As Ezekiel Emanuel laments in his NYT commentary, the national debate over health care has all but disappeared in the 2008 presidential election.
Amidst all the talk about Sarah Palin, a floundering economy and Wall Street bailouts, and whether to pull out of Iraq, debates over the feasibility and desirability of either candidate’s plan has been left out of the political discourse.
While McCain and Obama are trading barbs over who is more “naive” in their debates, both have avoided any real substantive talk about health care. Emanuel is right; health care is no longer number one. It was long eclipsed by Palin and her various -gates and gaffes, then the belly-up economy.
It’s a shame. The first real chance for health reform since 1994 appears to be drown out by the noise of unfortunate and unnecessary debates on other issues that we can ill-afford as a nation.
Summer Johnson, PhD