Healthcare Reform Redux
There are many reminders in the media that the anticipated defeat of the current healthcare reform bill is nothing but history replaying itself, and 75 years of history at that. But it’s easy to forget how similar the issues are. In 1994, when all the buzz was around Hillary Clinton’s efforts, my agency, Lena Chow Advertising, worked with the team at Syva Company (today a part of Siemens Healthcare through multiple iterations of acquisitions) to conduct a healthcare reform survey as part of a promotion. A preshow mailer drew hundreds of attendees to Syva’s booth on the exhibit floor of the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry. We then published the results in a journal ad. The bottom line: 80.3 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the cost of doing nothing far outweighs the cost of reform.”
Now I want to go back and read, one more time, the last chapter of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office, where authors David Blumenthal and James Morone highlight the critical steps required for passage of healthcare reform. Obviously, every president since Roosevelt has managed to skip one or more steps, leading to the demise of the aspired-to reform.
