Health care reform is Washington’s hot topic these days. And perhaps no other politician was as prominent an advocate of health care reform as late Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose name was pegged to many proposed health care bills over the years.
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Kennedy’s eldest son, Edward Kennedy Jr., was diagnosed with malignant bone tumor at the age of 12. Despite losing a leg, Edward survived. His treatment was extremely complex and costly, but was covered by the health care benefits afforded to members of Congress.
Through his personal tragedy, Kennedy met several families struggling to save their loved ones. For most, health insurance coverage limits coupled with prohibitive costs meant that treatment had to be discontinued after a few sessions. Families that had sold their homes and gone into debt were finally left no option but to wait for their children to die.
Kennedy called for the same level of health care afforded to Congress members to be available to all. Year after year, Kennedy would push for health care reform along these lines. And year after year, just as now, the proposed reform legislation would fall to defeat, or simply languish in bureaucratic limbo. Why did Kennedy’s calls for health care reform never materialize?
Working within—and for—the system
Progressive legislation is not the fruit of the legislative process; it is the product of mass struggle. It is the legal mechanism by which the political representatives of the capitalist class concede defeat.
Such was the Civil Rights Act of 1964—the crowning achievement of a civil rights movement that lasted more than a decade. So were the gains of the 1930s, enshrined in pro-labor measures of the New Deal era following the heroic and at times bloody struggle waged by workers around the country.
What would have happened if Kennedy, a prominent liberal with a strong following, had put out a call for a demonstration of one million people around the issue of health care? What if Kennedy had called on labor leaders to mobilize their constituencies and surround Congress with this single demand: Free, universal health care?
A mass movement for universal health care—one that stood a chance of winning—would have been born. That, of course, never happened.
Kennedy was born into a wealthy political dynasty. Whatever personal feelings he had on the health care issue, Kennedy worked entirely within the confines of the U.S. political system, structured entirely to protect the interests of the ruling capitalist class—his class.
To call on workers to take political matters into their own hands would have been an act of class treason. Like his colleagues in the Senate and virtually all their counterparts in the House, Kennedy never doubted that the political arena should be the exclusive realm of representatives bankrolled by corporate interests.
Rather, the multi-millionaire poured a great amount of his legislative energies into weakening organized labor. He offered key support for the passage of NAFTA and GATT. He was also instrumental in the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, with disastrous effects for labor. Unlike truly progressive health care reform, these anti-worker efforts resonated strongly with the moneyed interests represented in Congress.
Kennedy spent his final decade sponsoring right-wing “bipartisan” measures, such as “No Child Left Behind”—an attack on public education—and a punitive bill targeting undocumented immigrants that failed to win passage in Congress.
In death, Kennedy is being eulogized as a kind and brilliant legislator and champion of the people. Yet despite a lifetime in office, Kennedy’s name is not associated with a single serious piece of social reform legislation.
Free, universal health care is a popular demand for a basic human need. Under a truly democratic system, it would have been realized decades ago. It is within our reach, but it will not come into being in the halls of Congress. It will not spring from “town hall meetings,” run more like live-audience infomercials than democratic debates. It will be won in the streets, the one avenue under capitalism where the voices of the working class can make themselves heard, in the tradition of mass struggle that Republican and Democratic leaders alike would rather have us forget.
