There's an old Gospel song called "Trouble Don't Last Always." My mother has repeated that phrase so often that the words are written on my consciousness.
The lesson of that saying is always with me: Though your problems may be present, they are not permanent. Storms pass.
That's why I have grown weary of the Democratic gnashing of teeth over the problems with the Obamacare rollout and the president's falling poll numbers.
Panic lacks perspective.
This situation should remind us of a few things:
Although we like to think of nearly everyone as ardently right or left, a significant portion of the electorate is closer to the middle. An October Esquire-NBC News poll put the number of American moderates as high as 51 percent of the population. Many of these people can swing one way or another based on the news of the day or the season.
As much as people like to talk about the Republican Party's being in its death throes, the party is still very much alive. Things don't like to die. They change. That change may be slow and hard, but as death draws near, change is often forced. The Republican Party cannot sustain itself as a nationally viable party on its current path, but Republicans will eventually figure that out and a charismatic conservative will be able to sell the change.
Change is hard and often messy, and a movement and a messenger — the progressive cause and this president — whose whole identities are about change will always be linked to any discomfort that change brings.
You can't promise more than you can produce. When the president told people they could keep their doctors and current insurance plans and that turned out not to be true, that hurt his standing more than any issue with the website ever could. To most people, that sounds dishonest, and dishonesty is an easily understood and widely reviled trait.
Republicans are going to harp on Obamacare and highlight hardship stories for as long as they feel the story has legs — and that may be a while. That happens in politics. You give your opponents a stick, and they'll whack you with it every time.
That being said, this is not the end of days for this president or his party — no more so than shutting down the government was the end of the Republican Party.
Here is what we must remember:
Obamacare is, in the end, good for America. A report this week from the Council of Economic Advisers found that since 2010, when the Affordable Care Act passed, "Health care spending is the lowest on record," and, "Health care price inflation is at its lowest rate in 50 years." The report also said that the law has "substantially improved the long-term federal budget outlook."
Not only must we lower health care costs so that they don't bankrupt us; we must improve our health care system, something that Obamacare aims to do. Right now, we spend more than any other country on health care and still don't have the best health outcomes. To quote from a PBS NewsHour report last year, in the United States:
• There are fewer physicians per person than in most other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.
• The number of hospital beds in the U.S. was 2.6 per 1,000 population in 2009, lower than the O.E.C.D. average of 3.4 beds.
• Life expectancy at birth increased by almost nine years between 1960 and 2010, but that's less than the increase of over 15 years in Japan and over 11 years on average in O.E.C.D. countries.
Fixing our health care system is not only right from a budget and policy perspective; it's morally right. No one should be turned down for health coverage because of pre-existing conditions. No one should have to live in fear of going broke from getting sick. No one should have to use emergency rooms as his or her only option. As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."
Every policy change — particularly large ones — will have winners and losers. For now, the Republicans will keep highlighting the losers. Democrats must keep highlighting the winners, while reminding people that data points are not the data set. In the end, this health care law will be judged by its overall effects on the population and the economy, which I wager will be a net positive.
Anger is exhausting. It eventually subsides, memories fade and the media turn away to chase another ambulance.
As my mother would say, "Trouble don't last always."
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