Editor’s note: This is opinion is from Tom Licata, founder of Vermonters for Economic Health and resident of Burlington.
“Governor Dean, you want a more robust Public Option?”
“I think the bill still has some fairly significant flaws but you know we can work with this. This is what Mitt Romney did essentially in Massachusetts, but it’s going to take a long time but it’s going to lead to reforms ultimately. I wouldn’t call this bill reform but I do think it can lead to reform…it’s going to take a lot more work”
“Governor Dean, Philosophically… do you think your party knows…we’ve chosen a different type of society, more akin to Europe?”
“…when it gets [social inequality] out of whack…you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution.”
This CNBC Squawk Box interview occurred on March 25th; two days after President Obama signed into law the most significant major legislation since Medicare, in 1965.
As Governor Dean stated, “This is a form of redistribution,” and “I wouldn’t call this bill [health care] reform but I do think it can lead to reform.” If this major legislation doesn’t – yet – provide the kind of health care change sold to the American public, what “change” actually was sold?
The U.S. Senate’s health-care legislation recently passed by the House does not “reform” America’s health-care system. Rather, it provides for transformative “change.” Change to America’s social contract; change to America’s civil society; and predominately, change to America’s individual freedoms and its relationship with its government.
18th century philosopher Edmund Burke writes of this difference between “change” and “reform”:
“There is…a marked distinction between change and [reform]. [Change] alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as of all accidental evil annexed to them…. Reform is not change in the substance or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.”
This health-care legislation “changes” the substance of the object; that object being America’s relationship between its citizenry and its government; a relationship emanated from our Founder’s Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. This, I believe, is what Governor Dean was speaking to; like the proverbial adage of boiling the frog in the pot of water by – ever so slowly – increasing its temperature, he knows goals are attained by – ever so slowly – redefining relationships.
It is here – the substantive change between the relationship of an individual’s rights with that of government’s control over both these rights and property – that our nation’s battle lines are drawn.
