Vital Center: Why are Democrats Fighting for a Republican Health Plan?
Here is the ultimate paradox of the Great Health Care Showdown: Congress will divide along partisan lines to pass a Republican version of health-care reform, and Republicans will vote against it. Yes, Democrats have rallied behind a bill that large numbers of Republicans should love. It is built on a series of principles that Republicans espoused for years.
Republicans have said that they do not want to destroy the private insurance market. This bill not only preserves that market but strengthens it by bringing millions of new customers. The plan before Congress does not call for a government “takeover” of health care. It provides subsidies so more people can buy private insurance.
Republicans always say that they are against “socialized medicine.” Not only is this bill nothing like a “single-payer” health system along Canadian or British lines, but it doesn’t even include the “public option” that would have allowed people voluntarily to buy their insurance from the government. The single-payer idea fell by the wayside long ago, and supporters of the public option—sadly, from my point of view—lost out in December.
They’ll be back, of course. The newly pragmatic Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was right to say that this is just the first step in a long process. We will see if this market-based system works. If it doesn’t, single-payer plans and public options will look more attractive.
Republican reform advocates have long called for a better insurance market. Our current system provides individuals with little market power in the purchase of health insurance. As a result, they typically pay exorbitant premiums. The new insurance exchanges will pool individuals together and give them a fighting chance at a fair shake.
Republicans now say that they hate the mandate that requires everyone to buy insurance. But an individual mandate was hailed as a form of “personal responsibility” by no less a conservative Republican than Mitt Romney. He was proud of the mandate and proud of the insurance exchange idea, known in Massachusetts as “The Health Connector” (the idea itself came from the conservative Heritage Foundation).
What does it tell us that Republicans are now opposing a bill rooted in so many of their own principles? Why has it fallen to Democrats to push the thing through? The obvious lesson is that the balance of opinion in the Republican Party has swung far to the right of where it used to be. Republicans once believed in market-based government solutions. Now they are suspicious of government solutions altogether. That’s true even in an area such as health care, where government, through Medicare and Medicaid, already plays a necessarily large role.
As for the Democrats, they have been both pragmatic and moderate, despite all the claims that this plan is “left wing” or “socialist.” It is neither. You could argue that Democrats have learned from Republicans. Some might say that Democrats have been less than true to their principles.
But there is a simpler conclusion: Democrats, including President Obama, are so anxious to get everyone health insurance that they are more than willing to try a market-based system and hope it works. It’s a shame the Republicans can no longer take “yes” for an answer.
By: E.J. Dionne, Jr. -author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. March 20, 2010, The New Republic
For the GOP, Fear is Always the Answer in Thwarting Health Care Reform
With the Congressional Budget Office’s report out, detailing that health care reform will trim the deficit over the next 10 years by $138 billion, Republican resistance to this bill has gone from annoying to downright illogical, and I mean birther-style illogical. It is no longer about cost or policy issues, it is simply an obvious attempt to kill this presidency and damn the citizens in the process.
The Congressional Budget Office’s methods or neutrality on issues have never been questioned until now. It seems that now because reality doesn’t coincide with the Republicans desire to block health care reform, the CBO is playing a shell game.
“Only in Washington, D.C. can people announce they are spending a trillion dollars and reducing the national deficit,” said Mike Pence., R-Indiana, on The Dylan Ratigan show. “The American people know this is growing the government. It’s only going to increase the deficit, increase the debt…This massive government plan, with the CBO report withstanding, is not fooling anyone.”
Then, on the conservative Web site, Redstate.com: “The natural reaction by most Americans to the unofficial and preliminary claim that the $2.5 trillion ObamaCare bill is revenue-neutral is, well, B.S. (There is a card game with the same name.) The second natural reaction is the realization that ObamaCare must cut the guts out of Medicare and raise taxes through the roof.”
What is even more strange and really disappointing is that this “non-logic” appears to be working. Even with the CBO report, Americans are evenly divided on health care reform. Even with the proof that it will reduce, not add to the deficit, recent polling indicates only a slight improvement for passage of the bill. Why? Fear.
These are uncertain times. Jobs are disappearing. The banks are doubling down on fees while demanding more in terms of credit, down payments and collateral. The American Automotive industry is effectively existing only through taxpayer subsidies. Even Toyota—who not so long ago was considered “the standard” in the industry—appears to maybe knowingly have put its customers at risk to save a few bucks.
FOX News has been on a mission for the last year to discredit and derail this administration by misinforming and enraging its viewers. America is at a tipping point. Within the next decade, Caucasians will no longer be the majority. In the next decade, Blacks will no longer be the largest minority in this country. Within the next decade, America loses its prominence as the wealthiest nation to China. In the last 10 years, we have endured terrorism. We are currently engaged in two wars and still in the middle of the most debilitating recession in more than 20 years. These are uncertain times and Americans are fearful.
Past efforts to overhaul the nation’s health care system looked different. The process to reaching the legislation was different. The folks supporting it were different. The folks opposing reform were different. The one common denominator in this effort and every past effort: Fear.
“It’s really a case of deja vu,” Jonathan Oberlander, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said. “You hear in today’s debate echoes of the past that extend all the way to the early part of the 20th century. And I think the reason that people use fear again and again is that it’s effective. It’s worked to stop health reform in the past. And so they’re going to try and use it in the present.”
The very first time in 1915 when America attempted to change its health care system, it was defeated by tying those attempts to our greatest international treat of the time: The German Empire.
Fear was used again in the next effort of the late 1940s. This time the American Medical Association told citizens if the nation adopted national health insurance, the Red army would be marching up and down the streets. Then even later when former President Bill Clinton tried passing health care reform, the health care industry was firmly in place. Their lobbying influence in Congress was apparent and their might in terms of influencing public opinion by flooding the television with misleading advertisements was informidable. Remember Harry and Louise?
This time around it’s the same. They’ve gone back to the well of fear with the death panels claim, fear of big government, fear of socialism, fear of rationing. Then they targeted the politicians themselves, with the fear of losing their next election. Today, the GOP upped the ante of this fear campaign, by telling Democrats that if they vote for reform, and lose their next election, he will personally block them from future governmental appointments. Once again, the obstacle to change is fear.
Fear is something you cannot reason with. You cannot refute. You cannot combat. It’s this primal instinct that, once aroused, simply takes over your brain, rendering you incapable of either reason or logic. A lot of people are pointing to the points where health care reform falls short. Others are pointing to how the president has come up short in terms of selling reform to America and Congress.
Me? I’m just wondering if this will finally be the year that fear no longer works.
By: Devona Walker- TheLoop21.com’s senior financial/political reporter and blogger-March 19, 2010
Discrediting the Legislative Process Itself
John Boehner-House Minority Leader of "No"
So far in the health-care debate, Republicans have attacked the legitimacy of private negotiations, parochial dealmaking, the budget reconciliation process, self-executing rules, the Congressional Budget Office’s analyses, and even the constitutionality of the legislation. It’s a good theory: Make people hate Washington and mistrust the legislative process and you’ll make people hate and mistrust what emerges from that process.
But it’s also dangerous. As Republicans well know, private negotiations between lawmakers, deals that advantage a state or a district, and a base level of respect for the CBO’s scores have long been central to the lawmaking progress. As the parties have polarized, reconciliation and self-executing rules (like deem and pass) have become more common — and the GOP’s own record, which includes dozens of reconciliation bills and self-executing rules, proves it.
The GOP’s answer to this is that health-care reform is important. Stopping the bill is worth pulling out all the stops. And I’m actually quite sympathetic to this view. Outcomes are, in fact, more important than process. But once you’ve taken the stops out, it’s hard to put them back in. Democrats will launch the very same attacks when they’re consigned to the minority, and maybe think up a few new ones of their own.
The result of this constant assault on how a bill becomes a law — a process that has never before been subject to such 24/7 scrutiny from cable news and blogs and talk radio — will be ever more public cynicism. Evan Bayh put it well in his New York Times op-ed. “Power is constantly sought through the use of means which render its effective use, once acquired, impossible,” he wrote. Republicans, who’re likely to return to power with a majority that’s well below 60 seats in the Senate and a 40-vote margin in the House, will soon find themselves on the wrong end of that calculus.
Photo credit: Melina Mara/Washington Post.
By Ezra Klein | March 19, 2010
Procedurally Correct: The House Can Decide How to Enact Health Reform
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is considering asking the full House to vote on a package of amendments to the Senate-passed health care bill that would also contain language adopting the Senate bill
People who are opposed to health care reform are raising a real ruckus over a possible parliamentary maneuver being considered by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). She is thinking of asking the full House to vote on a package of amendments to the Senate-passed health care bill that would also contain language adopting the Senate bill. That may sound like a fairly exotic method of enacting important legislation, but is it inappropriate? My answer is no.
What this so-called “deeming” provision does is essentially join the two pieces of legislation into one. If the Senate had a different rule on debate this would happen in a conference committee. The House conferees would insist on amendments very similar to those now in the package that Pelosi is bringing to the floor, but the amendments and underlying legislation would all be wrapped together as a single conference report and voted up or down by both the House and Senate.
Because the 59 senators who support health care cannot shut off debate on such a conference report that option is not open, so the House has created this procedure as a substitute.
But, as some might ask, isn’t the 60-vote majority required to end a Senate filibuster part of the legislative process? Is it fair for the House to attempt to circumvent that process by joining two pieces of legislation—one that has already passed the Senate and the other that is being sent to the Senate for consideration?
The answer is yes. Although the filibuster is part of current Senate rules it has not always been. Further, while some continue to think that the 60-vote supermajority required to terminate debate in the Senate has constitutional origins, the Constitution in fact implies that such matters should be resolved by a simple majority—leaving the House free to take whatever view it chooses on the question of the 60-vote supermajority required by current Senate rules.
The possibly apocryphal story of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson arguing over the role of the Senate is often cited by defenders of the filibuster. Washington supposedly asked Jefferson, “Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?” Jefferson responded, “To cool it.” Then Washington is said to have replied, “Even so, we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.”
But the Senate rules did not permit a filibuster at the time this conversation allegedly took place. Filibusters were not allowed under Senate rules until 1806 and they were not practiced until the 1840s—when they were used largely against legislation to limit the practice of slavery.
The Constitution did structure the Senate in a way that it would counterbalance the possibility for erratic tendencies in the House, which elects all of its members every two years. Senators are elected for six-year terms so that only a third of the body is subjected to the scrutiny of the electorate in any one election.
The Constitution does specify that supermajorities are necessary for certain actions by the Senate. For instance, the Constitution requires that two-thirds of the Senate must vote to approve the overturn of a presidential veto or to ratify a treaty. In five other instances the Constitution requires the Senate to act by a supermajority, but for matters such as the passage of ordinary legislation like the health care bill the Constitution provides it to be determined by majority vote.
The House can’t completely circumvent the current Senate rules, but it can respond to the Senate passage of legislation that is unpopular with House members by packaging it as though it were a conference agreement and sending it forward saying that the body agrees to this legislation only if it is amended as specified by the amendments contained in the rest of the package. That is not simply permissible but it provides the House with the only means of voting on the issue that reflects the true sentiment of the body.
Further, it should be noted that use of self-executing or deeming resolutions is in fact not all that exotic and that the record of those feigning great dismay over its use have repeatedly used exactly the same procedure themselves—often with far less justification than can be provided in the current instance. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) calls the proposed procedure “the twisted scheme by which Democratic leaders plan to bend the rules.” Yet during the 109th Congress alone (a portion of which Rep. Boehner served as his party’s floor leader when his party was in the majority) deeming resolutions were used 36 times and Boehner supported all of them.
What the speaker is now considering as a means of resolving the long-protracted debate on health care is putting the two pieces of legislation that deal with health care together so the House can vote on them up or down as one package. That is the way our new policy on health care should be considered and it is highly regrettable that the archaic and undemocratic rules of the Senate don’t allow that as the order of business in both houses of Congress.
By:Scott Lilly-Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress-March 17, 2010
Top 10 Reasons Why Voting Yes on Health Care Reform is Good Politics for Democrats
Reason # 10 — Consider the source. Who are the major advocates of the theory that it is bad politics for Democrats to vote for health care reform? None other than Republican leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner. If they recommend that Democrats vote no, then any Democrat with half his wits should fall all over himself to vote yes.
Reason # 9 — A receding tide leaves those in the shallowest political waters aground. We all saw what happened in 1994 when President Clinton’s health care reform went down in flames: so did a substantial number of the most vulnerable Democrats. Like it or not, Democrats in swing districts are tied at the hip to the political fortunes of their own President. And fundamentally, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) was right last year when he argued that if Republicans can stop the President on health care reform, they will cripple him politically. Like President Clinton, President Obama could fight back from such a setback. But there is no doubt it would massively injure his political stature and that of the Democratic Party going into the fall elections. Let’s face it, people don’t like to vote for losers — or for people who they put in charge who then can’t deliver. Since leaving office, former President Clinton has argued persuasively that the party that nationalizes the mid-term elections always wins. There will be no running away from the national Democratic Party for members in swing districts – no immersing yourself in “local issues.” If health care fails, it will lower the ambient level of support for Democrats across the country among swing voters, and it will depress turnout in the Democratic base. Let’s recall that the biggest reasons the Republicans took power in 1994 was that the depressed and dispirited Democratic base failed to appear at the polls. The defeat of health care reform would hurt every Democrat. And it will mortally wound those in the toughest districts – whether or not they vote for the bill.
Reason # 8 – The Republicans will say you did anyway. When I was 16 years old, it snowed in my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. When it snows in Shreveport, everything stops and the schools let out. This snowstorm happened right in the middle of Mardi Gras, so a friend and I set off on the train to stay with his brother in New Orleans and partake in the Mardi Gras fun. In the course of that trip, we were naive — and with wide eyes — walking down Bourbon Street, when a big hawker at a strip joint said something that taught me an important lesson in life and politics. He said: “Come on in, sonny, they’re going to say you did anyway.” Most Democrats have already voted in favor of health care reform. The Republicans will attack them for that vote regardless. So much better to be able to point to the upsides of passing the legislation. So much better to overcome the negatives created by kilotons of negative advertising, by demonstrating that the sky did not fall when health care reform was passed – and that many positive benefits immediately accrued to everyday Americans.
Reason # 7 – Even voters who say they oppose “health care reform” tell pollsters they support the major elements of the reform. That’s because “Obamacare” as a concept has been vilified by incessant negative advertising and the right wing noise machine. But it wasn’t so easy to convince people not to like concrete policies that were good for them, such as banning insurance companies from denying care because of pre-existing conditions, or preventing them to continue massive rate increases. Once the bill passes, the Republicans will be confronted with having to rail against popular policies – not rant about vague concepts like “Obamacare.”
Reason #6 – Nobody ever votes based on “legislative process.” Democrats who worry that voters will retaliate against them for “jamming through” health care need to take a deep breath. First, of course, no one ever “jams through” a piece of legislation if it passes by a majority vote. Majority rule is the central premise of democratic governance. But that aside, no one ever remembers — or cares — how a law is passed. They care about its effect on everyday people. What normal person remembers how Medicare or Social Security, or the minimum wage, or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), or any other bill is passed? It doesn’t happen — ever.
Reason #5 – The bill is a great “starter house.’ Some progressive Members of Congress are concerned that the final health care bill will not include a public option, as it should. It won’t be perfect in other respects either. But as Senator Tom Harkin says, it is a great “starter house” to build on and add to. The other side knows that. And that’s one of the reasons they want to kill it dead in its tracks. People ask, why isn’t the insurance industry wild about having more customers? The answer is that they don’t care about customers, they care about the freedom to make big profits and provide huge paydays to top executives. In fact, in the last few months, profits have shot up at the same time that the number of people covered has actually dropped. That’s possible because in most states these companies — fundamentally bereft of competitive pressure — can raise premiums until they are blue in the face. The insurance industry knows that this is the beginning of the end of their ability to stalk the countryside unchallenged — to do whatever it is they want to do to make money – and they will do everything they can to stop it cold.
Reason #4 – A victory on health care reform will completely change the political narrative. Instead of “Obama fails to deliver on promises” or “Democrats confront gridlock” the new narrative will be “Obama and Democrats raise health care — like a Phoenix — from the dead.” That new narrative is heroic. It is about people who stay tough when things get hard and triumph in the end — who overcome massive odds to succeed. It is about taking on the massive insurance industry — with its infinitely deep pockets — and winning. Voters like winners. And voters love heroes. That narrative is part of a winning political narrative for the fall elections.
Reason #3 – The boost from passing health care reform will massively increase the odds that Democrats can pass other critical, politically popular measures in Congress this year. Success on health care will enormously increase our ability to pass tough legislation to hold the big Wall Street banks accountable, to create more jobs,and to forge a path to energy independence. For Hispanic voters it will greatly increase the odds that Obama can lead the way to pass bi-partisan immigration reform. All of these measures, and many others, will boost his ability to show swing voters that Democrats deliver — and inspire support and enthusiasm among base voters. But the opposite is also true. If we lose the health care battle, our ability to win other legislative fights will be greatly reduced — and with it the political benefit as well.
Reason #2 – Voters hate the insurance industry. They will be thrilled that Obama and the Democrats have vanquished them on the field of battle. They will love that we have begun to hold them accountable, and rein in their power. It will enable us to frame the legislative battles of the last year and a half — and the electoral battle this fall — as a contest between everyday Americans and the insurance industry, Wall Street and the oil companies. Of course the most important thing about this narrative is that it rings true, because it is true. Victory will allow us to escape the quicksand of “policy speak” and legislative procedure, to the pure essence of who is on whose side.
Reason #1 – Finally, victory will allow Members of Congress to be on the right side of history. Social Security, Medicare, Civil Rights, a woman’s right to vote, ending slavery…. every one of the major steps on America’s road to become a more democratic society has been marked by controversy and conflict. But how many people today would want to brag that their grandfather voted against Social Security or Medicare? There is a reason why progressive leaders are the heroes and heroines of American history. They embody the values and aspirations that are at the core of American values — and human values. When the House of Representatives finally votes this week to make health care a right in America it will be making history that will be remembered for generations. And in the final analysis, there can be no better politics than that.
By: Robert Creamer, political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win” -March 16, 2010, The Huffington Post.
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