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OPINIONS
John Patrick Grace: Health care reform, even if done badly, may be better than nothing
Our unsettled times call out for unconventional wisdom. To this end, I propose an epigram from one of England's master essayist-philosophers, the early 20th century author G.K. Chesterton. Are you ready for this? "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly."
Apply this, if you will, to the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) that bailed out the Wall Street brokerage firms, investment banks and the big commercial banks -- Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, City National, Wells Fargo, etc.
The loans those financial entities received -- and in some cases were forced to take -- were, hindsight has shown, done badly. The proper strings were never attached to the loans, and though Congress and the two White Houses -- Bush's and Obama's -- intended that the banks use the bailout funds to make loans and stem the home foreclosure crisis, that didn't happen.
Instead, in many cases, the banks used the bailouts to buy other banks, pay down their own debt and give colossal bonuses to their executives.
In some measure at least, the TARP program was poorly run. Some banks could not even accurately account for how they had spent the money that saved them from collapse.
And yet, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and others now say that if it hadn't been for TARP, the financial meltdown that we know as the longest-running recession in seven decades might have replayed the Great Depression that ran from 1929 right through the 1930s. The TARP funds helped stabilize the global financial system. And that was huge.
We might say something similar about the subsequent bailouts of the Big Three automakers. Billions of taxpayer dollars were thrown at these Detroit-based behemoths to redress their sins of haphazard design and poor fuel-efficiency standards that allowed imports to rush past the home team. And remember how the CEOs of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler first arrived in Washington to face congressional oversight committees -- in private jets.
Once again, though the bailouts were not done to the satisfaction of many of our citizen taxpayers, they have nonetheless allowed three icons of U.S. manufacturing another shot at viability. And that may well turn out to be very good for the overall economy.
Are you starting to see what Chesterton meant? Yes, it would have been better to do the TARP program and the Big Three bailouts with all the right caveats and protections for taxpayer money. In both cases, however, even doing the bailouts badly was almost certainly better than not doing them at all.
Now let's apply Chesterton's epigram to health care reform.
With the House and Senate bills awaiting a September reconvening to be put in final form, the month of August is shaping up as a battle royale among the various stakeholders and ideologues. We are seeing a blitz of townhall meetings, televised panels and rancorous discussions and disquisitions on talk radio, all touting or tearing apart provisions of the pending bills.
We're probably not going to get an outcome that will satisfy anyone entirely. Both the extreme left and the extreme right are likely to be especially disappointed. It may even be that the final healthcare reform product will be done badly.
If Chesterton's maxim holds, however, that will turn out to be better than having done nothing at all.
John Patrick Grace is a former healthcare editor for The Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record. He is now a book editor and publisher. He lives in eastern Cabell County.
