President Obama and congressional leadership are nearing the end of the road on health care reform. The only option left to pass their grandiose visions of a government overhaul of the nation’s health care system into law is to pass the Senate-passed bill in the House. However, House Democrats will only go along with this if the bill is followed by a side-by-side bill including changes to the Senate bill, which could only clear the Senate using reconciliation, a method which would be both unpopular and unprecedented.
This does not come without its own laundry list of problems, as Democrats acknowledged this morning on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. According to Bill Hoagland, a lobbyist for CIGNA and former Republican Staff Director for the Senate Budget Committee, “reconciliation cannot amend something that’s not law…so, if you’re trying to make changes to the health care reform bill to get it more appealing to the House members, they first have to hold their nose and cross their fingers and vote to pass the Senate-passed health care reform bill and send it to the President.”
This comes with certain sticking points for Democrats. The Senate bill would have to be passed first, without any assurance that the changes required by the House would later pass or even make it to a reconciliation vote. As Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) admits, “I’d say at this point, for any House member to vote for something that they object to, with the future potential possible prospect that the Senate will fix it later, when later often never comes in Washington, DC, is an unbelievable leap of faith.”
And passage in the Senate is anything but certain, as several Senate Democrats are leery of the process. Said Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), “Look, I’m obviously not going to say I will support a package and I’ve never seen the package.”
Finally, former Senate Parliamentarian Robert Dove says “That vote counts as a real vote and is used against senators who can claim all they were doing was protecting the budget process, but suddenly are on record as refusing to weigh the budget act to deal with Guantanamo or trying people in New York—I can imagine the list of amendments will be sent forward.”
Reconciliation will not prove an easy path to the finish line for Democrats’ health care bills. President Obama and the congressional majority leaders still face several hurdles to passing their unpopular version of health care reform. Clearly, one of them will be assuaging the concerns of fellow Democrats.
Morning Bell: Someone Needs to Tell the President His Health Care Plan is Dead
Author: Conn CarrollThe day before yesterday’s White House health care summit, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) told reporters: “The only way this works is for the House to pass the Senate bill and then, depending on what the package is, the reconciliation provision that moves first through the House and then comes here.” When Conrad was reminded that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has repeatedly insisted that the House will not pass the Senate bill until the Senate passes a second bill that fixes the first, Conrad replied: “Fine, then it’s dead.”
This was the dynamic that President Barack Obama was trying to alter with his eventually-seven-hour meeting. And judging by pretty much every major news outlet, he completely failed. Rep. Jason Altmire (D-PA), who is one of the 39 House Democrats that the White House needs to switch from a “no” the first time around to a “yes” this time, told The New York Times: “I don’t see very many at all who voted no who are going to switch their votes unless there are substantial changes in the bill.”
And that reality is already spreading throughout Capitol Hill. Politico reports that while Democrats were hoping to pass Obamacare by Easter, “there were signs Thursday night that the schedule was slipping. One Democratic lawmaker involved in the negotiations, who asked not to be identified to speak candidly of the process, said the party would not, in fact, start down the path of reconciliation next week.”
That is some rare great news for the American people. As Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) ably explained yesterday, Americans do not want Washington dictating their health care decisions to them, and that is exactly what Obamacare would do:
The difference is this: We don’t think all the answers lie in Washington regulating all of this. … if the National Restaurant Association or the National Federation of Independent Business, on behalf of their members, wants to set up an association health plan, we think they’ll probably do a good job on behalf of their members. Let them decide to do that instead of restricting insurance competition by federalizing the regulation of insurance, and by mandating exactly how it will work, you make it more expensive and you reduce the competition among insurers for people’s business. We want to decentralize the system, give more power to small businesses, more power to individuals, and make insurers compete more. But if you federalize it and standardize it and mandate it, you do not achieve that. And that’s the big difference we have.
President Obama bristled at this analysis, responding: “Can I just say that, at this point, any time that a question is phrased as, “Does Washington know better,” I think we’re kind of tipping the scales a little bit there since we all know that everybody is angry at Washington right now.”
The President seems to understand that the American people do not want bureaucrats in Washington controlling their health care decisions, but then he seems completely oblivious to the fact that increasing bureaucratic control at the expense of every American’s ability to make their own choices is exactly what his plan does.
The American people know this. That is why support for the President’s health care plan has been steadily declining. That is why the most recent CBS News/New York Times Poll shows 53% of Americans say the United States cannot afford to fix health care at this time. It is why 52% of Americans tell Gallup they do not want to see Obamacare pass with only 50 Senators in support (Vice President Joe Biden casting the 51st vote). That is why 59% of registered voters tell Fox News they want the President to start over.
And he should. If the President truly wants to enact historic bipartisan and lasting health care reform, he needs to admit this version of Obamacare is dead. In 2011, when there is likely to be a more centrist Congress in place, then Obama should come back and start again.
Quick Hits:
- Stocks dipped yesterday after government data showed that jobless claims reached their highest levels since November, renewing concerns about the weak state of the labor market.
- North Dakota, whose unemployment rate is only 4.3%, compared to the nationwide 9.7%, is reaping huge economic gains from developing its oil reserves in the Bakken Shale Deposit.
- The Obama administration is planning to use the federal government’s enormous buying power to institute wage controls.
- The European Union is telling Greece they most double their deficit reductions efforts if they want more help.
- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Congress yesterday, “We have to address this deficit and the debt of the U.S. as a matter of national security, not only as a matter of economics.”