Obama's Health Care Speech Upstaged: Today's Outrage
NEW YORK (
) --President Obama's big health care reform speech last night was seriously upstaged by all the undue attention being given to the unseemly outburst by Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.).
Never mind that Wilson was reprimanded by fellow Republicans and humiliated into issuing a public apology.
Never mind that most of the assembled lawmakers tolerated the president's speech with the usual decorum.
Never mind that Obama actually offered a big concession to Republicans by suggesting a willingness to abandon the public insurance option.
Never mind that we actually need some reforms to our inefficient health care system.
Please put all that aside so that we can talk about Wilson's outburst.
It was like watching the British parliament heckle the prime minister, only without the intellectual undertones.
It was brilliantly staged theatrics like the infamous shoe-banging by Nikita Krushchev at the United Nations back in 1960. And like the case of Kruschev's shoe, Wilson's outburst is now as much a topic of discussion as the topic at hand.
But perhaps Wilson's moment will be short lived. Maybe our political leaders will find a way to have a constructive dialog about the real issues for once.
It would be nice if we could replace the emergency rooms as the health care providers to the poor. We all know that's how it works and we all know that it's the most inefficient and expensive way to do things. I'm sure even the lobbyists for hospital chains like
Tenet
(THC) - Get Report
would agree.
There must be a way to provide some level of health care coverage for the millions of Americans that don't currently have health insurance. Surely even the big insurers like
UnitedHealth
(UNH) - Get Report
,
WellPoint
(WLP)
and
Aetna
(AET)
wouldn't mind since they aren't serving that market anyway.
And what about the cost of drugs? Surely we can make medication more affordable without bankrupting the companies that invest in massive amounts of research and development to find new cures. I can't imagine drugmakers like
Merck
(MRK) - Get Report
,
Pfizer
(PFE) - Get Report
and
Johnson & Johnson
(JNJ) - Get Report
are too happy with the status quo in terms of patent protections and regulations, so maybe they'd be inclined to consider some new ideas too.
In any event, we won't have to blame the special interests or corporate lobbyists if nothing comes of all this health care reform talk this time around.
We can blame Wilson.
--Written by Glenn Hall in New York.
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Glenn Hall is the New York-based Editor in Chief of
TheStreet.com
. Previously, he served as deputy editor and chief innovation officer at
The Orange County Register
and as a news manager at
Bloomberg News
in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Washington, D.C. As a reporter, he covered business and financial markets, worked in both print and television in the U.S. and Europe, and conducted in-depth investigative coverage at
The Journal-Gazette
in Fort Wayne, Ind. His work also has been published in a variety of newspapers including
The Wall Street Journal
,
The New York Times
and
International Herald Tribune
. Hall received a bachelor's degree in journalism and political science from The Ohio State University and a certificate in project and program management from Boston University.
