Prediction: Not One Damn Thing Will Happen With Health Care This Year or Next
Despite their relentless right-on-the-cusp-of-a-deal rhetoric, I think hapless Congressional leaders of both parties, along with the Obama administration, are now at the point that they see the writing on the wall. There will be no health care reform in 2009 or in 2010. Obama's "public option" proposal, while highly imperfect, was the closest we were gonna come to a compromise position that would expand coverage to millions more people. And it's dead.
Now comes the big, sloppy trillion-dollar kiss to the insurance industry known as the "Baucus bill" that has rightfully enraged the left, given more ammunition to the obstructionist right, and given the Blue Dogs a brief window to winkingly "ponder, consider, and review" the latest proposal before they reject that as well. Any health care reform package that was capable of passage (I'm increasingly skeptical such an animal could ever exist in the modern political climate) would have to thread a perfect needle. If the Obama proposal fell short of that goal by several yards, the "centrist" Baucus plan falls short by several miles.
The absolute dealbreaker of the Baucus plan is the premise that uninsured middle-income households will be required to forfeit 13% of their income to receive a government-mandated insurance premium from the very health insurance barons whose bootheels Congress promised to take off the necks of Americans, not add more weight to. The unsustainable economics of the existing health insurance industry would not only fail to be reined in, but it would increase by millions the number of people being smacked around by them. To call this Baucus proposal a steaming pile of shit would be a grave insult to fecal matter, yet it's now being hailed as the last best hope for health care reform even as everybody is trash-talking it except the scaredy-pants Blue Dogs, most of whom never intended to vote for health care reform in the first place.
On the outside chance that it begins to look like any version of health care reform, and the Baucus bill in particular, is on the cusp of Senate passage, expect it to play out the same way the immigration reform bill did two years ago. Talk radio will whip up a frenzied audience to call their Congresspersons expressing their outrage....and every nervous Senator will ultimately fold and vote "no" no matter what they had been planning to vote only a couple of weeks earlier. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas might be voicing hollow support for health care reform in Senate subcommittees now, but whatever slim chance there was of her ultimately supporting it will vanish as soon as her telephone starts buzzing with ferocious opposition. Lincoln is the highest-profile fairweather friend on any version of health care reform, but there are at least a dozen like her in the Senate. And the immigration reform analogy is a political firecracker compared to the hydrogen bomb of government mandating thousands of dollars in yearly premiums from middle-income uninsured households to the coffers of insurance companies.
And I think at this point everybody in the process realizes it's a nonstarter. It's possible some of the 500+ amendments in the pipeline could make the bill less awful than it is now, but it's unlikely to matter at the end of the day. This is a Congress that equivocated last year at this time on TARP even as the economy was on the cusp of lapsing into an inevitable depression. If even that grim prospect was not enough to bring about consensus, they certainly won't be moved by the comparatively tepid prospect of providing health insurance to Joe Sixpack.
The next question becomes what the political fallout will be. Some argue that inaction makes the Democratic Party look incompetent and unable to govern, so therefore the worst thing that could happen would be for health care reform to die entirely. Others argue that foist a bad and unpopular reform bill on the public would incite rage upon so many people that passage would be a worst-case scenario for Democrats going into 2010. They're both right. Legislation this epic and controversial has no immediate upside for the party in power. If it passes, the Democrats are screwed. And if it doesn't pass, they're screwed.
It's very telling that large majorities of Americans believe Republicans are dealing in bad faith on health care reform, knowing that not a single Congressional Republican (including Olympia Snowe) has any intention of voting for health care reform legislation commandeered by the Democratic majority and President Obama....and that nothing that Obama and the Dems could do would get the GOP to play ball when the stated agenda even of "moderates" like Chuck Grassley is "killing health care reform". Yet even knowing this, and while still favoring a generic version of "health care reform" by overwhelming margins, American voters are telling pollsters with increasing frequency that they plan to vote Republican in the 2010 midterm elections.
Chalk it up to the schizophrenic and ultimately clueless nature of the American electorate. They'll be outraged if health care is reformed. They'll be outraged if it's not. They'll punish the party in power for passing the reform they claimed overwhelming support for last year. And they'll reward the party out of power for denying that reform. Things will continue to spiral out of control and make ultimate change that much more politically impossible for anybody in the future.
Welcome to Washington, Mr. Obama. What was that you were saying last year about entitlement reform? Think you can still make that happen even as Social Security and Medicare veer off a financial cliff?
Now comes the big, sloppy trillion-dollar kiss to the insurance industry known as the "Baucus bill" that has rightfully enraged the left, given more ammunition to the obstructionist right, and given the Blue Dogs a brief window to winkingly "ponder, consider, and review" the latest proposal before they reject that as well. Any health care reform package that was capable of passage (I'm increasingly skeptical such an animal could ever exist in the modern political climate) would have to thread a perfect needle. If the Obama proposal fell short of that goal by several yards, the "centrist" Baucus plan falls short by several miles.
The absolute dealbreaker of the Baucus plan is the premise that uninsured middle-income households will be required to forfeit 13% of their income to receive a government-mandated insurance premium from the very health insurance barons whose bootheels Congress promised to take off the necks of Americans, not add more weight to. The unsustainable economics of the existing health insurance industry would not only fail to be reined in, but it would increase by millions the number of people being smacked around by them. To call this Baucus proposal a steaming pile of shit would be a grave insult to fecal matter, yet it's now being hailed as the last best hope for health care reform even as everybody is trash-talking it except the scaredy-pants Blue Dogs, most of whom never intended to vote for health care reform in the first place.
On the outside chance that it begins to look like any version of health care reform, and the Baucus bill in particular, is on the cusp of Senate passage, expect it to play out the same way the immigration reform bill did two years ago. Talk radio will whip up a frenzied audience to call their Congresspersons expressing their outrage....and every nervous Senator will ultimately fold and vote "no" no matter what they had been planning to vote only a couple of weeks earlier. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas might be voicing hollow support for health care reform in Senate subcommittees now, but whatever slim chance there was of her ultimately supporting it will vanish as soon as her telephone starts buzzing with ferocious opposition. Lincoln is the highest-profile fairweather friend on any version of health care reform, but there are at least a dozen like her in the Senate. And the immigration reform analogy is a political firecracker compared to the hydrogen bomb of government mandating thousands of dollars in yearly premiums from middle-income uninsured households to the coffers of insurance companies.
And I think at this point everybody in the process realizes it's a nonstarter. It's possible some of the 500+ amendments in the pipeline could make the bill less awful than it is now, but it's unlikely to matter at the end of the day. This is a Congress that equivocated last year at this time on TARP even as the economy was on the cusp of lapsing into an inevitable depression. If even that grim prospect was not enough to bring about consensus, they certainly won't be moved by the comparatively tepid prospect of providing health insurance to Joe Sixpack.
The next question becomes what the political fallout will be. Some argue that inaction makes the Democratic Party look incompetent and unable to govern, so therefore the worst thing that could happen would be for health care reform to die entirely. Others argue that foist a bad and unpopular reform bill on the public would incite rage upon so many people that passage would be a worst-case scenario for Democrats going into 2010. They're both right. Legislation this epic and controversial has no immediate upside for the party in power. If it passes, the Democrats are screwed. And if it doesn't pass, they're screwed.
It's very telling that large majorities of Americans believe Republicans are dealing in bad faith on health care reform, knowing that not a single Congressional Republican (including Olympia Snowe) has any intention of voting for health care reform legislation commandeered by the Democratic majority and President Obama....and that nothing that Obama and the Dems could do would get the GOP to play ball when the stated agenda even of "moderates" like Chuck Grassley is "killing health care reform". Yet even knowing this, and while still favoring a generic version of "health care reform" by overwhelming margins, American voters are telling pollsters with increasing frequency that they plan to vote Republican in the 2010 midterm elections.
Chalk it up to the schizophrenic and ultimately clueless nature of the American electorate. They'll be outraged if health care is reformed. They'll be outraged if it's not. They'll punish the party in power for passing the reform they claimed overwhelming support for last year. And they'll reward the party out of power for denying that reform. Things will continue to spiral out of control and make ultimate change that much more politically impossible for anybody in the future.
Welcome to Washington, Mr. Obama. What was that you were saying last year about entitlement reform? Think you can still make that happen even as Social Security and Medicare veer off a financial cliff?
posted by Mark at 3:35 PM
4 Comments:
I really dont know why Democrats continue to beat this dead horse. I think after this failure, Democrats and liberals will finally give up on this unrealistic dream. All of the people who stupidly thought that Democrats would finally get it done this time were wrong again.
Democrats would be smart to abandon this loser issue just like they did gun control in the 1990's. You dont try to change a system that 90% of Americans are happy with.
Ill add another prediction here for you. If Obama doesnt get healthcare done, he is not going to get a single piece of legislation he wants passed for the rest of his Presidency.
Mr. Phips, it's more likely that Obama will lose health care, take a massive beating in the 2010 midterms, and then adjust accordingly as Clinton did and pass a bunch of minor, meaningless priorities for the remainder of his Presidency. Unless someone I'm not aware of emerges strong in the next two years, Obama will be re-elected handily in 2012, but probably with a Republican House of Representatives undermining him every step of the way. Ultimately, this gridlock is what Americans want.
Regarding "90% of Americans being happy with health care as it stands", that's a manipulated reading of one poll. Minutes after the healthcare industry knows the reform bill is officially dead, there will be a purge of millions of high-risk customers from the health insurance rolls....and the industry's already unsustainable trajectory will spiral further out of control with soaring premiums and higher numbers of uninsureds. This all means that healthcare reform is bound to be revisited just a few years down the road. Will it fail again then? Most likely, but naive politicians will continue to watch us heading off a cliff and think that they can do what nobody before them was able to. The cycle will continue. We're quickly becoming an ungovernable country.
Obama will need to fight the Republican House with everything he has. He should sign nothing that they pass(Majority Leader Schumer can make sure nothing gets through the Senate) and then blame them for the gridlock. If he loses reelection, he loses reelection, but at he takes the bastards down with him.
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