A Fitting Response...
The Healthcare plan is dead. But not because of newly-elected Massachusetts senator Scott Brown. The plan Democrats had in mind, the plan voters like myself enthusiastically supported, was already dead and has been for over a month. The whole losing-an-election-on-our-home-turf debacle? That was just icing on the cake. Democrats have no one to blame for the Healthcare plan’s failure but themselves.
I’ll say this: a bill will eventually pass, and it will accomplish a couple things. It will ensure people cannot be denied coverage based on pre-existing health conditions. It will set up a government exchange to help make healthcare more affordable, which should honestly reduce the number of uninsured people, especially coupled with a mandate that they must have insurance in the first place. However, these issues were not the crux of the debate. Private insurance providers and both parties in Washington supported these measures. It was the public option that was at the core of this bill. In the initial draft of the Obama-Biden healthcare plan, the public option was the ultimate device for enforcing lower costs and the ancillary private reforms. Generic drugs are a good example. Obama-Biden wanted generics to be used ubiquitously to lower healthcare costs. Having a public government-run option would enforce that. If a private insurer still used the expensive medication without good reason, people would gravitate toward a cheaper, generics-infused option from the government. Drops in profits would become motivation to change current policy for private healthcare providers, and generics would become ubiquitously used. Without a competing government-run option, now what? How would the government tell insurers to use generics? Would they simply provide the same lip service they did to the banks during the bailout? We’ve seen how well that worked in getting banks to lend more money to small businesses. Namely they haven’t. There needs to be incentive to drive change, and this public option was as good an incentive as you were going to find, if only it were sold properly.
Ultimately, lack of marketing-consistency is what caused this bill to deteriorate. The 100% medicare expansion free for the state of Nebraska, the caving on abortion-related policy, etc. were all allowed to happen because Democrats never kept a stalwart position on the public option. Obama initially championed it, so did Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Howard Dean and others. Then Blue Dogs publicly debated how cost-effective it would be, stating they would not support a bill with the public option, directly contradicting claims made by Obama and others that it would save money in the long term. The Congressional Budget Office studies later validated these claims, further embarrassing the President. He was also resisted in his claims that the public option would not lead to a single-payer plan, when Barney Frank called the option a great “gateway” to a single payer plan (I would’ve called this the Democrats’ gaffe of the year, were it not for Senator Reid’s “negro” comments). Sensing confusion and loss of the plan’s political momentum, Obama decided to concede on the public option in the hopes of retaining the private reforms. So he stated the option was not 100% essential, and could be dropped to preserve the other private reforms, only to have Nancy Pelosi heroically claim that there “will be a public option,” in the final plan. Even when Pelosi and others hopped on board, finally sacrificing the public option, factions within the party resisted melodramatically, and again publicly, stating they wouldn’t support a bill without the public option. They never once truly aligned, and this constant contradiction fed into Republicans’ hands.
The Republican party held a firm position the entire time, which was that the government-run public option, and the healthcare reform bill in its entirety should be opposed. Consistency can cover for so many other sins in a political race. It is absolutely crucial to winning long-term debates. The steady, constant “Hope and Change” mantra that bolstered Obama’s campaign helped overcome slip-ups such as the “guns and religion” comments, as well as public attacks on his character and capability ranging from “terrorist” to “elitist” to “inexperienced” all the while. On the opposite end of the spectrum, just look at Bush vs. Kerry from 2004. Kerry’s “flip-flop” reputation was political cyanide. Uncertainty is to politicians what alcohol is to Mel Gibson. When the Democratic party proposed the public option, they needed to stick to it. Any internal fusion should have been kept INTERNAL. This was again, done beautifully by Obama’s campaign team in the Presidential elections. But Obama picked his campaign team. You don’t get to pick Congressmen and Senators, who are far more intractable and truculent than campaign advisors.
This confusion and miasma of mixed messages made even liberals too confused to truly support anything, option or no option. Republicans representing moderate states felt zero pressure from their voters to support this bill as a result. Meanwhile, they had been unanimously and consistently recruiting people to oppose the bill, with success. As time wore on, even Republicans who initially wanted to support the healthcare bill, such as Olympia Snowe (R-ME) were forced to decline. Now with only 60 votes to work with, Democrats fell victim to leeching. Realizing that they were the “C” variable in the median voter theorem, the one who pits A against B such that they are now in a position of power, people such as Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) used their vote as fodder for Medicare provisions for Nebraska and specialized abortion legislation. Other moderate Democrats began interjecting their own provisions for farm-friendlier states so they could bring bacon back home to their voters and brag about it. By the time it was done, healthcare supporters felt more like whores than like politicians, if there’s any difference. But to be fair, this was unusual even for them. They’d just bought off more people than Frank Lucas.
At least something was being passed though. It was precariously built on buyouts and failed promises, but at least some of the private reforms would still be enacted. Until January 18th, 2010 happened. Until Scott Brown won that Senate seat in Massachusetts, replacing the late Ted Kennedy and killing the Democrats’ filibuster-proof 60-40 majority, thus inevitably rendering the Democrats’ healthcare-bill even more impotent in effectiveness, as they’d have to further scale back their ambitions in order to obtain a passable bill. The Democrats’ fumbling while selling the public option, and then the Healthcare plan entirely, has now lead to an inconsistency in their brand, a brand they’d so magnificently built in the wake of Obama’s Presidential election. And that brand-inconsistency is coming back to haunt them, as clearly evidenced in the Massachusetts loss, in a state that is supposed to be the Democrats’ home turf.
I voted for Barack Obama last year, and in doing so I implicitly voted for his Democratic allies, the 60-40 majority of Senators and Congressmen that would bolster his domestic and international power. I supported healthcare reform from the beginning, and with a Senate, Congress and President all in agreement, sailing would be smooth for people like me. But I was painfully reminded why Democrats can be so unbearable at times, why South Park has made a killing lampooning their leaders and celebrity supporters for over a decade. Democrats try to portray this higher sense of dignity and intelligence, this help-the-poor, hope-for-all optimism. They claim to be on the leading edge of social equality and fiscal opportunity. And at many times they are. But for all their high-fiving over their similar ideals, for all of their collectively progressive-minded chutzpah, they seem to have had a damned time cooperating on one stinking goal, especially when that goal was at the absolute domestic forefront of social equality and fiscal opportunity.
Republicans of late have usually had bad ideas. From the Patriot Act to Iraq to the 5% capital-gains-tax, they’ve set the bar about as low as it could go. But give them credit. At least they executed their bad ideas.
Cindy McCain has followed in her daughter’s footsteps by openly supporting gay marriage rights, despite the obvious position of her husband John McCain.
