Now that Democrats have lost their 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Republicans have some ideas for how their stalled health overhaul can get started again: Find some bipartisanship.Now despite the fact that Orrin Hatch is lying through his teeth (exactly zero of the Senators in the GOP want any health care reform) and Mitch McConnell thinks he's Senate Majority Leader already, not everyone is fooled by this.
"I don't know one Republican who does not want health care reform. I don't know one Republican who would not try to work together with the Democrats," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, on CNN's Late Edition on Sunday. But, warned Hatch, "We would have to start over. There are a lot of things we can agree on right off the bat."
Over on NBC's Meet the Press, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky picked up right where Hatch left off. "You start with junk lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, interstate competition among insurance companies," he said.
But there's a problem with that, says Len Nichols, who heads the health policy program at the nonpartisan New America Foundation. If you take most of the ideas that Republicans are shopping around at the moment, "then we're back to a policy that frankly was rejected by the Republicans when they had a majority."That's right, the Republicans couldn't even get 50 votes in the Senate for their own health care plan even when Bush was President and they had the majority.
Medical malpractice is a good example. Republicans have long advocated for a bill that would cap so-called noneconomic damages — those for victims' pain and suffering — at $250,000. It passed the Republican-led House eight times between 1995 and 2005. But it never even won a majority in the Republican-controlled Senate, despite several attempts. Republicans have long blamed the failure on the influence of trial lawyers, but Nichols says there's also just a lack of consensus on the issue.
(More after the jump...)
Another favorite Republican proposal is the idea of selling insurance policies across state lines. That would let people in one state buy cheaper insurance in another state. But without nationwide insurance regulations and a ban on insurers discriminating against people with pre-existing health conditions, the insurance might not cover as much. The idea also has alarmed state insurance regulators, who would no longer know who would be in charge of regulating what.Remember, Republicans supported the mandate to make Americans buy health insurance...until they all turned against it because the Democrats thought it would be a good idea. Suddenly a staple of every Republican effort at health reform became horrible tyranny when proposed by a Democratic Senate. Despite Democrats bending over backwards to please their Republican masters during Bush's term, the GOP couldn't even muster 50 votes for their own health care plan.
In fact, the idea has been so controversial, says Dave Kendall, of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, that Sen. Mike Enzi, a Republican from Wyoming, failed to get members of his own party to go along with it.
Enzi was one of the Republicans who spent much of last spring and summer unsuccessfully working to craft a bipartisan bill with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana.
All of which makes Kendall wonder why Democrats would take Republican offers to work together any more seriously now.
And now they want the Democrats to scrap everything and go with a plan the GOP has no intention of supporting. Not a single one of them. It's a trap to kill health care reform for good.
Will the Democrats fall for such an obvious ploy?
They've fallen for everything else in the last year. The fact I have to seriously pose this question should tell you what I think. It's only a matter of time before you'll see the ConservaDems think this is a good idea and start walking away.
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