edbaiting is the Bush strategy on health care.
In 1992, President George Herbert Walker Bush was surrounded by spiraling health care costs and 37 million uninsured families. Beholden to health care industry PACs, Bush produced no plan other than a minuscule tax cut and telling people not to drink or smoke and to wear their seat belts. He tried to turn any discussion about controlling costs into hammers and sickles.
When some Democrats in Congress talked about a more national health care system, Bush railed, ''I am going to fight a nationalized, socialized medicine approach for this country.'' Bush added, ''They think socialized medicine - everything provided by the government, totally government-controlled medical care is just the ticket ... It's also the ticket for treatment waiting lines. Anyone who has spent months checking the mail for that income tax refund or tried to track down a missing Social Security check or wasted a day in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles is going to think long and hard before the let the government play doctor.''
Eight years later, Bush's son, George W., is running for president. Now we have 44 million Americans without health insurance. (The senior Bush may have lost with his redbaiting, but the health care industry did not.)
Democratic rival Al Gore has scored points with voters by seizing upon health care. Gore has singled out some drug companies for price gouging and promised health insurance for all children and a prescription drug benefit. Gore says America should move ''step by step'' toward universal coverage. That may be too incremental for hard-core advocates of a national system, but it is light years ahead of George W., who had no plan coming out of his convention. His new, economy-sized prescription drug plan was crafted so as to not offend health care industries like pharmaceuticals, which give three times more money to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party.
This leaves George W. reaching into his daddy's tackle box to pull out more red bait. His press aides call Gore's attack on pharmaceuticals a ''nationalized drug plan,'' ''similar to Hillary Clinton's attempt to nationalize health care.''
Why George W. thinks he can fish with this bait better than his father is a mystery, since Americans remain highly concerned about health care. Yet, that is probably the only strategy George W. has. He certainly cannot run on his record as governor of Texas.
If the rest of the nation were like Texas:
27 percent of people under 65 would be uninsured, according to federal data, the second-worst percentage of any state in the nation;
51 percent of low-income adults would be uninsured, worst in the nation, according to federal figures.
12 percent of people with family income over the national median income would be uninsured, worst in the nation.
One out of every four pregnant mothers would go without prenatal care her first trimester, the fourth worst percentage in the nation.
14 percent of people would not visit a doctor because of cost, the seventh-worst percentage in the nation.
Only 35 percent of low income people under 65 would have Medicaid, the ninth-worst percentage in the nation.
The percentage of uninsured people would skyrocket. From 1998 to 1999, Texas had the nation's worst decline in parent enrollment in Medicaid, a 30 percent drop. From 1996 to 1999, Texas had the worst decline in enrollment of children in Medicaid, a 14 percent drop. Texas has 600,000 children who are eligible for Medicaid coverage but are not enrolled because Texas did not provide the funds.
Bush says ''I offer new ideas, ideas that are working.'' The question is, ''Where?'' Certainly not in Texas. Last month a federal judge, saying ''a poor and often-isolated population should not be robbed of their right to services,'' ruled that Texas has denied proper care to one million low-income children.
The problems include a teenager with cerebral palsy who waited more than a year for a wheelchair, jamming children into ''grossly inadequate and incomplete'' checkups, and providing so little information about services available under Medicaid that one million children in the state did not see a dentist last year. That resulted in emergency room cases of oral infections, dehydration, fevers, and malnourishment.
Americans may not agree on to how to fix the health care system, detesting the profiteering of private providers but conditioned to be leery of a Canadian single-payer system. But no one wants to see the health care system of Texas exported to America. It is a measure of Bush's desperation on this issue that he has already reached for a tactic that failed his dad.
When the elder Bush insinuated that universal health care would turn Mayo Clinics into Mao Centers, he was exposed as out of touch. George W. is trying to do the same thing, with a Texas record no one wants to touch. Bush will be waiting at the shore a long time. The voters will not be biting.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
