US Senate primary?

I see in Colorado Confidential that Mark Benner is talking about mounting a primary challenge against Mark Udall in the US Senate race. I heard it yesterday at the State Democratic Central Committee meeting as well. Benner wants to have a debate about universal health care, about holding Bush and Cheney accountable for their lack of respect for the law, and about the Congress' lack of progress on torture, Iraq, and the environment.

I wish him luck. It's a debate we need badly, but I'm not sure we really do debates any more. Even the presidential debates we see on TV aren't really debates, so much as a sequence of commercials. Udall, as respectful as he might personally be for Benner's concerns, will receive unanimous advice from his campaign staff that he ignore Benner. And he will. If we had a functioning traditional press in Colorado it might pick up the story, but we don't and it won't. I hope at least Colorado Confidential will follow it.

I had occasion to talk briefly with Udall at the Arapahoe County Democrats' Pat Schroeder Dinner a couple of weeks ago. (And I thank Arapahoe Chair Mike Hamrick for a great dinner and for seating me with Udall at the last minute.) Udall says he likes the idea of universal health care in principle, but he doesn't know how to get there from here. He says the forces lined up against it in Congress are too strong.

Udall didn't elaborate on that last point, but he didn't need to. The health insurance industry, as I've pointed out, serves no purpose in the US economy other than income redistribution. Of each dollar we spend on health insurance premiums, 70 cents go to doctors, hospitals, medicine, etc.; and 30 cents go into insurance company coffers to use however they like, on second-guessing doctors or political activism as the spirit moves. That's a lot of cash flow available to use as needed to defeat political opponents.

How do you fight that? The business community — the companies that pay the health insurance premiums and get nothing out of it besides a competitive handicap relative to foreign competitors — has that kind of money. But they're too busy fighting the bogeymen of the past, labor unions and taxes, both of which are no real threat. You can chalk that up to the dinosaur leadership of the business community, that has long since overstayed its usefulness; people who will go to their graves or bankruptcy court denying that globalization should have any real effect on their behavior.

I think Udall under-estimates a powerful ally, the one that supplies the money to US businesses, money that these businesses in turn pass through to the insurance industry. The ally he is ignoring, is the American consumer. How do you get from the broken, expensive health care system we have now, to more efficient universal health care? Competition, that's how. Specifically, competition between health insurance companies and the most efficient health insurance provider in America, Medicare.

Setting up this competition doesn't require thousands of pages of legislation. It's a lot simpler than that. Let each consumer choose whether to obtain insurance from the private market, or from Medicare. Let them keep the difference in cash. For entrepreneurs, the self-employed, and contract employees who don't receive insurance coverage from employers, just give us the option to buy our insurance from Medicare if we want to do so. That's all. No mandates, just give us the option. We'll take it from there.

This should be a familiar strategy. The business community destroyed organized labor through right-to-work laws, that in effect divided up the support for labor by offering workers their share of the cost of that institution, in cash. How about a different kind of right-to-work law, to apply that divide-and-conquer strategy to the health insurance industry? Force down the cost of health care by means of good old American competition.

Those of us who are close to the policy wonk community, tend to see the big issues of the time, especially health care, to be endlessly complex. And they are complex. But to gain the allegiance and power of the consumer, we need a part of that strategy to be extremely simple, that anyone can act upon simply by following their own instincts. That's called populism. I'd like to see Mark Benner be a voice for populism, because that's the ingredient missing from Udall's conception of universal health care.

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[Mike Collins]

E pluribus Unum