Interesting Tom Geoghegan interview re single-payer health care

For reasons explained several times in the past six weeks (here, here, and here), I really hope my long-time friend Tom Geoghegan can win next month's special election for the Congressional seat from the Fifth District of Illinois. This is no slight on any of the other candidates in the race. I know very little about them or the politics of the district. But I know enough about Geoghegan, based on decades of friendship starting when we were teenagers, to be 100% sure that he would bring an unusual level of honesty, intelligence, humor, and again honesty to national politics. I am saying honesty twice because I mean both the personal-probity and the plain-speaking variety.

Anecdote I just remembered: the first time I heard the name "Barack Obama" was from Geoghegan. He was visiting our house in Washington in the early 2000s, after Obama had made it into the Illinois State Senate and then lost his 2000 race for Congress against Bobby Rush, and before (I think) Obama's anti-Iraq-war speech of late 2002. "Watch this guy," Tom told my wife and me. He knew Obama from labor-organizing work on the South Side, since Geoghegan had spent much of his career representing dislocated workers in that area. "He can be our Lincoln." I thought: Yeah, yeah.

Now, back to Tom Geoghegan's honesty: His recent half-hour TV interview with Jeff Berkowitz, available on Geoghegan's campaign web site here and shown below, is a good illustration. You don't want to miss the host's unintentionally campy welcome to the program, 56 seconds into the clip. "Berkowitz is my name. Politics is our game." But the part worth studying is from 2:15 through about minute 10, when Geoghegan unashamedly argues in favor of a single-payer health coverage plan. And after that, he argues with similar directness for "soak the rich" progressive income-tax rates and nationalizing the failed banks -- or "the Greenspan plan," as we now know it.

  
If I were on Geoghegan's policy team, I'd be suggesting that when making the case for single-payer, he spend less time talking about Europeans and more talking about the success of VA hospitals in the US. (Phillip Longman's classic article on the VA as health-care model is here, and subsequent book here. For another time, my own recent experience with an extremely top-of-the-the-line doctor who told me how much simpler his practice would be if he could handle all his patients with the minimum of paperwork, bureaucracy, and insurance-driven hassle of his practice at the VA.) Still, it's impressive to watch a politician clearly explain why it would be cheaper and better to get rid of the massive insurance-company bureaucracy.

So whether you're interested in Chicago politics, health-care policy, or the process of making "daring" points on TV, this interview has its rewards. More about this interview, plus general campaign info, from one of Geoghegan's neighbors and supporters at the GSpot blog, here.