GOP Senators Will Keep America Safe from Jungle Gyms!

by Tim Foley

categories: Enemies of Reform, Obama and Congress

Published July 01, 2009 @ 05:03PM PT

I sincerely hope the Senate Finance Committee is watching what went on in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this month.  Much has been made of the need to act in a bipartisan way, or at least to make a sincere attempt.  But lately Finance has been obsessed more with what will get votes in their committee and the Senate as a whole than what will actually build a workable package.  Looking at what bipartisanship has bought the HELP committee, it's hard to see how that strategy will be worth it in the end.

I was looking at the HELP Committee Web site for something else when I was suddenly struck by how large the gulf between the two parties really is.  After all, as many commenters on this blog have remarked, this is the moment for a true, robust, national debate on what fixing our health care system will really entail.  Nebulous concepts need to be defined and refined.  We must pay attention not just to coverage, where there are somewhat easier - or at least more familiar - arguments, but also to thorny issues payment reform, reconfiguring our health care workforce development pipeline to adapt to future need, and making the hard decisions that will restore fiscal sanity to our bloated, $2.4 trillion a year system.  Based on the most recent press releases, the Democratic leadership is somewhat interested in that.  You'll see releases on eliminating discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions, on the FDA being able to regulate tobacco, and on the urgent need for health reform.  Sure, it's way too general, but it's at least focused and issue-based.

The Republican side of press releases on the site is another matter entirely.  For one thing, either "Democrat" or "Bipartisan" is part of every headline - as in "Democrats Reject Proposal to Limit Size of Bloated Washington Bureaucracies" or "Democrats Block Efforts to Cut Wasteful Spending, Expand Health Care Coverage to Low-Income Americans" or "Democrats' Prescription for Health Reform:  More Pork!"  From the headlines, you might have no idea what some of these releases are talking about, but in the end they're all amendments to the Kennedy Bill.  Given that Sen. Tom Coburn is on the committee, many of them are purely obstructionist without a legitimate point towards making health care more affordable, accessible or better.  For example, the "Bloated Washington Bureaucracies" press release laments that "In a party-line vote" Democrats rejected Coburn's amendment to force the firing of a federal employee to match every new employee that would have to be hired at HHS to implement health care reform.  "Block Efforts to Cut Wasteful Spending" mourns the failure of an amendment to prohibit "funds from being used on wasteful construction projects like farmers' markets and jungle gyms."  The "Pork" press release is similarly obsessed with jungle-gyms.

This is the level of debate in the world's greatest deliberative body, folks.  One side is wrestling with constructing a workable public health insurance option, determining how to make coverage more affordable, and instituting employer pay or play over the strenuous objections of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The other wants to save American health care from jungle gyms.

George Mitchell once famously said that the only people who take the arguments of Republican Senators seriously are Democratic Senators.  I understand the logic of a bipartisan process as an appeal to squirmish, centrist Democrats like Evan Bayh, Kay Hagan, Kent Conrad and others.  It counts in a close vote to say, "At least we tried."  But clearly our health care debate is operating on two fundamentally irreconcilable levels.  Bipartisanship would be nice, but reality is better. It would be foolish to negotiate away the very mechanisms for keeping health care affordable for lower and middle class Americans just to satisfy a party who'll use any excuse to oppose real reform.

(Photo credit:  Official White House Photostream on Flickr.)