The Most Ridiculous Day Yet in US Healthcare Reform
We’ve had a lot of bad days during these 9 months or so of D.C. healthcare reform charades. Today could be the worst one yet. Policy wonks are celebrating like pigs in slop tracing the byzantine twists and turns of Monday’s last-ditch effort to pass reform and hypothesizing about all possible solutions and outcomes. Meanwhile those of us who are really affected by this gargantuan US healthcare mess are holding our heads in our hands. Let’s take a look at how we got here.
Admittedly the House tri-committee bill was fairly free of drama. By producing watered-down reforms with a weak public option, the legislation was able to pass without any made-for-TV moments. Lord knows we’ve had enough of those, which makes C-SPAN’s outrage over being locked out of the final Democratic debate a head-scratcher. Has the American public not seen enough of bullying Republicans interrupting the Democratic Women’s Caucus and saying they oppose reform because they love their country? Reality TV has reached a new low; maybe with cameras off the Democrats might find some productive horse-trading to engage in.
There has certainly been enough unproductive horse-trading. First was the ill-conceived effort at bipartisanship, spearheaded by Max Baucus at Obama’s behest. Never mind that Republicans had proclaimed loudly and often that they wouldn’t support a healthcare bill under any circumstances. It was very important to produce a Senate bill beholden to every special interest and obstructive Republican possible. Now THAT took a while.
Then came the combined bill, when Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson proved to the country that they actually held the most power, not the President. Joe wasn’t acquiescing to the public’s demand for a public option under any circumstances, and magically made the Medicare buy-in disappear along with the age-independent public option. Ben, meanwhile, held healthcare reform for all hostage to his determination to repeal Roe v. Wade. By the time the bill passed, it was a farce.
The public has taken notice of how much Democrats don’t want majority rule. The Big Tent theory really doesn’t hold up – it’s more of a ‘What’s in it for me?’ selfish political vibe combined with a ‘But I can’t do anything to hurt my chances of re-election’ reluctance. Unfortunately for them, voters don’t want people who won’t get anything done while they are in office so they can supposedly increase their chances of staying there. And so we come to the current situation, where the late Ted Kennedy’s seat is under dire threat of crossing the aisle to Republican challenger Scott Brown if Martha Coakley can’t pull it out on Tuesday.
What can the D.C. Democratic caucus say? They cow-towed for over 6 months to Republicans sworn to block healthcare reform. Obama never got tough with foot-draggers, telling Lieberman and Nelson to get out of the way of reform. Nope, he let this process stagnate for the better part of a year. So here we are: one day to get it done. If Democrats can’t, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Unfortunately that doesn’t make it any better for those of who need healthcare reform, sometimes desperately. The historic nature of this healthcare reform attempt may be in its unveiling of a completely broken US political system. On a life-or-death issue, Washington decided to let us eat cake.
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Good job identifying the real problem: broken political system (and touching on a non-existent health care system-can’t break what doesn’t exist!). I recall Michael Moore’s comment in Sick-O about the French: over there, the gov’t fears the people!
I sincerely hope that, unlike the French, we can move to reform without the aid of the guillotine (though it is hard to argue its effectiveness:)
Keep it up!
Hi Gillian, I had to tune into your words today to make sure I was seeing things correctly, and I am, (as usual;). I am writing to give you the good news.
This is a good twist for progressives, although the corporate dems are being willfully obstinant. Now they will have to stop hiding behind the 60 votes and using it to manipulate things so they can LOOK LIKE they are on our side while serving their corporate overlords. They have to be stopped.
I don’t care who’s running against Coakley, it could be Java the Hut or Atila the Hun, I don’t care, as long as he stops these charades. This will force them to work from the true majority of 51 votes and prove to us all that NOW maybe they can write good clean laws thru reconciliation.
But, I see them cheating already, scraping and clawing to keep their power and maintain some semblance of credibility. It’s easier to sort them out now. Those that want to fast track the steaming pile are corporate dems.
We can afford to lose a couple of seats, I like seeing them squirm. I pray they will wake up and realize they NEED TO WRITE GOOD LAWS, no more backroom deals with special interest thru reconciliation. HA HA HA!!!!
Hi CG — you are right, that is the good news, and thank you for putting a happier spin on events. Better we should really know what (rather than just who) we are voting for. There is some hope in reconciliation, and I’m hoping they can package as much as possible to meet the “budgetary only” criteria that we covered around Thanksgiving http://activelyfused.com/index.php/2009/11/reconciliation-may-not-help-potential-senate-healthcare-slowdowns/
For instance, would expanding Medicare, a pre-existing public option, be primarily budgetary? One would think so, as the program itself is long established and adding more enrollees would primarily affect revenues and costs. Consumer protections are a harder sell as budget items though.
The bad news is well represented by this Kaiser Health News headline: “Health Insurer Stocks Rise As Wall Street Anticipates Republican Victory In Mass.” http://smtp01.kaiserhealthnews.org/t/7098/468728/6940/0/ That one doesn’t make me smile!