Today President Obama announced “that he would convene a half-day bipartisan health care session at the White House to be televised live this month, a high-profile gambit that will allow Americans to watch as Democrats and Republicans try to break their political impasse.”
The announcement, which came during a Super Bowl pre-game show, is noteworthy for a number of reasons. First, it finally represents a decision to fulfill Obama’s campaign promise to conduct negotiations in front of CSPAN cameras. In this regard, it is hard to argue with the summit given that the alternative to such negotiations is months of back-room deals with moderates in the House and Senate. Moreover, the summit will augment the scrutiny of Republican counter-proposals, which the White House has clearly prioritized after the Scott Brown debacle. But does that mean it moves us any closer to passing health care reform?
My initial reaction is skeptical. From the perspective of the White House, there appears to be two possible positive outcomes from these negotiations: A) A handful, or just one or two Republicans acquiesce and agree to a further stripped-down bill, perhaps focusing primarily on “insurance reform” that does little to expand health care. B) Voters gain a better grasp of the Democrats’ position on health care, recognize that the GOP is not offering viable alternatives, and therefore decide to support health care reform after all. This latter option, I can only assume, is understood as an indirect path to a better bill.
It’s hard for me to imagine either of these scenarios producing a better health care bill than the ones the House and Senate already passed. The first would be quite strange given the tremendous success that the GOP has achieved through its current strategy of obfuscating the debate and rejecting most all reform provisions out of hand, and even if it succeeded it would produce a bill that will most likely not expand coverage. The second seems even more unlikely given that it would require the public to demonstrate more patience and understanding than it has since this process began.
Unfortunately, my guess is that option A is the most likely, and that the White House knows this. Even if House Democrats had the votes to do it, the Obama administration is clearly uninterested in passing the Senate bill. If this were not the case, why would the President be calling for a health care summit to debate the issues further? Reconciliation also appears off the table for the same reason. Yet at the same time complete failure, i.e. not passing anything, is still the worst possible scenario for Democrats. Accordingly, I expect the White House and Senate Democrats to focus on picking up a handful of GOP votes for something that is called “health care reform,” but does little to expand coverage or reduce costs. The President said that he will not start these negotiations from scratch, which I interpret to mean that they will focus on passing a package of reforms picked from the original bill, but without the more controversial elements.
A bill that banned insurance providers from rejecting applicants because of pre-existing conditions will still do a lot of good for Americans, but I doubt too many liberals made this their top priority to get “insurance reform”.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / Center for American Progress Action Fund
