Opinion

EDITORIAL: Go it alone

Published: Sunday, February 28, 2010

WE didn’t get agreement last week from seven hours of televised discussion among the major politi-cal players in the federal health care reform debate. Not by a long shot.

What the nation did get, however, was clarity.

Early in 2009, Republicans had focused on foot dragging. “Watz-the-hurry, watz-the-hurry?” was the talking-point refrain.

A companion to “watz-the-hurry?” was to bemoan this lack of detail or that.

In short, we can’t move ahead until we take the time to see the particulars, which was very shrewd politically. Slowing the process allowed opponents to gin up opposition to elements of the plan, real or imagined. Notable with regard to the latter was the fictitious, but devastatingly effective, notion of “death panels” bent on “killing granny” to make health care affordable for the young. No such panels existed. Indeed, you barely hear of them anymore because the fiction, having done its job of building opposition, is no longer needed.

After spending much of the summer making hay on the alleged lack of detail to the plan, Republicans shifted gears as the plan coalesced. Suddenly, the bill without detail had become too much detail — it was “too complex” and the bill itself became the visual prop of an alleged “massive government take-over” of health care, never mind that most Americans would retain employer-sponsored plans bought on the open market.

AGAINST that legislative history, the most clarifying moment from the event last week was the ad-mission by Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., that the crux of the opposition really has to do with the very concept of comprehensive reform.

Alexander admitted that the Republicans not only would not offer a comprehensive, acceptable alter-native to the Democratic plan now, but never would.

“If you’re waiting for Mitch McConnell to roll in a wheelbarrow in here with a 2,700-page Republi-can, comprehensive bill, it’s not going to happen, because we’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t do comprehensive well,” Alexander said.

That is to say, if you’re expecting Republicans to reform health care, don’t. It’s beyond their ideologi-cal capacity. Can’t do it. Won’t do it. Indeed, as a matter of principle, won’t do it. Continued...

The constitutes an unbridgeable philosophical difference between Democrats and Republicans on this matter.

Oh, yes, the GOP will agree to bite around the edges at things like fraud and tort reform, but no one seriously thinks that will solve the unsustainability problem of the current “system.”

In short, Republicans will not be a part of the heavy lifting required to make health care sustainable.

THE reason they want to “start over,” rather than amend, is they want to eliminate “comprehensive.” The problem with that is piecemeal doesn’t work with this system. Piecemeal is what got us into the current mess.

Piecemeal gave us an accidental, historical hodgepodge of arrangements devised by a multiplicity of entrepreneurial interests, each attempting to extract as much wealth for themselves from health care as possible. It should be no surprise that such a “system,” left to its own devices, now leaves more than 38 million people without health insurance coverage, Medicare on shaky financial grounds, and is driving the erosion of wages for nearly everyone who has employer-based health coverage.

Republicans also said at the summit that we cannot, as a nation, afford health care reform. As the only industrialized nation without universal health care coverage for its citizens, that can only mean one of two things — either we’re spending too much on health care already or our spending priorities are messed up.

Yes and yes. Both.

We are spending 50 percent more than anyone else, leaving 38 million citizens uncovered, and getting outcomes that are middling at best.

The clarity, then, is this — bipartisan reform is, at this point, a hopeless illusion. The two sides are so far apart that no agreement worth undertaking is possible.

Therefore, it’s time for the Democrats to get on with acting on their own, if only they can. Continued...

DEMOCRATS should be unafraid of using what is known as reconciliation to pass this legislation with a bare majority of votes in each house of Congress. Republicans are trying to paint such a maneuver — which they used to pass tax cuts during the administration of President George W. Bush — as somehow unfair, that requiring 51 votes in the 100-vote Senate instead of 60 votes is undemocratic. But Americans understand nothing so much about democracy as the concept of majority rule.

Democrats won the election of 2008. It’s high time they begin to govern as if they did.