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Even Camelot Needed Health Care
Toward the end of George McGovern's failed presidential bid in 1972, I was helping advance a bus trip for vice presidential candidate Sargent Shriver. The final weekend of the campaign, his caravan would start in New Hampshire and work its way down the Eastern seaboard, holding rallies along the way and winding up in Washington, DC, just before Election Day.
As we spoke with mayors whose cities would be visited, the draw wasn't Shriver but the news that his brother-in-law, Senator Ted Kennedy, would be accompanying him. Even though Chappaquiddick had taken place just a little more than three years before, it was the Kennedy charisma, the power of that family that still got even the most seasoned local politico excited.
Imagine how popular we were a few days later when we had to go back to tell them Teddy wasn't coming. His bad back from that near fatal plane crash in 1964 made a long bus journey impossible to endure. Shriver still drew crowds but it just wasn't the same.
Nearly 20 years later, I ran into Kennedy on an escalator at the AFL-CIO convention in Detroit as he arrived to make a speech. No bodyguards (visible, anyway), no entourage. I thought that I had never seen him look so healthy and vigorous. The gregariousness that made him such a consummate politician was on full display as we chatted and he loudly greeted union officials as we ascended, each a hail fellow, well met.
To those belonging to the post-baby boomer generations, it may be difficult to comprehend the change that took place in America when Ted Kennedy's older brother Jack became President in 1961 -- although the successful embracing of the Obama candidacy by young people comes close.
As we ended the years of the Eisenhower administration, even though the nation was more prosperous than ever, there was a grayness to everyday life that seemed to shift to Technicolor with the advent of those brief Kennedy years, like Dorothy shaking off the dust of Kansas for Oz.
John F. Kennedy's presidential race against Richard Nixon split my family neatly in two. My dad and older brother were for Nixon, my mother and I favored JFK (but I still have a gold Nixon tie clip my father prized, with an engraved caricature of Tricky Dick that looks more like Bob Hope than the presidential incubus we all came to know and love).
My father and brother came around. I witnessed Kennedy's inauguration on the elementary school's TV set, and was allowed to stay up late to watch the inaugural balls. My mother kept scrapbooks about Jack and Jackie and Caroline and John-John. All of us snapped up stories about family life in the White House and wept when the President died in Dallas. A few years later we would do the same for Bobby.
As time went by we would learn that we had been fooled about a lot of it; that the Wizard was a man behind a curtain, that much of the Camelot legend's glitter was media hype as bogus as fool's gold. But there remained about the Kennedy family a sort of grand, Shakespearean sublimity that applied as equally to the hubris and heartbreak as the good luck and achievement.
Or, in the words of playwright, journalist and Republican Clare Boothe Luce, cited in some of this week's obituaries, "Where else but in gothic fiction, where else among real people could one encounter such triumphs and tragedies, such beauty and charm and ambition and pride and human wreckage, such dedication to the best and lapses into the mire of life; such vulgar, noble, driven, generous, self-centered, loving, suspicious, devious, honorable, vulnerable, indomitable people?"
But how interesting that despite their grossest and most callow foibles and failings, throughout the life and times of the three Kennedy brothers who survived their older brother Joe there was a deep, moral concern for the nation's health that continued right up through Ted Kennedy's death. Notice in their memories of him this week how many friends and colleagues mentioned help that Senator Kennedy got for them during medical crises of their own.
Vice President Joe Biden remembered that when his two sons were recovering from the car crash that took the life of his wife and daughter in 1972, Kennedy "was on the phone with me literally ever day in the hospital... I'd turn around and there would be some specialist from Massachusetts, a doc I had never even asked for, literally sitting in the room with me."
And in Thursday's Washington Post, Howard Kurtz reported that, "Chris Matthews, a Type 2 diabetic, spoke of Kennedy calling him with advice after the 'Hardball' host had an attack of hypoglycemia. Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, recalled on CNN that when his father had received a cancer diagnosis, Kennedy called and 'gave me the name of one of the world's foremost experts in cancer treatment. He said, "He's expecting your call. I just talked to him." And he helped pave the way to get my father the treatment that, frankly, saved his life.'"
Perhaps such concern was inspired by the example of the matriarch Rose's selfless devotion to service in the name of the Catholic Church or simply all the time the Kennedy family has spent in hospital wards through the years, nursing or mourning their own.
The first time I ever heard the dreaded phrase "socialized medicine" was during John F. Kennedy's presidency, when the GOP and the AMA fought his administration's attempts at health care reform. And during his own, all too brief presidential campaign in 1968, when Bobby Kennedy told audiences that decent medical care should not be a luxury of the rich, he quoted Aristotle: "If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide."
The only one of the brothers to live beyond the age of fifty and make it to senior citizenship, Ted Kennedy honed his skills as a legislator over nearly as many decades in the US Senate, and universal health care was, in his words, the cause of his life.
Through his years there, Kennedy pushed for it incrementally with the Americans with Disabilities Act, creation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-Chip), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act allowing folks to hang onto their insurance after leaving a job, the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), increased funds for AIDS and cancer research and community medical centers.
But many believe the time for increments has passed. In Edward Moore Kennedy's name, it's time to do the right thing, the big thing; time to revive flagging support and step up to universal reform. Already there has been far too much shouting and far too little healing.
In Newsweek last month, Kennedy wrote with his longtime speechwriter and advisor Bob Shrum, "I've thought in an even more powerful way than before about what this will mean to others. And I am resolved to see to it this year that we create a system to ensure that someday, when there is a cure for the disease I now have, no American who needs it will be denied it."
Ted Kennedy, resolute in his faith and passionately, unabashedly liberal to the last breath, said he wanted "a good ending for myself." Universal health care -- at its best with a public option -- would be it.
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38 Comments so far
Show AllNot much different from G.W. Bush, Teddy Kennedy was a son of privilege. And son of a man who made his millions bootlegging during prohibition and evicting tenants in the middle of winter. Like Prescott Bush, Joseph Kennedy became rich breaking the law.
Despite being the extreme right's favorite villain, Ted Kennedy accomplished nothing of real social substance in congress during his 47 years in the senate (let alone health care reform), the same period in which congress turned even more to the right and Americans workers were repeatedly raped and left to die even more frequently.
WSWS had a brilliant article on Kennedy and this passage says it all: "The fact remains that his name is not associated with a single serious social reform. He spent his final decade sponsoring bipartisan measures of a right-wing character, such as George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind Act”—an attack on public education—and a punitive bill targeting undocumented immigrants that failed to win passage in Congress."
I don't know about you, but I'm not my father, I'm not even like my father in the way I have conducted my life, and neither was Ted Kennedy. There are a lot of examples of well-to-do people actually helping the lower classes. As for your comment that Ted Kennedy accomplished nothing of real social substance in congress during his 47 years in the senate (let alone health care reform)-- Ted Kennedy helped pass Medicare, the Civil Rights act, ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) , SCHIP (Children's health insurance), just for starters... maybe these don't pass as "real social substance" to you.
Waldo is right. He accomplished nothing of substance. Those things people name are just sops, crumbs he threw to the peons, while behind the scenes he spent his whole life aiding and abetting and promoting corporate power and wealth, especially his won.
There is nothing admirable in any way about Camelot. This country does not want or need any royal family. What the Kennedy family attempted to do was to subvert the very foundations of American democracy, to basically overthrow it and establish themselves as a royal dynasty. It was (and is) profoundly unAmerican, about as unAmerican as it gets.
Some people say it's the "end of an era." God, I hope so. I've been alive the entire 50 years since the Kennedys showed up, and it has been a period of one unrelenting assault on working people after another. Beginning with the Kennedy brothers' vicious attacks on the Teamsters Union, the most successful union in the country, who had achieved for their members the highest wages working people have ever made. That was the real beginning of modern neo-conism, not Reagan.
Kennedy was first and foremost a protector of his family connections and fortunes. (Both the Kopechne and Kennnedy Smith episodes speak to this one, as well as the NIMBY policy weaseling and the Kennedy land grabs, etc.)
I remember when Kennedy Jr. was killed in that plane crash. Who was the first guy on the scene? Ted Kennedy. The bodies weren't even out of the water and Kennedy was on it. Two words: Damage control. That was the only thing that went through my mind seeing Ted Kennedy there. Even Caroline wasn't there when they pulled out the bodies. But there's old Ted, making sure the Kennedy name doesn't get smeared with unsavory evidence of some kind.
Second, he was a protector of his class: the extremely wealthy.
The proles were far far down on his list.
Some of the shit RFK as AG did to the unions was really egregious. These guys were so anti-union. And Joseph McCarthy's counsel was RFK, for pete sake.
Can we stop canonizing this family once and for all?
Please, someone's background and family roots are fundamental. But I wouldn't mind much Teddy's corrupt father and how he made his obscenely illegal family fortune if, as an adult, Edward Kennedy dropped the beautiful rhetoric in his several memorable, gorgeous speeches and actually did something substantial for the American working class.
Instead, the Kennedys, like Obama, the Clintons, all Democrats really, talked a good game but when ACTION is necessary, they always side with Republicans, corporate mobsters and war mongers. Sure, they throw some crumbs to the masses, but that's all it is, crumbs. What amazes me is the amount of people treating these womanizing cheating frat boys Kennedys as if they were messiahs. Good grief!
Compare Kennedy's record to that of Huey Long. There's a reason why Huey is still to this day demonised by both wings of the Wealth Party: he pulled Louisiana out from under the plantation owners, created roads, bridges, hospitals, and a fine university, gave Black kids free textbooks, killed the poll tax, and made FDR very nervous by working toward a hugely popular, quasi-socialist program of wealth redistribution at the national level. What did any of the Kennedys -or all of them together- ever do to compare with that? We didn't see anything even close til LBJ's Great Society initiative.
Huey Long could have been our Chavez!
Y'know, I hadn't thought about him in that light, but now that you mention it - you're right! Chavez is very like Huey was - he's pulling the rug out from under the elite exploiters, is *vastly* popular with the poor and marginalised, doesn't hesitate to do what needs done by whatever means are necessary, and makes sure that the people know what he's doing and why so that they're prepared for it and can intelligently reject elite propaganda.
Well caught!
I can certainly grant Winship the privilege of his Camelot-drenched eulogy to Kennedy (after all, his funeral is today). But as the post-mortem mythology of Kennedy as the "liberal lion" (especially with reference to health care reform),has already begun, it is timely enough to begin to subject this sentimental hyberbole to some realities about his political career. Much of this is done by Steve Early in a z-net article this morning: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22464 as he indulges on behalf of working people, in some "Irish alzheimer" ("never forget a grudge") description of the way Kennedy's support of de-regulation and neo-liberalism helped to slap workers to the floor, only then offering them a "hand" to try to get back on their feet. Early has a passable paragraph as well of description of Kennedy's pivotal role (even before the Gang of 6 got hold of health care reform) to change legislation that would transmute his "life time passion" for health care reform into legislation that further delivers what is loosely called "health care" into the untender mercies of the health care industry.
A sociologist (Lloyd Warner) describes an American funeral as an occasion when people "repeat the norms" prevailing among themselves of how an exemplary human life would be conducted, never mind the frailty of the efforts of the "eulogized" in realizing those norms. So let it be with Kennedy. The noble Obama (and many other nobles) hath told us Kennedy was compassionate and Obama is an honorable men.
So let us honor Kennedy and go on looking for the real health care heroes like Bill Moyers, Donna Smith and Wendell Potter, whose lives are in fact dedicated to universal health care. (As well as making a respectful bow to Michael Winship himself for his excellent work with Bill Moyers.)
Thanks for the reality check.
Asked about his greatest regret as a legislator, Ted Kennedy would usually cite his refusal to cut a deal with Richard Nixon on health care.
It's strange to write an article about Ted Kennedy and health care yet leave what he considered his worst mistake (which I would actually consider a principled stand in favor of single-payer, if I didn't feel it was done merely for political calculations).
But as he later explained in Newsweek, "I came to believe that we'd have to give up on the idea of a government run, single-payer system if we wanted to get universal care."
He certainly gave up on that.
I've contacted senator Menendez of NJ about considering single-payer. Will he listen?
Did you ask him about his take on Sanders's S 703? That's the Senate equivalent of House version HR676. How's that governor's race going in NJ by the way and is the NJ legislature considering a state wide single payer health care system? I'm bugging both my senators, house rep, and the WI legislature and governor to consider.
Um, not this week.
He's too busy running around New Jersey putting up signs that read: Muammar Gaddafi! Don't let the sun set on you in New Jersey tonight!
· Yr Obd't Servant
Did Doris Brin Walker get eulogized anywhere like Ted Kennedy Did?
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09237/993034-122.stm
thegreatrockyhill: Your question answers itself. I had to google the name to find that she was the first woman President of the National Lawyers Guild and involved for many decades in significant civil rights cases. Now who would want to eulogize HER as a friend of ordinary people, when that Great Populist liberal lion Kennedy has to get all our attention these days?
"Liberal lion."
Jesus, that phrase makes me cringe. It's so hokey! As soon as people use "liberal lion" to describe Kennedy, they've lost their cred.
"Ted Kennedy's life's work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections," Obama said in his eulogy.
"It was to give a voice to those who were not heard; to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity; to make real the dream of our founding. He was given the gift of time that his brothers were not, and he used that gift to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow," the president said.
Isn't it interesting that Glenn Beck said "I respect the fact that Ted Kennedy has died but I DO NOT AGREE WITH ANYTHING HE SUPPORTED"!!
Here's an improved version of the news report:
_________________________________________
"Ted Kennedy's life's work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections," Obama said in his eulogy. "That's MY life's work!" he added, flashing his own Kennedyesque grin.
Despite the solemnity of the occasion, a ripple of laughs and scattered applause broke out among the attendees.
· Yr Obd't Servant
YOB: did Obama actually say that??? If so, was it the mother of all Freudian slips? Or did I just bite for another your disobedient put-me-ons?
You bit, Jerry! ;)
If only...
I changed "edited" to "improved" as a clue. "Enhanced" would've been too much of a giveaway.
But it wouldn't have been such an easy "gotcha" if it didn't ring so true!
Do you agree?
· Yr Obd't Servant
YOB: yeah, it really did "ring true": as all "Freudian slips" are truths that come out that are not intended to be revealed.
I'll bet my paycheck that both Waldo and mikep have heath care insurance and are not concerned that close to 50 million Americans don't...
Shooting the messenger, aren't we? How about addressing what I or mikep wrote instead?
Mr. Kennedy accomplished very little of substance in 47 years as senator. He supported Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama, 4 corporate, anti-labor, pro-war hipocrytes. His signature political cause — universal health care — has been turned by his beloved Obama into a greedy drive to trash health care for millions of Americans. The bill was being debated in Congress as Kennedy lay dying.
It's "hypocrites." It looks like we'll end up with a "health insurance reform bill" that is worse than what we have now.
In a weird way, that is "worse than Bush." Bush refused even to address health care reform.
More likely they have health care and have never had to fight with their insurers to get the care they need.
And a lot of people riff off Reaganism - "I've got mine and screw the rest of you."
That's been the mantra for the last 30 years. It disgusting, but there it is.
Plenty of people have health care coverage but get the runaround and get screwed over by their insurance company. It's not enough to have health coverage anymore. If you think the system we have is working, it's because you are a cold hearted bastard who doesn't give a rat's ass about your fellow Amerikans, or you have never had to look down the barrel of your insurance company's "gun" in the form of denial of care.
"If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide."
Every other country among the world's top fifty economies thinks so. But the United States of America, the self-proclaimed "greatest democracy on earth", knows that every other country is just wrong, and probably full of [gasp] socialist pinkos to boot.
Americans are firmly convinced that no other country could possibly teach them anything about health care or about moral rights of any kind. And they're probably right. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Jerry D Rose-I didn't even know about her until I saw that obit buried in the backpages of our local paper this week. They almost always obscure the real radicals or in the case of MLK, try to co-opt them and censor them.
"Americans are firmly convinced that no other country could possibly teach them anything about health care or about moral rights of any kind. And they're probably right. There are none so blind as those who will not see."
If that were the case, a majority of the American public wouldn't be for universal single payer.
How about Madonna getting booed in Romania for speaking out against intolerance towards gypsies? What could Americans learn from that?
Are you suggesting that currently ambiguous popular support "for universal single payer" (if true) should be seen as reflecting widespread American understanding of other countries' health care systems and moral rights?
Frankly I'm doubtful that there is even widespread U.S. understanding of their own government's proposed "public option", but I'll modify my comment if it makes anyone feel any better: Americans who actually matter to any legislative process are firmly convinced that no other country could possibly teach them anything about health care or about moral rights of any kind.
Hell, the U.S. doesn't even adhere to such long established "foreign" concepts as habeas corpus rights, knowing that all such old English nonsense is "quaint and obsolete" and probably socialist too. Internationally accepted Rights of the Child? Criminal justice? Laws of war? Humane treatment of prisoners? Forget it all! The U.S. thinks it knows better than the whole world about morality and rights.
Someday it may learn otherwise, but not through its own efforts.
And what the hell did Ted Kennedy do about Vietnam War? Why, he let his brother Robert Kennedy be the fall guy and LBJ and Nixon continue it ! And did Ted Kennedy do about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Sure, he voted against the Iraq war resolutions both times but he allowed the pro-war Democrats to have their say. He said nothing about Joe Lieberman in 2000, campaigned for pro-war Kerry in 2004, and supported Obama in 2008 even when more young people were losing their health and lives to war ! VA, Medicare, etc... are already going broke and what's gonna happen without single payer? I was lucky to have a loving wife bail me out of my mental madness after I lost my limbs in Vietnam but how many of today's young soldiers will be lucky to have any care even if their injuries and PTSD are not as severe? Ted Kennedy was guaranteed his single payer even while we rotted for years without one. Camelot, shamlot ! Forget them. We the people are the ones who need single payer first ! I'm tired of royalty politicking from the Kennedys to the Bushes !
So I too served in the Vietnam War and my best buddy was shipped home in a pine box, shipped to Panama as he joined the Army to get his citizenship. His mother being not to keen about the idea from the start.
So the purpose of this world is to prove the harm in it. So how much worse must things get before start to get better?
Forget healthcare -- Attack processed food industry
The processed food industry gives the average American a 50% fat diet, and in so doing cause over 90% of illness. Surely there is no way to reduce healthcare costs until we attack the root cause of all that fat clogging up our veins, heart, capillaries and thinking part of the brain.
REWARD: At the end of each year give those with no medical expenses a $2,000 reward. Goal being to cut in half the $8,000 a year we give to the medical industry for every man, woman and child in America.
PENALTY: Those with a diet of more then 25% fat must pay all medical expenses until their wealth is gone. For you have the freedom to enrich yourself upon rich food, and I have the freedom to not be made miserable by it.
For Obama by his words and inaction is doing more harm then good for healthcare reform, and rightly so. For both President John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were shot dead shortly after they made an absolute commitment to healthcare for all.
Newsflash: The lipid hypothesis died. It's dead. Sorry to burst your bubble.
I agree about the processed food, but the healthiest diet is one that is high fat and moderate protein, maybe about 10% carbs in the form of non-starchy veggies. And all that fat should be animal fat. SFAs.
Carbs are about the worst thing you can eat for long term health.
Keep the carbs low, eat only green and non-starchy veggies as your carbs, eat moderate amounts of protein and high fat, and you'll be fine.
You need to get up to speed on the lipid hypothesis. That quackery is completely outdated.
I would like to know where Aristotle said that "If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide." I frankly doubt that he said it - it does not sound like him. Can anyone provide a citation?
Apparently your instincts are good: it seems to be spurious, or perhaps loosely translated. The origin is discussed in a pdf here: (google title) "Aristotle and the Right to Health Care: A Cautionary Tale". From the pdf: "In attempts to establish the provenance of the text in question we have conducted an extensive search for its source and original wording. We have not been able to locate it. Our initial curiosity was aroused by several things, including that rights language did not seem to have the Aristotelian context, and health care, as such, was not included in Aristotle’s works.
We searched Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics, and the Magna Moralia without
successfully locating the quote. Nor could we find it in other of works of Aristotle: On Length and Shortness of Life, De Anima, Economics or the Fragments. “Rights” language certainly would stick out in Aristotle’s virtue-based ethics.
Use of the quote in question has been traced to Ruth Roemer, who, when President of the American Public Health Association, used it to begin her chapter in The Right to Health in the Americas: A Comparative Constitutional Study (1989). Roemer obtained the quote from an article by Walter P. von Wartburg published in The Right to Health as a Human Right/Le Droit a la Santé en tant que Droit deL’Homme (1979). Von Wartburg translated the quote himself from, if memory serves him correctly, a Latin edition of the Nicomachean Ethics (email correspondence with the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, August 17, 2006)."
I thought as much, thanks. I would have recalled reading anything like that in the Nicomachean Ethics.
Not only is it not in the Nicomachean Ethics, it really can't be put into intelligible Greek. There is nothing Aristotelian about the quote. Freshmen in college would say that that was obviously not Aristotle. Further I rather doubt that Robert Kennedy used it in a speech. I wonder if the author could cite when RFK used it. Till then I need to straighten out some issues with my medicare disability which refuses to pay for two medically needed pieces of equipment and for which, had I the option of an individual policy, would be covered by my secondary policy, but since Medicare is primary, I am uncovered. Given that what these guys do in the VA hospitals, I do not want them making a bad system even worse.
We needn't hide the fact that a single payer system such as Medicare for all puts us on the road to socialism. After all, for many of us who seek change we can believe, socialism is the way to go. Not the faux-socialism of the Soviet Union but socialism in which not only is there equality, justice and freedom, but in addition everyone is equally important in the total scheme of things. Which brings us to single payer, since nothing could do more to reshape the popular image of socialism than an up and running single payer system. It could be the harbinger of good things yet to come. Not through the efforts of any one person or group, but by popular demand. And easily doable, too, because empowered by what we will have accomplished, "Well wadayaknow, at long last, government of, for and by the people."