Democratic Party leadership has struggled to bring about the changes they promised in 2008. Photo from the Christian Science Monitor.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go exactly as planned. Two of the three Republican Senators have been unwilling to work with Democrats and seem intent on stopping the bill before it reaches the floor. Somewhere in the talks, bipartisanship got lost.
Let’s get one thing straight — President Barack Obama doesn’t need bipartisanship to pass his healthcare plan. With a comfortable majority in both the House and Senate, the Obama administration could have Congress draft a bill and then use some executive muscle to get it passed. It wouldn’t be pretty, but the plan would be enacted.
President George W. Bush used this method to pass bills such as the Patriot Act when Republicans held a slim majority in the House and were essentially deadlocked in the Senate. But Obama is not going to do this. He is, at his heart, a legislator first. A compromiser. He realizes that healthcare is a major issue in this country, and he seems committed to fixing it in a way that will please everybody.
The problem is that not everybody is willing to cooperate. He can’t please Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who said at a rally that Americans have to slit their wrists and make a covenant to make sure the bill doesn’t pass.
He can’t please former governor Sarah Palin, who fabricated the notion of death panels. He can’t please former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who has called Obama a McCarthyist who wants to “put terrorists on welfare.”
By trying to appease the far right, Democrats, particularly the president, are appearing weak. The agenda of hope and change that Obama advocated during his campaign is being abandoned for a watered down version, or, politics as usual.
This is how discussions about dropping the public option from health reform began. The public option, a government healthcare plan that would compete with private companies, is a good idea. It would help to keep insurance companies honest and stand as a cheaper option for those who cannot currently afford health coverage.
Los Angeles has had a similar system for more than a decade with its L.A. Care Health Plan, which has over 800,000 enrollees. The mostly successful Medicare is another good example of this. A public option is not only possible, it’s necessary to healthcare reform. The thought of a healthcare bill without a public option written in is staggering. Mandating citizens to purchase healthcare that is unaffordable would solve nothing.
Americans deserve healthcare reform. More than 70 million people in this country are either uninsured or underinsured. Insurance companies routinely drop clients just when they need coverage the most. The World Health Organization ranks America’s healthcare system at No. 37 in the world, behind countries such as Malta, Dominica and Oman. In a country as prosperous, principled and celebrated as the United States, the status quo is unacceptable.
Obama should stop letting Congress push him around. When the stimulus debate was raging, Republicans in Congress worried that the price tag was just too steep. Obama listened and compromised, lowering the cost of the bill by hundreds of billions of dollars. Turns out we didn’t spend enough, and now American unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades. He is now falling into the same trap.
Republicans have already made their decision: They want the president to fail. Obama needs to remind everyone that he is commander in chief and use his Democratic majority to his advantage now before he loses it next November.
