Lieberman: Put Off Health Care Reform Until After the Recession

Today on CNN, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said the recession is too big a crisis to handle right now, and that Congress should worry about the nearly 50 million uninsured at some point down the road:

LIEBERMAN: Morally, everyone of us would like to cover every American with health insurance but that’s where you spend most of the trillion dollars plus, or a little less that is estimated, the estimate said this health care plan will cost. And I’m afraid we’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy's out of recession. There’s no reason we have to do it all now.

I'm glad that Lieberman added the word "morally." It's hard to understand how the right-wingers can condemn many people to die without health insurance. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 2004 that as many as 18,000 deaths a year among adults could be attributed to lack of insurance.

However, putting it off is not the right answer. Now is the time, with so many more out of work, that the number of uninsured or underinsured has gone way, way up. To be honest, the insurance companies would love this to be delayed, forever.

Of course, what would Lieberman care? He has his own "publicly funded health care" right now. Why don't they just give everyone what Congress has, and be done with it?

If Lieberman thinks the recession is a tough time to start reforming health insurance, he should take a look at what the U.K. did with the National Health Service, which is far more ambitious than anything proposed.

In the midst of turmoil and devastation from WWII, in 1946 the U.K. passed the National Health Service Act in 1946, and created the NHS in 1948. Joe, you think we have problems? You haven't seen anything.