Coming Out Swinging

Obama has let other folks do the talking on health care reform over the last couple of weeks, mainly the Dems in the Senate and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  Today however he used his weekly address to go straight after the health insurance companies to make the case for health care reform.

“The other week, men and women across California opened up their mailboxes to find a letter from Anthem Blue Cross. The news inside was jaw-dropping,” Obama said in his weekly radio address. “Anthem was alerting almost a million of its customers that it would be raising premiums by an average of 25 percent, with about a quarter of folks likely to see their rates go up by anywhere from 35 to 39 percent.”

Since news of Anthem Blue Cross’ planed premium increases first broke, Democrats in both the House and the Senate have cited little else in arguing their case for refusing to let healthcare reform slip through their fingers.

But with the economy and debate over a jobs bill dominating the majority of their attention so far this year, Democrats had shown very little progress in merging two competing bills, or even formulating a cohesive strategy for sending a single bill to the president’s desk.

That seemed to change Friday, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office left the door open to using a parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation to pass a bill out of the Senate with only 51 votes.

And just days ahead of Obama’s much-anticipated bipartisan, televised healthcare forum, the president himself on Friday – speaking at a town-hall style meeting in Las Vegas – began to reemphasize the importance of finishing the task of signing a healthcare reform bill into law.

He reiterated that argument during his Saturday address.

“The bottom line is that the status quo is good for the insurance industry and bad for America,” Obama said. “And as bad as things are today, they’ll only get worse if we fail to act. We’ll see more and more Americans go without the coverage they need. We’ll see exploding premiums and out-of-pocket costs burn through more and more family budgets.”

The GOP is scared right now.  They thought they had cornered the market on populist anger and directed it all at the Dems in preparation for a massive electoral landslide in November.  They thought they had sealed the deal with the death of health care reform after Scott Brown's election.

But something funny happened on the way to measuring the drapes in Pelosi's office.  Wellpoint singlehandedly saved health care reform and revived the public option with one of the most boneheaded moves in corporate history.  The GOP argument against health care reform was "the government is so horrific that doing nothing is better than any health care reform bill."

That GOP "doing nothing" plan now involves people waiting for their own insurer to hike rates by 39%.  If insurance companies can arbitrarily do that...and they basically can...then there's a serious problem here.  Wellpoint clearly thought the battle was over and proceeded to propose to jack up rates in a number of states, not just California along with their fellow insurance companies.

Wellpoint's disastrous fumble did what the Democrats had been largely unable to do since the days of the Town Hall Blitz scaring the crap out of voters in the summer:  they are now able to take the high road on the populist argument for health care reform.

"If we don't get a health care bill passed and signed into law, the insurance companies will continue to raise your rates until you can't afford insurance anymore."

That's a simple and powerful argument.  It's the argument Obama should have been making from day one but instead he went for the complex and confusing angle on how much the plan would cost.  That allowed the GOP to all but bury it.

Now there's some slim hope to get the plan moving.  The GOP doesn't have a counterattack to this.  A 39% rate hike in this economy?  Suddenly the Republicans don't have an answer at all.  And wisely, Obama is going on the attack.  Given a second chance, it's time for the Dems to make the most of it.