Democrats in the House have good reason to prefer the stronger, more comprehensive health-care reform bill that they passed over the Senate’s reform bill. But if they cannot bring themselves to agree on passage of the Senate bill as it is written, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says, they might as well bow down to the Party of No, and write off the November elections. They will not get another chance to pass meaningful reform in the foreseeable future.
That prospect cratered Tuesday on their party’s loss in Massachusetts of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. They simply cannot change the Senate bill and get it passed again when the new Republican senator from Massachusetts takes his seat. Democrats are hopelessly myopic if they don’t understand that new reality.
It would be tragic to let the opportunity that is now in their hands to pass competent reform crash on the hope of finding a bipartisan kumbyyah moment in the Senate before the November elections. Republicans simply will run down the clock resisting every effort to pass a so-called bipartisan reform bill, and then drub idealistic Democrats in November for being unable to produce one.
Democrats cannot create a bipartisan bill on their own, but that is precisely the point: Republicans will not help them, and do not want to help them, achieve that goal. Their leadership has made that abundantly clear.
In the interim, and for another generation to come, the hope of achieving health care reform will die a slow death (or perhaps a very quick death) as the medical industry lobby rushes to use its newly granted campaign clout — thanks to the new election spending powers so wrongly granted to corporations on Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court’s radical majority.
Deep-pocket, for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industries will take over the fight against reform at election time, spending whatever it takes to brainwash the public with an avalanche of shrewdly distorted advertising claims. The Harry-and-Louise television campaign the giant health insurance industry used in 1994 to kill the proposed Clinton health-care reform initiative will pale in comparison.
This scenario should be as imminently clear to House Democrats, who are refusing to give up the dream for a more perfect bill in favor of the best bill now possible. They should not impale themselves, and their majority, on that futile dream by making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Regrettably, President Barack Obama apparently fails to understand the dimensions of the new political dynamic. He has retreated to the point of suggesting the possibility of offering a short list of tepid reforms in an attempt to reach consensus with Republicans.
Republicans would love for him to take that bait. But Congress cannot simply pull the goodies of reform out of the bag and pass them without the cost-control components that would make the good stuff viable. Insurance reforms — banning pre-existing conditions, requiring the offering of insurance to all comers without discrimination and on level regional rates, banning the dropping of coverage for the ill, ending annual and life-time limits on coverage, and requiring insurers to spend over 85 percent of their revenue on coverage — would not be financially viable for insurers without mandates on individuals to purchase insurance.
And many working class families, as well as many small employers, cannot purchase insurance without federal subsidies, which, in turn, must be financed by other reform measures. Health care costs also cannot be contained without requiring the medical industry to shift away from a fee-for-service approach to care-giving and billing.
Republicans would stall on those tradeoffs, and kill reform. Similarly, allowing the current Senate-passed bill to die for lack of acceptance by House Democrats, who reasonably prefer the better bill that they have already passed, would effectively kill both bills. That would lead voters to conclude that Democrats cannot deliver on their promise. Republicans would be happy to campaign on that failure in November.
Indeed, they are now more apt than ever to thwart every Democratic and administration initiative — from health care to regulatory reform, from banking to clean air and to energy efficiency — to produce the stall and stalemate that they can hang around Democrats’ and Mr. Obama’s neck.
By passing health care reform and letting people discover its benefits — contrary to the propagandized version that Republicans have used to poison the idea — Democrats can achieve a landmark turn in favor of secure and almost-universal health care. It would be a grave mistake to surrender that goal when it lies so close at hand.