Health-care battle at a crossroads

What happened

Seeking to turn Congress and public opinion against the Obama administration, conservative protesters descended on Washington last weekend, objecting to taxes, corporate bailouts, government intrusion in the marketplace, and, most of all, the president’s push for health-care reform. The protesters, numbering up to 75,000, according to an estimate by a local fire department official, were joined by several Republican lawmakers hoping to build a populist uprising against health-care reform. “Our history is decorated by those who endured the burden of defending freedom!” said Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.). “Now a new generation of patriots has emerged. You are those patriots!” Some of those cheering held signs calling Obama a “socialist,” while others celebrated Rep. Joe Wilson, who gained fame by interrupting the president’s health-care speech to Congress, shouting, “You lie!”

The protest hit Washington as the debate over health-care reform reached a critical juncture, with both parties’ positions hardening. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) this week unveiled his long-awaited “compromise” bill of health-care reforms, which would extend coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans, cost $856 billion over 10 years, and be paid for with $507 billion in cuts to government health-care programs and $349 billion in fees and taxes. Baucus’ bill does not include a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, one of several compromises designed to win support from Republicans and moderate Democrats. But the bill failed to win any Republican support and alienated liberal Democrats. “The way it is now, there’s no way I can vote for the Senate package,” said Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

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What the editorials said

All those bellowing against reform “have done Americans two great disservices,” said The New York Times. They have ignored “the very real suffering of tens of millions of uninsured Americans” along with the “real danger” that millions more could soon join their ranks simply by losing their jobs. And conservatives have “twisted” the debate by playing to people’s fears, instead of making an honest case for opposition.

Democrats keep insisting that the growing opposition to reform is simply “artificial noise” whipped up by Rush Limbaugh and other talk-show hosts, said the New York Post. But when “tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of angry Americans” converge on Washington, the White House really ought to abandon its “dissent be damned” approach and listen to the American people. If Democrats don’t learn the lesson of these impassioned protests now, they may learn it “at the polls next year.”

What the columnists said

Spying my reporter’s notebook, one woman at the march quietly assured me that the protesters were “not all nuts,” said Alex Koppelman in Salon.com. She was certainly right. But there’s no denying that many of the protesters reside in an “alternate reality” where Obama is a “Marxist and a fascist,” health-care proposals establish “death panels,” and Fox News host Glenn Beck is an intellectual guiding light. This perhaps also explains the conviction, expressed by many present, that at least 1.5 million people—“almost three times more than the entire population of Washington”—attended the rally.

Here’s some reality for you, said Matt Welch in the New York Post. The people who came to this rally are just a small part of “the passionate pushback” against the president’s “big government policies,” from “Wall Street welfare” to auto company bailouts to this grotesque spending spree that Democrats call health-care “reform.” Liberals may write off this uprising as racism, or focus on a handful of stupid Hitler signs, but the polls show “an increasing public alarm about government spending and debt.”

Fine—so protest, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. But it’s worth noting that last year, Obama campaigned relentlessly on reforming the health-care system. He won the election “by a hefty margin.” So spare me the cries that you want your country back. “You didn’t lose your country, you just lost an election.” If conservatives want to win the next one, they’ll have to provide “a constructive set of proposals” that cover the uninsured and cut soaring costs more effectively than Obama’s plan, rather than throw “this extremist-riddled hissy fit.”