Olbermann takes on healthcare, sort of

Keith Olbermann’s “Special Comments,” his occasional editorial comment, are often pointed and say things that need to be said.

Some on the other hand, miss the mark completely.

Last night’s, as Mike Madden writes on Salon.com, just fell flat. It was overly long and offered little to the people who watch his show, the vast majority who support reform. It was a good, old-fashioned venting, one he may have needed to perform, but one that we did not need to hear and that did not move the debate forward. Olbermann, as Madden says, “mostly ignored what’s actually happening, in favor of preaching to the choir, rather than explaining the situation.”

The entire hour was dedicated to a “Special Comment” — Olbermann-ese for an editorial — about healthcare reform. But the point didn’t seem to be to pass reform legislation; the point appeared to be to chastise everyone involved in it, on either side, and to declaim about the nature of the system. Where Olbermann could have explained what the legislation would do — and taken on the myths against it — instead he spent his time making solemn pronouncements.

The questions he raised and did not raise, the myths he magnified and dismantled, did not get at the basics of an argument that has gone horribly off track (my Progressive Populist column, which will be published later this month, focuses on this) — the need to expand care to the uninsured and to make sure the insured actually get the coverage they pay for, the need to change how we pay doctors and the need to uncouple health coverage form employment.

Spending an hour spitting venom on a dysfunctional system should have functioned as a call to arms for single-payer, but instead he offered nothing more than an angry salvo in a healthcare battle the contours of which have been decided by politicians without imagination or guts or both.