Reading Congress

TNR's Jon Cohn takes a look at the efforts to bring together camps in Congress on health care. The major revalation?

During the past year, Republicans have frequently said they want to work with Democrats. But the real story of the last few months is how unserious those pledges turned out to be. Although you wouldn’t know it from their rhetoric or the media coverage, there are not one but two ostensibly bipartisan proposals out there right now. Either of them could be the template for successful reform if even a few Republicans started pushing them seriously. But, even the ostensibly reasonable Republican senators whom Democrats have tried to engage--Mike Enzi, Charles Grassley, and Hatch--just aren’t interested. And it appears they haven’t been for a while.

Gee, called that last year. The GOP help the Dems usher in a New New Deal era of Democratic control of Congress for a generation by voting for a real health care reform plan? Sure they were going to work with the Democrats on that.

Here's the interesting part:

Earlier this year, a group of former Senate majority leaders--Republicans Howard Baker and Bob Dole, along with Democrats Tom Daschle and George Mitchell--showed how that might be accomplished. After negotiating with each other for more than a year, as if they were still in office and representing their two parties, the group (minus Mitchell, who had since joined the administration) unveiled a fully fledged health care reform proposal in June. They released it through the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank they’d establish precisely to advance proposals like these. And, at least on paper, it looked like the kind of scheme members of both parties could support in good conscience.

The Center’s proposal had the same basic architecture as the plan Obama put forward in his presidential campaign and that congressional committees have been debating this year. Everybody would have to get insurance; in exchange, government would make sure everybody could get insurance, by subsidizing the cost for those who needed financial assistance--and by creating a marketplace in which people without access to employer policies could get coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions.

Still, it was hardly everything Obama or the Democrats would have wanted. Instead of a single public-insurance plan into which people could enroll, the Center’s proposal would have given states the option of creating independent insurance plans to compete with private insurers; it allowed the federal government to step in with its own plan only if, after five years, there was evidence the system needed more competition. This was an effort to satisfy conservatives, who believe a public plan might drive private insurers out of business and, ultimately, starve doctors and hospitals of necessary resources by underpaying them.

In other words, there really was a good faith, bi-partisan effort that was a pretty fair compromise for health care reform. It's been on the table for months, crafted by Republicans and Democrats in a realist view. The White House plan appears to be strongly edging towards something along this plan's lines.

And the Republicans, save Olympia Snowe, want absolutely nothing to do with it.

The Center’s plan included other compromises as well. It expanded Medicaid eligibility to the poverty line but not beyond, while the House bill, in line with liberal expectations, raised eligibility to include people making one-third more than the poverty line. This change helped achieve another major goal: holding down the overall price of reform. All told, the Center’s plan called for $1.2 trillion in new government spending--a significant sum, to be sure, but less than initial Democratic proposals, which, according to most outside experts, were likely to cost $1.5 trillion or more. And, again consistent with conservative thinking, the Center did not simply impose new taxes on the wealthy, as both Obama and, later, the House Democrats would. Instead, the Center’s proposal would have paid for reform by capping the exclusion on group health benefits, then extracting savings from Medicare and Medicaid. It was, in short, a proposal in which both sides gave ground. “I had a lot of trouble with mandates, just as Tom had trouble with the public plan,” Dole said. “But, if we can’t compromise, how are you ever going to get a bill passed?”

And it's even a fairly good plan, certainly better than the nothing we have now, but not as good as the Democratic plans. The point is if the Republicans were ever serious about bi-partisan compromise, this is the plan they should have jumped on. Say what you will, but Bob Dole and Tom Daschle still have a fair amount of pull and respect on the Hill.

The reality of course is that the Republicans in Congress now never had any intention of working out a bipartisan plan on any damn health care anything, ever, period. It's only now in September that the White House is figuring out something that should have been patently obvious to anyone paying attention since August 2008. That really doesn't bode well for this administration and their brain trust. If an amateur fifth-string political blogger can figure this out, so should Rahmbo and the President.

Guys, the Republicans don't want to work with you. They don't want to work with you on anything, save the issues they want to see passed...and then they will attack you on those issues anyway.

Cohn has the right of it, however.

But, presented with that opportunity, Republicans refused it. With one or two exceptions, even the legislators co-sponsoring the measure did not in fact seem to support it. When asked about it, they would inevitably refuse to endorse the particulars and call the proposal--as a spokesperson for GOP Representative Mike Castle did in an interview--“a great conversation starter.” And, while Bennett still seems committed to the bill, it’s hard to know if that will last. The Club for Growth--a conservative group--began running advertisements in Utah, attacking Bennett for his advocacy of the bill. Bennett, in turn, has recently vowed to “kill” Obamacare, which suggests that combining the bills to produce a true compromise--a possibility others have certainly entertained--is not an option in his mind.

After the stimulus bill, which every single Republican in the House voted against and only a handful of GOP senators voted for, is anyone surprised at the Party of No?

You shouldn't be.

[UPDATE 10:45 AM] John Cole gets it, sort of.

At some point, even the dim bulbs in the media (and maybe even Rahm Emanuel) will figure out that all the Republicans want to do is destroy Obama. Period.

Figure out? Hell, they're helping to do so. They're fully aware.