Health care: What now, Democrats?

Health-care reform may not be dead, said Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic Online, but its prognosis is “really, really grim.” With last week’s surprise upset by Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, the White House no longer has 60, filibuster-proof votes to assure passage of President Obama’s historic effort to enact affordable, universal coverage. Brown’s victory has spooked many Democratic legislators and leaders, said David Paul Kuhn in RealClearPolitics.com. Convinced that health care’s “near-term political cost outweighs the party’s long-term goals,” they now want to shove it to the back burner. At best, party strategists are urging Obama to abandon comprehensive coverage in favor of “a limited bill that can be quickly passed.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already indicated that her more liberal chamber won’t pass the current Senate version.

In that case, Democrats may as well bury their plan right now, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The clear message of Brown’s upset victory is that Americans don’t want “trillion-dollar health care” forced on them. Obama’s exorbitant and ambitious scheme “can’t be salvaged at the margins.” The only hope is to start afresh, scrapping “the current reliance on mandates and central planning” and giving the uninsured tax credits as incentives to buy insurance, while using insurance exchanges and free markets to lower costs. But Republicans will never sign on to any health-care plan while Obama is president, said the Los Angeles Times. The party’s official position “is that comprehensive reform is not just unnecessary, it’s a toxic and illegal takeover of the world’s best health-care system.”

Still, the Democrats haven’t given up, said E.J. Dionne in TheWashingtonPost.com. Under a plan now being quietly discussed, the House would pass a version of the Senate bill containing some key amendments. The Senate would then pass that new bill through a legislative maneuver called “reconciliation,” which requires only 51 votes and cannot be filibustered. Before that happens, though, Democrats will have to be convinced it’s worth the political risks of going it alone, said USA Today in an editorial. “For now, it appears that Washington’s polarizing ways, and public anxiety about change, have again left Americans with the most expensive, least-reliable health-care system in the developed world.”

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