as those who were employed but had no private health insurance and earned too much to qualify for Medicaid. Truman’s hope that a system would be put in place “to protect all our people equally against insecurity and ill health” has never been put in place (Truman 1948).
President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act was far different from a Canadian system of national health insurance in that it basically leaves private companies in charge of providing insurance. Even so, the Republicans ran in 2012 vowing to repeal it immediately, but since they lost the election and it was upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court last year it is going to become the law of the land. In his recent State of the Union Address, Obama hardly referred to it at all, except for one line about how it was working to reduce medical costs overall. He had very little to say about healthcare policy in general, except in the context of the ongoing debate about taxes, entitlement programs and budget deficits. Although the Republicans have a policy to turn Medicare into a private insurance and voucher program, Obama promised only that he would make minor or modest changes. In addition, he stated that “the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care for an aging population”, but he promised not to reduce those costs by placing the burden on working class and middle class families, but rather forcing the wealthy to pay higher taxes and accept some reductions in Medicare benefits (Obama 2013). Except for mentioning new funds for research into Alzheimer’s disease and stem cells, those were the extent of his remarks on healthcare policy.
WORKS CITED
http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net/texts/19480107.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/state-of-the-union-2013-president-obamas-address-to-congress-transcript/2013/02/12/d429b574-7574-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html
