Are Americans too uninformed to be part of the process? OK that’s a little over the top but after the last year it’s really difficult for someone who’s spent a career trying to find the facts and then report them to watch the media, the pollsters, and the people follow each other down the rabbit hole into a world where every opinion is valid while every fact is either suspect or not worth our time.

Let’s ponder the polls on health care reform from just the last three frenzied weeks. It says a lot about what we’ve become.

Fox News’s last poll had some interesting wording:

Some Americans choose not to buy health insurance even though they can afford it. The president’s plan requires all Americans who can afford it to have some form of health insurance or else pay a penalty. Failure to pay the penalty would result in an even larger fine, a jail sentence of up to one year, or both. Do you think the government should be able to require all Americans who can afford it to have health insurance or pay a penalty, or not?

Yes                     29%

No                      68%

That was the sixth question Fox asked after the generic approve/disapprove and better/worse queries. I would have liked to see them follow with the same question but substituting “auto insurance” for “health insurance”. Alas that kind of thing was not on Fox’s agenda. For instance check out this one:

Some people think President Obama is showing strong leadership in his efforts to pass health care legislation by staying the course even in the face of opposition, while other people think he is showing stubbornness by ignoring opposition to the health care proposals and moving ahead anyway. Which is closer to your view?

Stubborn? Love that. Nowhere did Fox ask if people knew any facts about the bill. Not on the agenda.

I like this from CBS:

Do you feel you have a good understanding of how the current health care reform bill would affect you and your family, or is it confusing to you?

Good Understanding                       42%

Confusing                                        54%

So where’s the follow-up? Something like, “Why are you confused?” or “Who do you think made you confused?” or “Have you read anything other than headlines about the bill?” I guess it would have been too easy to ask if people thought the news media had done a good job of making the bill clear.

On the other hand CBS got an odd answer to this question:

Do you think Democrats who have been trying to pass the current health care bill have done so mainly because they believe it is good policy for the country, or mainly for political reasons?

Good Policy                                   35%

Political Reasons                           57%

Really? I guess the news that this is “political suicide” for Democrats hasn’t penetrated despite it becoming almost overnight conventional wisdom from the New York Times to Fox News.

The best poll by far was the one done by a health policy organization. The Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll not only asked probing questions about what Americans think about the health care bill but also importantly what they know about it. Here are two:

As far as you know, has the independent Congressional Budget Office which analyzes the cost of legislation said the health reform legislation currently being discussed in Congress will increase the federal budget deficit over the next ten years, decrease the deficit over the next ten years, or is it not expected to have much impact on the deficit?

As far as you know, if Congress and the president did pass a health care reform bill, would most people who currently get health insurance coverage through their employers keep their existing health insurance arrangements or would most people have to change their existing health insurance arrangements?

On the first one 55% got it wrong and 15% got it right. (The CBO said it would decrease the deficit) while 48% got the second one right and 41% got it wrong (the bill would be unlikely to have much impact on people with company plans). Neither result is particularly reassuring that Americans know very much about what they are being asked to opine on.

Another interesting question came from the AP-GFK poll early in March. This one pointed up the childlike unfocused unhappiness of many Americans when it comes to health care (and I would argue a lot of other things but we’ll save that for another day):

How much, if at all, should the health care system in the United States be CHANGED? Would you say it should be changed a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, or not at all?

Great Deal                                  31%

A Lot                                           19%

Moderate Amount                       32%

A Little                                         13%

Not at All                                       4%

So 50% think the system needs significant change and 82% think it needs to change at least some. But how? AP didn’t ask. Probably because the leading answer would have been, “I don’t know but in some way that makes everyone happy.”

Instead we got some real gems like this one from CNN/Opinion Research Corp asked of those who said they oppose the final bill:

Do you oppose that legislation because you think its approach toward health care is too liberal, or because you think it is not liberal enough?

Liberal? The bill is a lot of things but “conservative” or “liberal” it is not. Those political terms are almost meaningless when you’re talking about politicians let alone a huge and complex reworking of one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy. If you disagree then answer this: Is Medicare a “liberal” or “conservative” program? I’m gonna bet you wouldn’t get many of those aging Tea Party folks to say it’s “liberal” since most of them seem to be old enough to be getting their health care through Medicare.

Of course the pollsters don’t really deserve as much blame as their clients since that’s who pays the bills and signs off on how many questions will be asked. The fact that none of these news organizations was interested in finding out what, if anything, Americans knew about the health care reforms that will change a huge part of our economy and social system is a damning indictment on their failure to report both about the bill and the public’s failure to be responsible citizens.

Lest you think this is all much ado about nothing watch this video from an anti-health reform rally in Washington last week:

I’ve asked literally tens of thousands of questions to people over the years about what they think of political and policy decisions and this is not rare. This isn’t a conservative, liberal, rural, urban, racial, or anything else problem. This is an American problem. Everyone’s got an opinion but almost no one has an intelligent opinion yet all are treated equally. Everyone deserves to be heard. Right? Well, no.

What does it say about us as a country that both the pollsters and the polled appear appear to be completely and totally divorced from the “reality-based” world, and doesn’t care?

Joker or Whiteface?

It was inescapable from the very start of Barack Obama’s campaign waaaaay back in January 2007 that race and racism would play a big part in whatever came to pass. And of course it did and it has and it still is and it always will. Now the New York Times — or to be fair one of her columnists — has finally said what is pretty apparent: An awful lot of the screaming incoherent rage ostensibly directed at Obama’s actions is actually just plain racism.

Maureen Dowd put it this way on Sunday:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

Nothing new here if you’re a regular follower of even the slightly-left-of-center blogosphere but for the Doyenne of the Paper of Record it’s a mighty leap.

It’s not a leap Obama nor his inner circle want to make, though, lest the President get drawn into the elemental American battle. It’s been raging for 300 hundred years — from the Founders through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board, OJ Simpson, to the first African-American president. America has never worked through it’s race-tainted birth and probably never will unless and until we’re all so intermixed that to be American means to be “Made of Many Parts.”

Obama has done his best to act as if we are post-racial but he, and everyone else, knows better. As a black man, though, he can’t actually engage in this battle directly without becoming exactly what his conservative critics so desire — another Jesse Jackson. Turning Obama into a black guy who happens to be President (as opposed to what he is: the President who happens to be a black guy) would be a major accomplishment for the Beck-Limbaugh Axis of Anger. And so they will continue to work very hard on that goal knowing they have fertile soil in which to till their seeds of rage.

In the meantime let’s face the facts: When a bunch of angry, white, post-65-year-old people scream and yell all summer about the government taking over health care, it cannot really be about the government taking over health care. Why? Because the screamers all have government health care. It’s called Medicare and every American over 65 gets it (not that Maria Bartiromo would know this). So when these folks rage with such force that they risk stroke and heart attack they do so knowing full well that should such a health calamity befall them, you and I  will pick up the tab for their hospitalization and care. Must be nice.

And when fringe groups organize Tea Parties to protest taxes and bailouts that then reappear months later as personal hate-fests aimed at one man, it is clearly not about taxes and bailouts which got relatively scant attention at Saturday’s big 9/12 rally in Washington. The rally, which was respectfully covered by the Washington Post and The Hill has become yet another paper tiger for conservatives like Matt Welch (of the conservative opinion mag Reason) writing in today’s New York Post:

How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you support? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday’s massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done.

“Small protest,” popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station.

Welch goes on to quote the head of a DC-based think tank and, of course, Dowd. When he frames the argument that way (using a liberal blogger, a think-tanker, and a liberal op-ed columnist as the only evidence of media bias) he’s able to make a convincing case that the protest had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the mainstream media keeping the facts from the American people. Well done sir!

Of course we can thank Representative Addison Graves Wilson Sr. (oh, sorry, that’s Joe to his constituents) of “You Lie!” fame for at least some of this belated recognition of racism as the root. The Republican Congressman from the great state of South Carolina was a folk hero at the march on Saturday for allegedly speaking truth to power. There were more than a few “Joe for President” signs. But as Dowd put it better than I can:

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.

Joe Wilson is a racist. And so are many of the people that have attended rallies and town halls who are incapable of explaining what it is they are opposed to other than “him”. “Socialism” doesn’t count — especially for Medicare recipients and anyone who lives in the West where life exists in most places only because the Federal government built dams to provide cheap water and cheap power. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbauch are racists of convenience: Spouting thinly-veiled racism earns them huge paychecks (Limbaugh = $38 million/year minimum, Beck = $18 million/year).

Case in point: Beck’s recent regurgitation of a video showing young black men in military camo pants and blue t-shirts doing some sort of drill. Watch it all here. Beck first spent a couple of weeks wondering what these young men were up to back in October (during the last month of the campaign natch) and never quite was able to discover (despite plenty of very quick posts to the web explaining what the video was) that it was a high-school drill team practice. If only they’d been dressed in leotards he would have understood! In fact Beck learned very quickly what the video was and he certainly knows now but he still uses it to conjure up the specter of a secret army of black men ready to help the black president get his way — and give us all health care….

And then there’s that Obama as The Joker poster. Is it an affirmative action success story that a black man is playing the Joker? Or is it a not-very-subtle racist reminder of the not-so-distant past? We report, you decide.

Everyone knows there’s deep-seated racism in America and it’s not just among white people. Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Caribbean-Americans, Indians. There’s racism in every group and in every one of us. Sometimes there’s a lot,  sometimes very little. And that’s what Obama tried to be open about in his groundbreaking speech on race during the campaign. His grandma was a little bit racist and so is he. His point was that racism is alive and well and will never go away unless we acknowledge it, talk about it, and keep it uncovered.

Unfortunately some people have taken that to mean wearing racism on one’s sleeve is a good thing.

Walter Cronkite

OK so if the pundits left, right, and center are to be believed Barack Obama’s 7-month-old Presidency is in trouble and his speech to Congress on health care was his last best chance to keep the ship afloat. We’ll let you decide if that’s a bit hyperbolic (see: Bill Clinton health care failure 1994, reelection 1996 or George W. Bush “Education President” 2001, Iraq War legacy-killer 2008).

The big speech on the hill is getting plenty of (digital) ink but it was not Obama’s most important speech on Wednesday. That came hours earlier in New York when he spoke at Walter Cronkite’s funeral. And what he said has everything to do with his, and America’s problems, real and imagined.

Standing before the assembled masses of media and journalism executives and stars Obama spoke truth to power:

It may have seemed inevitable that he was named the most trusted man in America. But here’s the thing: That title wasn’t bestowed on him by a network. We weren’t told to believe it by some advertising campaign. It was earned. It was earned by year after year and decade after decade of painstaking effort; a commitment to fundamental values; his belief that the American people were hungry for the truth, unvarnished and unaccompanied by theatre or spectacle. He didn’t believe in dumbing down. He trusted us.

What a novel thought. Earned trust built over time. Not trust claimed in splashy promos so silly they look like Daily Show parodies. But there was more.

We also remember and celebrate the journalism that Walter practiced — a standard of honesty and integrity and responsibility to which so many of you have committed your careers. It’s a standard that’s a little bit harder to find today. We know that this is a difficult time for journalism. Even as appetites for news and information grow, newsrooms are closing. Despite the big stories of our era, serious journalists find themselves all too often without a beat. Just as the news cycle has shrunk, so has the bottom line.

Ah yes, money. As Obama notes journalism is in perilous times. The giant corporate owners of newspapers are staring into the abyss of free online content and vanishing paid paper circulation. Advertising has disappeared. They are responsible to their shareholders first. Readers and citizens second (maybe).

And television? Despite the predictable lionizing of Mr. Cronkite, network television was always the place of news stars who commanded large salaries to recreate the morning headlines from the New York Times and Washington Post in moving pictures. Before GE figured out it could force NBC to make a profit in news the networks at least did a public service in exchange for the use of the publicly-owned airwaves. Remember those hour-long documentaries in prime time? Those days are long gone as the President noted.

And too often, we fill that void with instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed. “What happened today?” is replaced with “Who won today?” The public debate cheapens. The public trust falters. We fail to understand our world or one another as well as we should — and that has real consequences in our own lives and in the life of our nation. We seem stuck with a choice between what cuts to our bottom line and what harms us as a society. Which price is higher to pay? Which cost is harder to bear?

It is not a lofty philosophical question. The destruction of journalism as a place where citizens could reliably get (mainly) facts and reason is a cancer that will destroy this 233-year-old democracy. It’s easy to blame the big bad companies that control the mainstream media (by which I mean giant corporate media like Fox, NBC, USA Today — not the silly meaning ascribed the phrase by bed-wetting whiny conservatives) but the old answer — the audience chooses what to watch/read/listen — is partly true.

There are choices galore. We have become the Wal-Mart of information: Cheap, available, and disposable. We consume the information we desire. We depend on our Facebook friends to tell us what’s going on. We only watch what we already believe. We believe we know the truth while the other side is brainwashed. Nuance? Shades of gray? The possibility that perhaps we are wrong and the other side is right? Even occasionally? [Insert shouts of righteous indignation here.]

We are children. And we have very bad parents.

The crowd at Cronkite’s funeral dutifully nodded at Obama’s points and then got into their awaiting black cars and returned to their plush offices to prepare the next posting/article/op-ed/newscast/chatterfest. They all might individually agree with what the President said but likely feel powerless to do anything about it. And be honest about it: Is Keith Olbermann suddenly going to grow up and use his keen wit and insight to examine all sides of an issue? Is Diane Sawyer going to grab the reins of World News and use it to give her viewers more than fast-paced gloss-over 2-minute reports on the biggest stories of the day? Is Rupert Murdoch going to direct his minions at Fox News to at least be responsible enough to stick to the facts instead of making things up? Is Jon Klein going to use CNN’s substantial resources to replace his network’s prime-time chatter with actual reporting?

And from their perspective why should they? The audience would rather watch train-wreck TV. And they have all those choices!

If you expect the media to fix itself you are delusional. Along with his honest diagnosis Obama gave the modern-day “giants” of journalism a little pat on the back but it was hard to take seriously. Cronkite was no god. Murrow did more to save America from itself. Adolph Ochs essentially founded objective American journalism. But Cronkite at least believed that he had a responsibility to his country. The Sean Hannity’s of this world believe only in what supports the largest paycheck.

“This democracy,” Walter said, “cannot function without a reasonably well-informed electorate.” That’s why the honest, objective, meticulous reporting that so many of you pursue with the same zeal that Walter did is so vital to our democracy and our society: Our future depends on it.

So look in the mirror. When the American people stop caring about what’s true and factual instead buy into whatever superstition or fantasy suits them at the moment, our democracy is lost.

Our American story continues. It needs to be told. And if we choose to live up to Walter’s example, if we realize that the kind of journalism he embodied will not simply rekindle itself as part of a natural cycle, but will come alive only if we stand up and demand it and resolve to value it once again, then I’m convinced that the choice between profit and progress is a false one — and that the golden days of journalism still lie ahead.

I Know Nothing!

It’s nothing new. Humans seem to prefer faith to facts. And I’m not talking about religion.

Howard Kurtz got lots of (liberal) blog links early this week with an article about the health care “debate” and how facts have been relegated to the sidelines. Kurtz now reports that it was Monday’s most commented piece on the paper’s website as people poured forth their vitriol from both sides of the health care aisle.

Kurtz’s main point was pretty simple: Despite the fact that many reporters demonstrably proved that the death panels myth was indeed a myth, almost half of the Americans surveyed by NBC News believe death panels are a part of the President’s health care reform proposals. Sadly this is not surprising. Jay Leno has played the often incredible ignorance of Americans for laughs on the Tonight Show for years. Likewise Comedy Central’s The Daily Show openly laughs at ignorant Americans (especially those in the media and politics) almost nightly.

It’s all pretty funny until someone gets hurt. And that’s what’s happening. It’s not so much someone but something. America.

It’s one thing to simply decry how uninformed or ignorant people are about things in the news but that misses the point. The problem is that many Americans are eager to be misinformed and wear it as a badge of honor.

Not long ago I gave a talk about politics and media to a small group of people upstate. These were people who paid attention. They read the papers. They watched the news. They listened to the radio. But when I suggested that media hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, and Sean Hannity are not journalists and that no one should pretend otherwise, I was greeted with dismay. There was nothing I could say, no data I could cite that would convince one woman that what came out of Limbaugh’s mouth was not a stream of facts. Rush says he’s 100% correct in his assertions and this woman could not be persuaded otherwise. Others in the room were aghast until I suggested that Rachel Maddow was hardly different.

“But Rachel doesn’t make things up!” “She’s not like O’Reilly and Limbaugh because she tells the truth!” Indeed she traffics in a completely different drug. She does focus in on facts but often only those facts that support her point of view. Facts that don’t help don’t generally get a big airing on her show.

That’s all fine if people understand that prime-time cable news is not the province of journalism but of opinion. The problem is the avid fans of these shows don’t see the difference. The opinions they share with their favored hosts are the facts — according to them.

It’s easy to blame the media for all this and in some respects it’s accurate as well. In their drive to stay relevant (and alive) newspapers have been hacking away at the things that made them a critical part of American democracy. Reporting facts.

When the television networks were freed from producing newscasts and documentaries as a condition of “borrowing” the public airwaves the result was inevitable. Real journalism is expensive. Sitting two people with opposite opinions down in a TV studio is cheap.

When was the last time you saw a well-produced, thoroughly reported story told by an experienced correspondent — a journalist — on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC? Their days are filled with yakking lightweights chatting up current events with whoever will come on free. Their nights are filled with screaming sarcasm and anger from highly-paid hosts trading knowing lies with a small stable of favored “experts”. There is no news here. This is “news” as a game played with a nod and a wink.

As America’s most trusted news anchor (John Stewart) pointed out recently, Fox News hosts have made a healthy living railing against the “mainstream media” while simultaneously trumpeting the fact that Fox News is the number one rated all-news network by a very large margin. Can’t have it both ways? Sure you can in a country where huge numbers of citizens can’t even grasp the concept of cognitive dissonance.

But the media is the dealer feeding the fix. It didn’t create the addiction.

You talkin' to me?

Somewhere along the line that whole Age of Reason thing has failed to stick. Logic is the province of eggheads. Facts are ephemera. Belief is all that matters.

This is an epidemic no one will confront because it hits all the buttons Americans are afraid of: Intelligence, education, real dialogue. Thinking. The American creation myth since Andrew Jackson is built on action. Never mind that our oft-lionized Founding Fathers valued intelligence far more. We are a nation of Rambos and Dirty Harrys. Reagans and Rumsfelds. Doers not thinkers. And in that reality facts don’t really matter.

So let people point out that there are no death panels in ObamaCare. That there is no evidence whatsoever that the World Trade Center was brought down by: a) bombs; b) U.S. missiles; c) Isrealis; d) UFOs. That Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. For many Americans conclusive absence of evidence is no barrier to belief in a thing.

This is where our leaders fail us. Politicians refuse to tell the truth. When Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley (widely seen as a responsible adult) parrots the death panel fiction he aids and abets our decline. He and his ilk are cowards.

When cable news claims to be “Fair and Balanced” or “The Place for Politics” Orwell’s fictional future becomes our factual present. When being “The Coolest News on Earth” gets ratings it can’t be long before one network adopts that as it’s slogan.

And it will only get worse. As we splinter into ever smaller social networking groups, subscribing to our selected Twitterers, monitoring our selected Facebook friends, reading our selected websites, watching our selected cable shows or You Tube channels, we will become a shattered mirror. Each of us living as if the world is really just a reflection of…ourselves.

Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the rest of the world will follow us down this rathole. But if not, the decline of America won’t be as a result of an overextended empire, a reckless war, a bankrupt financial system, or a permissive culture. It will be because we gave up on reason.

The arguments about the relative merits of various plans, the depth of the problem, and even who is most to blame are almost beside the point. Certainly Atul Gawande’s take in the New Yorker’s June 1 issue in which he explained why McAllen, Texas is the nation’s second most expensive health care market is very persuasive in arguing that who pays is much less in important than in how medical care is coordinated. And in a follow-up this past week the New York Times front-paged a story about how McAllen, Texas is — shockers! — among a handful of much larger cities whose “citizens” have donated the most money to Congress in order to influence the health care debate. The story goes on to explain how the very things that Gawande identified as the reasons McAllen’s health care is so expensive have been preserved in the latest version of the House bill. Those doctors are getting a good ROI apparently. So much for reform.

Should we be surprised? Hell no. Harry and Louise may be on the side of reform this time around but the fact that they are back at all is a vivid reminder how incredibly difficult fixing our ridiculous system is. Which is where Obama’s arrogance has made things worse.

We didn’t need Hillary Clinton to tell us that if the U.S. health care system was to really be changed (and it is f*cked up: highest cost in the world producing middling results) a President had to have a war plan. The arguments from doctors, health insurance companies, free-market conservatives, Blue Dog Democrats, and Big Pharma were predictable. Their combined ability to drive the debate should have been worry #1 for the Obama team. ClintonCare was KO’d by a combination of White House hubris and a masterful public relations campaign from opponents. How could Obama not avoid following the same path?

The President apparently believed his mandate and his popularity ratings big enough to magnify his bully pulpit in such a way that he alone could counter the other side. He mistakenly thought that (as did the last Democratic President in the months after he was elected) and having a Democratic Congress was enough. But that was just silly from the start. As multiple reporters have pointed out over the past few months most Americans desperately want the health care system changed — just not in any way that will effect the way it currently works for them. I know that sounds absurd but it’s true.

Americans who have health insurance may complain about the costs but flash a little “socialized medicine” snake oil in front of them and see how fast they switch sides. That’s because even with their co-pays and premiums they don’t really pay anything like the full cost of their health care. Their employers pay a sizable chunk and then that’s subsidized by you and me through an outdated tax credit for health premiums. So Americans are paying twice as much as anyone else — it’s just hidden.

Americans without health insurance — as large and growing a group as that might be — are unfortunately less likely to vote and therefore have less political clout than those with care. So even if they buy into ObamaCare and aren’t persuaded by the RedsCare crowd, they don’t really have the juice to make a difference in the debate.

And look at all those talking heads. Last time around CNN was the only 24/7 cable news network and they actually did news. Now three networks (five if you count CNBC and FBC) spend all day talking about the news instead of the more expensive task of reporting it. Of course all of these fine people who gather to impart their wisdom have generous employer-funded taxpayer-subsidized health plans. In fact the on-air folks at NBC left their union several years back because some rebelled when the union health plan instituted premiums. Yep before 2006 they paid no premiums and they thought that was normal. That’s how out-to-lunch some of these all-day bloviators are.

So in the face of all this readily apparent information what does Obama do? Not a whole lot. His personal appeals and working with Congress aside, the President has done virtually nothing to successfully prepare for, or more importantly, preempt the predictable onslaught. His last minute prime time seminar was too lame too little too late. And so Congress slinks away for the rest of the summer having passed nothing, Obama is left to lick his wounds, and We the People are no closer to having a rational health care system.

Nice going O. The only hope we have is that he seems to learn from his mistakes. Let’s hope the horse hasn’t left the barn.

Insurance Lackeys Harry & Louise

The king has been brought to his knees. General Motors is officially bankrupt. Hindsight is 20/20.

So far this has been a year of hand-wringing among economic pontificators who have variously proclaimed that the wreckage around us proves capitalism’s fatal flaws or it’s remarkable resilience. What is not often discussed is the way capitalism — true, pure capitalism — is colored by conservative ideology. GM is a case in point.

When General Motors and the United Auto Workers (as well as the rest of the auto industry at the time) entered into a practical bargain in which the company paid for retirement and health care (including for retirees) almost sixty years ago no one predicted it would prove the undoing of both. But it essentially has.

What seemed like a perfectly reasonable deal in the salad days of American automobile dominance slowly but surely became an albatross. Over time GM became a health insurance company that also happened to build cars (which became pretty apparent to anyone with a ’75 Vega) — by last year GM supported 344,000 retirees with their contractually agreed upon health insurance. In contrast GM employed just 61,000 hourly workers.

None of this came as a surprise to the companies. They saw the storm coming for decades but generally tried to force the union to accept all the changes required to keep the business viable. There was always another way.

National health insurance was first part of a Presidential platform in 1912 but it wasn’t  until the depths of the Great Depression that Franklin Delano Roosevelt rolled out an actual plan — a plan that died a quick death in the face of uniform opposition from the medical community. And so it was for the next 50 years. Doctors were the ones who argued against “socialized medicine” even as the rest of the industrialized world instituted various programs to publicly fund health care.

But for car companies “socialized medicine” would actually be great for their businesses.

How do deal with the ticking timebomb of retiree health care? The answer was obvious from both an economic and a competitive standpoint: Push the costs of health care, at least, onto the government and taxpayers. That would have been the smart business and the truest capitalist move where survival of the fittest, winning at all costs, and the triumph of competition is given great lip service if nothing else.

It was patently clear from the mid-80s on (and certainly much earlier to the actuaries GM, Ford, and Chrysler employed) that their deal with the UAW was unsustainable. There businesses would be wrecked. And the captains of industry in Detroit were not alone. These staggering legacy costs had helped nearly ruin the steel industry a decade earlier. Rapidly escalating health costs were fast becoming a seminal political issue as well and would soon play a big part in the election of Bill Clinton.

So when Clinton began devising a health plan that would, however flawed, give the auto industry cover for shifting the burden of health coverage to Washington, you’d think these brilliant leaders would seize the moment and save their companies. And they did. Sort of.

The chairman of Ford Harold Poling led the charge at the start of Clinton’s first term coming out in favor of full-on national health insurance as detailed in Nicholas Laham’s book “Lost Cause.”

Poling warned Clinton that rising health care costs posed a grave financial and competitive threat to Ford. He noted that America’s three major international competitors in the automobile industry — Germany, Japan, and Canada — had substantially lower health care costs than the United States. Because they pay less for health care…the Japanese, German, and Canadian auto industries are able to sell their cars at a lower cost than their American counterparts, providing the three industrial nations with a substantial competitive advantage over the U.S. in the international market.

Poling concluded his presentation by urging…that health care reform was required, not just to guarantee all Americans health security, but to maintain American’s competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Hmm. That sounds awfully familiar. Sort of like exactly what’s happened.

So why didn’t America join the rest of the Western world in 1993-94? Because the auto execs were pretty much alone in corporate suites in their support of a national health insurance plan. The Big 3 chiefs said all the right things but seemed conditionally incapable of working the message with their corporate colleagues. Big business outside Detroit was universally opposed. Despite the massive numbers of workers in affiliated industries we’ve been hearing about lately there was virtually no support for the Clinton plan in the business world. And so the insurance industry funded Harry and Louise and the rest it history.

Now many more corporate executives are facing what the car biz faced 15 years ago and so now the logic of national health care seems more solid to them. Business support is much stronger this time around. But it’s too late to save GM and Chrysler and all those workers.

So here’s a proposal: Let’s have the health insurance industry fund the next $30 billion being poured into GM. Maybe they could get Harry and Louise to deliver the check in person. It’s the least they could do.