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Attempts to get bipartisan support for health care reform were always doomed—doomed from the very beginning. Part of that is because Republicans had no political reason to help Democrats achieve one of the planks of their party platform. The idea that delivering on quality health care reform would help cement Democrats as defenders of the middle class was probably also in play. But I think the main reason that bipartisan health care reform was inherently doomed is much simpler. The bill has new taxes, and that violates a core Republican ideal.
In case Democrats have not seen the important part of the GOP platform that has come to define the modern Republican party, let me restate it:
TAXES BAD!!!
Any new tax is inherently bad from the Republican perspective. This is nothing new, and should not come as surprise to Democrats. Almost any Republican who faces a contested primary is basically forced by political necessity to sign the “taxpayer protection pledge.” During Obama’s State of the Union address, Republicans did not even clap for Obama’s plan to tax big banks to recover the American taxpayers’ money spent propping up the financial institutions using TARP. If Republicans are not going to support a tax on banks to get back TARP money, they are not going to support any new taxes.
The health care proposal from Obama contains new taxes, and, therefore, is unacceptable to Republicans. There are taxes on the industries, taxes on people making over $250,000, and a new excise tax on insurance benefits. New taxes are rarely popular, hence the success of Republicans’ TAXES BAD!!! platform.
Getting broad Republican support would definitely make selling new taxes much easier. Especially the politically toxic excise tax Obama insists must be part of the bill–despite once campaigning against it, and despite its destroying popular support for health care reform and endangering passage of the bill. By the same token, it would be easier to sell snowshoes in Miami if the city started getting an average of a hundred inches of snow each winter, but that is not going to happen, either. Republicans are not going to support tax increases to help Democrats achieve a victory.
The health care bill contain new taxes. Republicans believe TAXES BAD!!!, so Republicans would never support this bill. Maybe if a single person in Obama’s team of “political experts” had understood this most basic of political realities, health care reform would have been passed months ago using reconciliation–instead of wasting time chasing the futile hope of bipartisanship.
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The WH and senate dems are working very very hard to bring repubs back into power.
That’s a damn good point Jon. If Obama was serious about getting GOP support, he would have taken a page from President Bush’s Medicare drug benefit plan and not evened bother with making it deficit-neutral. Better yet, he would have simply framed the affordability subsidies as tax credits. Jay Rockefeller had a Medicare buy-in bill (for those 55 to 64) that provided an advanceable, refundable 75% premium tax credit.
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=312784
Now that’s the kind of bill that could have gotten bipartisan support. You’ll always be able to find Republicans willing to vote for a tax cut. Of course Rockefeller is only Chair of the Finance Health subcommittee. He didn’t rate an invite to Baucus’s group hug last summer, so what does he know?
Speaking of Jay Rockefeller, it is curious (and I doubt an accident) that the two subcommittee chairs with jurisdiction to mark up Medicare expansion proposals, Pete Stark on the House Way & Means and Jay Rockefeller on Senate Finance, were pretty much dropped kicked out of the process last year. On the House side, Pelosi had a tricommittee compromise bill quickly put together and pushed the Caucus to present a united front). This forestalled Stark’s subcommittee from repeating its 1994 performance of marking up a more liberal healthcare bill that the president wanted.
Likewise, Baucus’s endless summer of negotiating with Republican senators excluded Rockefeller personally and blocked Rockefeller’s subcommittee from marking up a healthcare bill, Baucus took his own bill directly to the full Committee. If Stark’s Americare bill and Rockefeller’s Medicare buy-in bill had been the starting points, I think Congress would have been dealing with (heck, would have passed last year) far better healthcare reform bills.
nothing curious about it. Obama has been trying to kill the PO without getting his hands dirty for months.
“Use Senate reconciliation and expand Medicare via the Senate’s buy-in provisions. The CBO has already signed off on this as a means of saving money.
More importantly, if more Americans can do a buy-in with Medicare, it creates more cost control (because there’s a genuine “public option” competitor).
It also helps to solve the problems of pre-existing conditions, because Medicare does not deny coverage on this basis.
Allowing a Medicare buy-in to Americans under 65 would give people a genuine alternative to private insurance and thereby render the pre-existing question moot.
It would also lower Medicare costs by expanding the risk pool of patients (the great bulk of medical expenses are accounted for by a small number of people, mostly the elderly, requiring very expensive treatment).
And it would substantially enhance the global competitiveness of American corporations. After all, in what other country in the world is health care a marginal cost of production for business?” – Roosevelt Institute Marshall Auerback