What to Expect from the Healthcare Summit
This Thursday, the Healthcare Summit will finally kick off. What will happen during the course of this none-too-historic event? You may be surprised to feel like you’re watching soap opera re-runs. And no, I’m not just referring to the fact that there was another healthcare summit held just about a year ago.
As I said in a related post introducing Obama’s healthcare proposal, I expect the Summit to be little more than political gamesmanship. In kind of a tit-for-tat televised commercial with Republicans, top Democrats will concede: “You want tort reform included in the bill, despite having no economic impact? Fine, but we’re going to include a public option as well, which has the biggest economic impact of any proposal.” Republicans will scream and cry “socialized medicine” and “death squads” again.
That’s really all the Summit is about, televising the same primarily uninformed political theater we — as knowledgeable healthcare reform followers — have observed for almost a year. But this time the huge buildup and supposed high stakes will virtually guarantee the rest of the country now watches it too, fully exposing Republican obstructionism and highlighting any virtues the combined healthcare legislation has left. The Summit is nothing more than “chicken soup for the legislative soul”, as Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post so aptly put it.
That’s why I haven’t devoted any posts to it until now. There won’t be anything to it that we haven’t seen before: progressives make their last stand for a public option, Blue Dogs pretend to be on board with reform while looking for an out, and Republicans try to divert the conversation with simplistic one-liners. In case this view seems overly cynical, there actually is a written history of recent summits that bears out this line of thinking.
Political summits are historically more about hope than tangible progress, as David Reynolds demonstrated in his book, SUMMITS: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century. Usually they are between two countries; this time the Summit is between umpteen special interests and ideologies. Not a formula for success, but definitely the Obama formula of leadership: bring parties together in the hope of reaching some sort of compromise for change, without having an actual future vision. That’s a great formula for a Secretary of State, but not a winning one for a President of a highly partisan and un-United States.
To sum up, what goes into the Summit will basically be what comes out of it. Obama’s healthcare proposal is nothing but a compromise between the Senate and House bills, in other words it is THE combined legislation. Anything included at top Republicans’ behest will be at the expense of them publicly proclaiming on C-SPAN that they will support the bill. That’s fairly unlikely. So will we see something magical and transformative happen for US healthcare during the Summit? No, but we’ll hopefully manage to shoe-horn more people into our current mess: coverage expansion will continue to masquerade as US healthcare reform.
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[...] I expect the public option to be among the subjects of political gamesmanship at the Summit. See this related post for my take on the Healthcare Summit. You can also tell the White House you want a good healthcare [...]