It feels like eons ago - last July - when Obama held a conference call with progressive bloggers about health care reform. We've been down so many roads of chasing after rumors and leaks that, for the most part, turned out to be nothing but distractions and tea-leaf reading. But in actuality, its only been 3 months. And I suspect that the history books will completely ignore all of our fascination with hand-wringing when real reform is passed.
What is likely to be studied by historians is the overall strategy that the White House and Congress employed to finally get this done. And, when it comes to the White House, Obama telegraphed it all to us in that conference call.
Here's a bit of what he said as recorded by Ezra Klein.
The House bills and the Senate bills will not be identical. We know this. The politics are different, because the makeup of the Senate and the House are different and they operate on different rules. I am not interested in making the best the enemy of the good. There will be a conference committee where the House and Senate bills will be reconciled, and that will be a tough, lengthy and serious negotiation process.
I am less interested in making sure there's a litmus test of perfection on every committee than I am in going ahead and getting a bill off the floor of the House and off the floor of the Senate. Eighty percent of those two bills will overlap. There's going to be 20 percent that will be different in terms of how it will be funded, its approach to the public plan, its pay-or-play provisions. We shouldn't automatically assume that if any of the bills coming out of the committees don't meet our test, that there is a betrayal or failure. I think it's an honest process of trying to reconcile a lot of different interests in a very big bill.
Conference is where these differences will get ironed out. And that's where my bottom lines will remain: Does this bill cover all Americans? Does it drive down costs both in the public sector and the private sector over the long-term. Does it improve quality? Does it emphasize prevention and wellness? Does it have a serious package of insurance reforms so people aren't losing health care over a preexisting condition? Does it have a serious public option in place? Those are the kind of benchmarks I'll be using. But I'm not assuming either the House and Senate bills will match up perfectly with where I want to end up. But I am going to be insisting we get something done.
I have bolded the parts of what he said that, if we had been paying attention, could have saved us all alot of grief over these last 3 months. In case anyone has forgotten the historical context in which he said this, the public option was - at that point - included in 4 of the 5 bills passed by Congress.
Now don't get me wrong, efforts that many of us have made to have the strongest possible bills going to the conference committee have been worth every ounce of time and resource spent on those activities.
What I'm talking about is the same thing mdmslle was referring to yesterday...the endless hours and diaries spent pouring over the utterings of every unnamed White House source to determine if Obama is "with us" or "against us" in this battle.
Whether or not you approve or disapprove of his strategy - there has been one. And as we see it all unfold, its working quite well. Certainly we're not there yet. But perhaps we can save ourselves an awful lot of time and grief if we just listen to what the President actually said and figure out how to work with this strategy to get the best possible result.
Over the next few weeks, I'd predict that the rumors will be flying fast and free - doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that. But we're getting close to the finish line. Obama has said that the real battle will come in the conference committee. As Seneca Doane pointed out last week - the members of that committee will be the real deal-makers/breakers. That's where the action will be.
If we can keep our eyes on that prize and then follow it up with the serious arm-twisting that ensures that NO Democratic Senator can risk standing with the Republicans to fillibuster final passage of the most important piece of legislation in decades...we just might get this thing done!