In Britain, a new PM is waiting
Michael Goldfarb serves as a GlobalPost correspondent in the United Kingdom, where this article first appeared.
The press was summoned early one recent morning to Chatham House, Britain’s leading foreign affairs think tank, to hear the thoughts of Conservative leader David Cameron on Britain’s national security. As Cameron is likely to become prime minister later this spring, attendance was high.
Anyone in the audience who, like me, thought they would hear a talk about his grand strategy for how to deal with threats to Britain’s national security in these extremely insecure times was disappointed. Cameron, bright and confident, spent most of his brief remarks outlining how he intended to change the internal decision making of government on national security issues rather than outlining a new approach to Iran or China.
The strategic decisions made by the Labour government — e.g. joining the U.S. in invading Afghanistan and Iraq — weren’t questioned … it was how they were arrived at that provoked Cameron’s criticism. The cabinet had been sidelined, he said. “Sofa government,” the prime minister’s unelected friends and advisors sitting comfortably on couches at Downing Street and deciding policy had replaced collective decision-making around the cabinet table. This would stop once he was prime minister, said Cameron. There would be a return to the traditions that had stood Britain in good stead. To facilitate cooperation among the various government departments he would form a “National Security Council.”
The lack of a grand vision from the prime minister-in-waiting demonstrates the degree of convergence between the country’s main political parties when it comes to security issues. On the major international crises of the last dozen years of Labour government it is hard to imagine that a Conservative government would have reacted differently.
Your Globalpost correspondent put the question to Cameron: Regardless of whether the decision was reached on a sofa or around the cabinet table, would he not have joined with the U.S. in bombing Belgrade in 1999, invading Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrowing Saddam in 2003?
Massachusetts vote a referendum on health care reform
Trudy Lieberman, a long-time health care and consumer journalist, is a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review and has blogged about health care for cjr.org since the beginning of the presidential campaign. The views expressed are her own.
A few year’s back, a joke on the cocktail circuit went like this: you know the world is topsy-turvy when the best rapper is white; the best golfer is black, and the Germans don’t want to go to war. Tuesday’s vote in Massachusetts that sent Republican Scott Brown to the Senate taking over the seat held by Edward Kennedy for nearly fifty years produced a new twist to the old joke.
Things are indeed upside down when the advocates for a single-payer, national health insurance system supported a Republican. On Sunday, one of those advocates, Diane Cooper Bridges, sent a letter to the president and to his adviser David Axelrod saying:
“Democrats are voting for Scott Brown b/c MA residents know for sure how regressive and oppressive life is under the failed MA plan, especially in this recession that is not getting any better unless you are a banker or a broker on Wall Street or a member of the U.S. Congress. And we know that the national bills are worse than the MA plan.”
For months a small band of single-payer supporters have tried to get the attention of their elected officials, telling them that their state’s much hailed health reform law, which became the model for the national bill Congress is crafting, was not working according to the official version that sometimes appeared in the nation’s news media. For the most part, those people were dismissed.
Specifically, they wanted them to know that the premiums for insurance that residents are required to buy are too high and unaffordable for many. Small businesses are hit particularly hard and are facing increases of 20 to 45 percent. To make policies affordable, families are turning to high deductible plans which make them pay the first $2000 (or more) of their medical costs before the insurance policy does. One person who recently dropped her policy after a 30 percent increase said what was the point of paying for a policy she could not use because of its high deductible.
Policyholders are gaming the system, buying insurance and using it for a few months to pay for care and then dropping it when they are well. That raises the price of coverage for everyone, but it is an inevitable result of the kind of reform the state passed.
None of the respondents who claim to have experience of the health care system in Europe mention which part of Europe they know something about. “Europe” consists of more than a dozen countries, each with its own health care system. In some places, the health care is excellent, in some it is merely adequate. In all places, it is either completely free or genuinely affordable and, most importantly, available to all. And there is always the option of ‘private health care’ – i.e. doctors and hospitals outside the national system that you simply pay for yourself if you can afford it and do not wish to rely on the health care that is provided free. Likewise, there are private health insurance companies similar to those in the USA if you prefer not to rely on the universal national health insurance schemes that pay for the ‘free’ care.
