David Broder is catching on. Read his Sunday column on the growing health reform wave moving across the nation. Four stages:
Stage 1: state action
Stage 2: Congressional action this year on kids’ coverage and SCHIP
Stage 3: the presidential campaign conversation
Stage 4: the main event starting in January 2009 with a new President and larger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, with health reform an electoral mandate issue.
Last October, health-care experts Drew Altman and Robert Blendon wrote in the journal Health Affairs that “the presidential candidates’ level of attention will be decisive to where health ranks on the national agenda going into the 2008 election and the 2009 Congress. If they do play a leadership role on health, the media will follow, and the agenda-setting power of a debate driven from the top will meet the public’s concern rising up from the bottom like two weather fronts colliding.”
Exactly that is happening. As he seeks the GOP nomination, Romney is touting his plan for universal coverage, and last month Democratic Sen. Barack Obama committed to the same goal — without saying how to get there. On her first trip to Iowa, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton showed her mastery of the subject, explaining what had gone wrong in 1994 and the lessons learned.
The bar has been raised to the point that any presidential candidate in either party without a plan for universal coverage may be seen as falling short. And that in turn could make 2009 the long-awaited breakthrough year.
