MEDIA REACTION: PRESIDENT OBAMA'S HEALTH CARE PLANS

UNCLAS KATHMANDU 000861

STATE FOR SCA/INSB, PM/CBM, PM/PRO

STATE FOR SCA/PPD, PA/RRU

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958 N/A
TAGS: KMDR, KPAO, PGOV, OPRC, NP
SUBJ: MEDIA REACTION: PRESIDENT OBAMA'S HEALTH CARE
PLANS

1. An opinion piece in popular English daily "The
Kathmandu Post," September 17, 2009 called President
Barack Obama's healthcare plan inspired by socialist
policies. The piece drew comparisons between United
States and Nepal, where being labeled a 'socialist'
is a badge of honor and for an American politician
would be "a death nail on his political career."
The article recommends study of the U.S. healthcare
system in order to address the needs of the poorest
of the poor.

2. Excerpts: "The ongoing healthcare reform debate
in the U.S. has reignited the partisan flames that
heated up the years of Bush presidency-just the kind
of fires that Barack Obama pledged to douse if he
was elected the president. ...In this acrimonious
debate, Obama has variously been called a 'racist,'
a 'Muslim' and even a 'Communist. ...Imagine a
Nepali prime minister being heckled in the
Constituent Assembly as a socialist. It is likely
that the person would accept the title with relish."

3. "...Obama, of course, cannot declare his
socialist inclinations. In America, that would be a
death nail on his political career. But it's an
open secret that the impetus for many of his
policies come from Social Democrats in Western
Europe: broadening of public option for healthcare
insurance, embrace of internationalism, greater
government oversight over private banks and
financial institutions, government control of
private enterprise, to name a few. Let us call a
spade a spade: These are all socialist policies.
What's hard to understand is the anathema that word
socialism evokes in America, especially among the
republicans. It seems they are still spooked by the
spectre of former Soviet Union which considered
socialism a stopover en route to establishing a
communist utopia. The rest of the world believes
that brand of socialism stopped being a global
forces after the fall of the Berlin Wall: many
Americans remain unconvinced."

4. "The US and the nuclear West argue that their
nuclear weapons guarantee world peace, while any
such weapons possessed by "rogue" states would
threaten that peace. True, developed countries and
mature democracies are less likely to resort to WMD
compared to unstable countries like Pakistan or
Iran, but to say that developed countries never use
them runs against historical fact: Didn't the US
drop A-bombs on Japan during World War II?"

5. "At present the U.S. government covers just 45.4
percent of health costs of Americans-one of the
worst rates in the industrialized world. ...In
opposing Obama's healthcare plan, many Republicans
are playing with the lives of their brethren to
appease their donors and vote bank."

6. "Death of hundreds of people for the lack of
basic medicine like and a little common sense is
just not done. If the developed countries continue
to food most of the healthcare bills of their
citizens, it is because health and education are the
fundamental basis for a developed society. Like in
any other field, the private players can work in
concert with the government in the health sector.
What they cannot do is play the government's role in
providing poor people with social safety nets
without any eye on profits. Obama's healthcare
proposal chiefly aimed at incorporating the poorest
of the poor Americans into the U.S. healthcare
system deserves to be studied in detail while
designing the healthcare system for federal Nepal."

MOON