Health care: Should Democrats go it alone?

In trying to reform the nation’s broken health-care system, said Katrina vanden Heuvel in TheNation.com, President Obama made one fundamental mistake: He asked for good-faith Republican participation. Obviously, a bipartisan bill would be preferable. But with the GOP ranting about White House–imposed “death panels,” and “fear mongering about government takeovers and socialism,” it’s clear it will use any tactic—no matter how false or inflammatory—to deal a popular Democratic president his first major defeat. With no votes or cooperation from the GOP, Obama and the Democrats have one realistic option, said The New York Times in an editorial. Ted Kennedy’s death leaves them one vote short of the 60 they need to override a Republican filibuster. So Democrats have to rely on a secret weapon called “budget reconciliation.” This “arcane parliamentary tactic” would allow any health program to pass with a simple majority of 51 votes.

Bad idea, said former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole in The Washington Post. Democrats would come to regret using procedural trickery to ram through historic and monumentally expensive legislation revamping the nation’s health-care system. Health-care reform is in trouble because Obama let Congress take control of it, issuing five different bills with complicated and conflicting provisions. Right now, no one knows what health-care reform would actually look like. To save it, Obama should start afresh—combing through the various options, and introducing his version of reform in both houses. Once Obama personally takes charge, public support for reform will grow, “the debate will narrow, and bipartisan bargaining can begin.”

Too late for all that, said Charles Krauthammer, also in the Post. “Obamacare Version 1.0 is dead.” Best for Obama to scale back his expectations and scrap his proposal’s most toxic provisions. He should “forget the public option” of a government-run insurance plan, because it’s “political poison.” And please, let’s “jettison any reference to end-of-life counseling,” which people regard as grotesque government intrusion. Above all, said David Brooks in The New York Times, Obama needs to recalibrate his message to a public “suspicious of centralized government” and traumatized by the recession and massive government bailouts of private industry. There will be little support for reform that adds to our “looming $9 trillion in debt.” Most Americans still back Obama. But they won’t if he doesn’t “align his proposals to the values of the political center.”

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