The sweeping improvement to health care in America envisioned by the Obama administration a year ago is dead. Its lengthy life killed it.
President Obama and his advisors looked back at the fate of President Clinton’s health initiative. President Clinton sent his wife up to Congress with a detailed master plan. When it arrived it hung there like a piñata at a Cinco de Mayo festival in a Juarez saloon where three kinds of people waited to bash it: the nearly drunk, the drunk and those who couldn’t even hang on to the floor. To avoid a similar fate, the new administration’s reasoning went, let’s allow Congress to write a bill around some goals advanced by President Obama. Well, that hasn’t worked either.
Having taken over the government in 2009, the really liberal Democrats in Congress (who never face serious Republican challenges back home) drafted a bill with every wish and wet dream idea they ever had in it. The Democrats from states where they depended on Republican cross voting to get elected balked at some of these ideas, not that they weren’t good. They were just too risky for some Democrats. Meanwhile, the Republicans got together and decided they would not support anything – even a 21st Century version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes – not even if they could put their hand into Jesus’ side.
Over in the Senate the Democratic majority that could push a proposal through dithered too damn long and then the great Liberal Lion, Ted Kennedy, died. What could have been the strongest voice for health care reform was silenced. The one man who might have brokered a deal, as sick as he was, with a few Republicans was gone from the Senate scene.
Then the seat held by Senator Kennedy was given to a Republican by the Massachusetts voters and the chances for health care reform began to really slide down hill. In the end, the proponents wanted and expected too much, the administration plan to let the Congress draft the bill has turned out to be a mistake and the refusal of the Republicans in Congress to come to the table in any collegial manner finally scuttled the whole idea of imaginative health care reform. If anything comes out in 2010 it will be a watered down version of the great dream. The 35 million uncovered Americans will remain uncovered. There may be tinkering around the edges but in the long run insurers will make more money and consumers will pay higher premiums.
(From my blog.)
