More than 3/4 of all Americans believe "it’s important for Americans to have a choice between a public/government insurance plan and a private one." The most popular President in recent memory ran heavily on a promise to reform the broken healthcare system with a workable public option. And Barack Obama is blessed (I use the term sans irony) with healthy majorities in both houses of Congress. Everything points to a new American healthcare system that will put our country back in the company of developed nations.
Everything but political momentum.
Attacked as the slippery slope to socialism by right-wingers who care only about the wealthy in the United States, and nitpicked and pre-bargained away by centrist Democrats in Congress, the once inevitable reform of our healthcare system now seems headed toward some watered-down compromise that does nothing to raise national standards or extend our social safety net.
Policy blogger Ezra Klein has the bad news on inside baseball in Congress:
Health reform is, I think it fair to say, in danger right now. The news out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee was bad. The Congressional Budget Office had scored a partial bill and the result was a total fiasco. But the news out of the Finance Committee is much, much worse.
Put simply, the Finance Committee wanted its bill to cost $1 trillion over 10 years. The CBO returned an early estimate to the panel on Tuesday night: $1.6 trillion over 10 years. The specifics of the estimate have not been made public. But the final number changed everything. Max Baucus, the chairman of the committee, pushed markup back behind the July 4th recess. He has promised to get the bill below $1 trillion over 10 years.
That's very dangerous.
Indeed it is. Baucus, who once posed as a champion of public healthcare, is now in the simply wacking position of attacking his own proposal. The hideous right is already talking up "ObamaCare" - mainly because it smells fear and waffling across the aisle on Capitol Hill. This comes as former Senator Tom Daschle - once tabbed as President Obama's health reform czar - tried to take the public option off the table, whilst hanging with Viagra Bob Dole. Digby's buddy dday calls it:
Tom Daschle has been folding like a cheap suit since before I was born. And he's no longer in Congress or the White House. But this is the kind of bipartisan Village elder circle jerk that gets all the ink in Washington. It's the scurrying around from Max Baucus, trying to gut his own bill to lower the cost from the CBO budget score, that really threatens reform. And unquestionably, he's taking his cues from Daschle, or at least has the same mindset.
As summer rolls in, here's the set-up: Congress has screwed up, wrecked on its own lack of real leadership. And the White House hasn't really tried to spend its still substantial political capital on the issue yet. It's been nibbling around the edges, doing the listening tour thing, and trying to push some kind of consensus through soft power.
I think it's time to get tough and force the issue, before the President's "allies" in Congress piss the whole issue - and ultimately, Obama's hard-won reputation - away for good. In retrospect, it looks like the plan to leave the details to Congress may have been, er, overly optimistic.
As Bob Stein wrote earlier this week: "...horse trading is par for the course in politics, but when the legislation gets into the final stretch, bedside manner won't be able to sooth away the critical issue--a public plan to keep private insurers honest." He's right.
from Amazon.
