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December 04, 2013, 04:48 pm

Women raped in crisis or conflict

PETER FENN

By PETER FENN

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/Peter-Fenn/2013/11/21/8-things-obama-must-do-now-to-win-the-health-care-fight

A new Republican memo, according to today’s New York Times, prods the party to adapt a rollout strategy for killing the Affordable Care Act: message points, hearings, “a multilayered, sequenced assault.”

They have created a “war room” to coordinate all aspects of the attack and sent out a 17-page playbook with sample opeds, social media tactics, a “Call to Action” email chain and numerous talking points as well as a calendar of activities.

This is election 2014 for the Republicans – ‘rev up your engines’ is the order of the day.

[See a collection of political cartoons on Obamacare.]

The White House needs to move fast to counter this onslaught. It is time for an all out effort to not only implement the reform, fix the website and sign up people, but the president and his team must again seize the offense in this debate.

And it must begin now.

Much as Rahm Emmanuel took charge of the effort in the White House during the Clinton administration to pass NAFTA, President Obama needs his own war room to run this operation.

Here are eight specific actions that must be put in place immediately:

1. Someone must be in charge, fulltime.
2. A solid group of seasoned staffers must be in place.
3. A “fact/fiction” website must be up and running with daily updates.
4. An outreach operation must be humming.
5. A direct line to Hill Democrats must be established with a point person devoted solely to this issue.
6. A research and data team must be in place.
7. Someone must be given responsibility to coordinate the various federal departments
8. A press liaison must be in place to be proactive.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the Republican Party.]

There are important arguments that are getting lost in this furor – and have been buried from the very beginning. The old system was a disaster and everyone knew it. Horror stories were abundant for decades about cost, access, getting kicked off plans, bankruptcies, shoddy care and shoddy plans. Never mind the number of people without care or forced into emergency rooms, the most expensive form of “insuring” their health. The current “stories” don’t hold a candle to what was happening for decades.

On the cost side, the math isn’t too hard to understand. If you enroll over 30 million new people in insurance plans the pools grow substantially and the number of people paying is an insurance company’s dream. What insurance executive doesn’t want that outcome?

The critical question now is whether the ACA will be allowed to work or whether it will be deep-sixed by a concerted Republican campaign machine.

The Obama team has to engage and engage with overwhelming force. To do otherwise would be malpractice.

PETER FENN

By PETER FENN

Last week, my father, who is 90, came to Washington for a reunion of people who worked in the JFK White House. Most of his fellow staffers of 50-plus years ago had passed away or could no longer travel.

My dad, who was also director of the JFK Library, remains, thankfully, very vigorous and still teaches at Harvard, serves on all sorts of boards and engages in numerous volunteer activities. His mind is as sharp as ever.

But he confided to me that he wasn’t looking forward to the coming month – to the books and the commentaries and the TV specials. Not only did they bring back the memories of Nov. 22, 1963, but they were often analyses that were destined to be over the top, conspiracy-laden and historically inaccurate.

I, too, have a fear of overdose. I was a 15-year-old kid whose dad worked in the White House. A kid who grew up around Massachusetts politics and who, like so many, was stunned when our principal came over the public address system at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., to tell us the  president had been shot.

[Check out our editorial cartoons on President Obama.]

I remember meeting Kennedy as a boy in the ’50s, campaigning in 1960, going to that final rally at Boston Garden the night before the election and waiting for what seemed like hours for Kennedy to arrive to give his final speech of the campaign. I remember watching the inauguration at a neighbor’s because our parents were in Washington on that snowy day. I even remember my friends in Lexington, Mass., where I grew up, asking me whether I lived in the White House!

Like most Americans of my age, I not only have a clear memory of that Friday, but of the entire weekend. A nation, a world, grieving, glued to their televisions in all the starkness of black and white. Hope shattered, innocence lost, a future uncertain. It was unexplainable, random, surreal.

It was the beginning of a decade of Vietnam, violence on our own streets, more assassinations, growing up as if you had been whip-sawed by events that truly altered our national psyche.

For those who worked in the JFK administration it would, of course, never be the same.

[See a collection of political cartoons on Congress.]

My father was riding in a car during the funeral with the famous reporter Mary McGrory and a number of others when one of Mrs. Kennedy’s staff said, “We will never laugh again.” My father replied, “We’ll laugh again, we will just never be young again.” McGrory somehow thought the quote had come from Daniel Patrick Moynihan and reported it in a column. It was an exchange that encapsulated the time so well.

My dad never questioned it or tried to correct it – Pat was his friend and they all felt the same way that day and for the rest of their lives. For many of my generation it was, and always will be, a defining moment in who we are and how we view ourselves and our country. To all of us, it was personal.

Maybe that’s why, 50 years later, we find ourselves with a flood of books, articles and TV specials.

PETER FENN

By PETER FENN

Tom Hanks in “Apollo 13.”

One of my favorite scenes in a movie is Ed Harris playing NASA ace Gene Kranz at mission control when Apollo 13 was about to burn up. He walks into a room full of engineers and scientists responsible for the mission as they are arguing and screaming at one another. He slams his fist down, quiets the crowd and says, “Let’s work the problem, people.”

That is how I feel about the launch of Obamacare. Fix it. Solve it. Make it work.

The other famous quote from that movie was Tom Hanks as Commander Jim Lovell when he said, “Houston, we have a problem.” The actual quote from Lovell was, “Houston we’ve had a problem.” Now that seems more appropriate for the herculean task of solving America’s health care problems.

[See a collection of political cartoons on Obamacare.]

We’ve had a problem, all right, for generations. We’ve failed to tackle the critical issue of health care in our country ever since Teddy Roosevelt. How can we justify more than 45 million Americans without health insurance? How can we rationalize a system that charges women twice as much as men? How can we not strike back against a system that would deny people health insurance because they had a pre-existing condition or that kicked them off because they hit a cap or got sick?

How can we possibly not recognize “we’ve had a problem” when costs have risen from $1,000 per person in the United States in 1980 to more than $8,000 in 2010? Costs going up 15 to 20 percent a year and eating up one-sixth of our economy are not sustainable.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the economy.]

The Republicans don’t want to work the problem, they want to sweep it back under the rug. Their goal is to turn this into a political football they can kick around between now and November. Five hearings in three days, more votes to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Not one suggested “fix” coming out of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.

I suggest House Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Darrell Issa watch the scene from Apollo 13 where the scientists react to Ed Harris. They put everything on the table that they have to work with in the space capsule and figure out how to bring the astronauts back safely to earth. They worked the problem; it is time for all concerned to do the same on health care. Mend it, don’t end it.