Health Care Showdown

The health care proposal has failed to generate wide public support up to this point for a variety of reasons. President Obama, rather than submit specific proposals of his own, has relied on congress to prepare a bill that even by his own admission he doesn't understand. Perhaps this will change with his Wednesday night address on the subject.

The president is not the only one having a problem with the 1000 plus page bill. Congressman John Conyers had this to say “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

If you take a look at the document, House 3200, you can almost sympathize with Conyers' statement.

The administration, the congress and the national media including our own Boston Globe has not laid out in detail exactly how this thing will work. Who will collect the premiums? Who will ok procedures? What taxes will be raised? Why no tort reform? Why are government employees and many unions exempt? Will there be age restrictions on certain treatment? How many new government employees? How many private sector jobs will be lost? Will it create more doctors?

How will it reduce over all costs of health care? How will it stem the rapid increases?

So far the party in power has mis-charachterized the opposition to this plan. The first mistake was the president expecting and even demanding that the bill be taken up and passed before the August break. If his fear was that congress would get cold feet when they went back to their respective districts and heard from constituents that fear was well founded.

When the shouting began back home, the house democratic leadership called it Un-American in a USA Today op-ed piece and according to senate majority leader Harry Reid, town hall protesters were "evil mongers" using "lies, innuendo and rumor" to drown out rational debate.

This is a huge and complex part of the economy (reportedly 16% of GDP) that needs to be fully understood by the participants before it is forced on them. The idea that six senators sitting in a conference room can craft a system that will smoothly be implemented and then efficiently provide a service to a couple of hundred million people is preposterous. How will the nation react if a new health care program operates as efficiently as cash for clunkers?

This is now purely a democratic party conundrum. With the large majorities in both houses of congress, the democrats cannot blame republican opposition to the plan as the reason for failure of it passing. What ever ultimately comes out of this debate will surely be the reason the democrats sink or swim in the mid term elections.

If the democrats ram this through without some semblance of bi-partisanship then they do so at their own peril. Obama is a 52% president and American political opinion is quite fickle. He has no sweeping mandate and that small margin of victory for him and the democrats can swing very quickly.