Want to Make News? Talk About Health Care

by Tim Foley

category: Obama and Congress

Published May 04, 2009 @ 04:49PM PT

That seems to be the mantra for our elected officials these days. Want to get a quick headline? Write about what you will and will not support in the health care bill to be. As an added bonus, you don’t even need to make sense.

Let's glance at who made news over this weekend and into today:

Sen. Arlen Specter (???-PA) made the rounds of the Sunday morning news programs to explain his surprising switch from being a Republican to a Democrat. The reaction I heard most often is “give the guy points for honesty,” which is polite-speak for “Whoa! What staffer gave him the OK to say THAT?” You may have expected Sen. Specter to explain his switch by talking about his motivation on the issues, health care being chief among them. Instead he reiterated his opposition to the public plan and budget reconciliation on Meet the Press, which got a fair amount of attention. What got less attention, but was more worthy of surprise, was that Specter came out strongly against removing the tax exemption for employer-based insurance, saying, “Health care provided by employers, which is deductible for them and not added on as income to the recipient, has been the mainstay of health coverage for millions of Americans, and I'd be very reluctant to abandon that.” OK, fair enough. But when asked what he’d like to see in health care reform, he answered, “I've joined with the Wyden-Bennett plan.” This would be the Wyden-Bennett plan which would not only remove the tax exemption but completely abandon the employer-based health care model.  That's not just an idle detail:  it's the whole aim of the Wyden-Bennett plan!

In short, he would have been better off just pretending he didn’t speak English.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Fiscal Conservatism), who was so successful in forcing the stimulus bill to be watered down that we lost millions of dollars in pandemic flu preparation (probably would come in a little handy right about now) is seeking once again to be the indispensible man in the middle for a compromise by coming out early against the public plan. This probably would have been more spectacular if he wasn’t doing so on the heels of 16 Democratic Senators signing a letter supporting said plan. It also would be more spectacular if it was in any way surprising, or if Nelson hadn’t just broadcast to the world that he doesn’t think we should pay for health care reform, period. It’s about as surprising as me telling you I plan to check out the new Star Trek movie. Yet he gets a headline.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Twitter) has an op-ed on Politico entitled, “With bipartisanship, health care reform is possible,” but which should really be called, “With you agreeing with me, health care reform is possible.” Forgive me for saying that if you spend 1/3 of your article (and the only parts of your article that contain policy instead of rhetoric) talking about the things you don’t like about the president’s plan, that doesn’t feel very bipartisanship-y. Suffice to say, Grassley is in favor of the fact that he and Sen. Baucus came up with a timeline for legislation (Yay, us!), controlling costs and covering everyone through some wholly unexplained mechanism, but against the public plan and comparative effectiveness research. You’re shocked, I know. He’s only said both of these a gazillion times. Yet, on the other hand, that’s a quick headline.

And finally, Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) (sorry, no joke) has another op-ed in Politico entitled “To reform, create a real marketplace”. I’ll cut to the chase: we should de-regulate health insurance and induce people to get insurance through the tax code. Because that worked so well with the financial markets, or when the McCain campaign ran on that platform. Rep. Price does have something noteworthy – it’s no longer the doctor-patient relationship that must be protected as sacrosanct (even when it occasionally makes bad decisions), it’s just the decision-making prowess of the patient. As an orthopedic surgeon, I’m sure Rep. Price wouldn’t mind at all if his patients attempted to haggle on their next knee arthoscopy.

So yes, people hostile to the pending reform legislation grabbed all the headlines. And they didn’t even have to know what they were talking about.  (We miss you, Tim Russert.)

(Photo credit:  jeffq on Flickr.)