Yep, you read the title right. I'm one that believes that its important to hold to our ideals as progressives. And if we want to get involved in legislative battles to see those ideals implemented, its best if we examine our strategies to see how they are/aren't working. I think we blew it this time. So here's a description of how I see the process of sausage-making unfold when it comes to health care reform.
I have no doubt that one of the first things the White House did when they began work on health care reform was to whip the count in the Senate for the public option. It would have been obvious to anyone that there were not 60 votes for it at the time, nor were there enough "persuadables" to get to 60. So a strategy was developed:
- Get a bill passed in the House with the strongest public option possible.
- Get the best possible bill passed in the Senate - which probably meant getting folks like Olympia Snowe on board with something like a triggered public option.
- Go to work in the Conference Committee using the momentum already built and pressure from all sides to include a non-triggered public option in the final bill.
- Pressure the Conservadems to vote for final passage or risk defeating health care reform in its entirety.
As a matter of fact, when the White House did reach out to the netroots back in July, this is precisely the strategy signaled to us by Obama at the time.
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.
As the White House was negotiating to get Snowe's vote (and yes, sounds like they discussed a triggered public option as a way to do that), the netroots went into full pressure mode to get Harry Reid to include a non-triggered public option in the bill that would go to the Senate floor. And all of the advocacy was successful - that's what happened.
If you remember, at the time it was clear that this was Reid's strategy and the White House was reluctant (they didn't see where the 60 votes were going to come from) and basically told Reid "If you think you can do it...go for it."
I'd say the White House was right...Reid didn't have the 60 votes. And in the meantime, we've seen one negotiation after another fail as the bill got weaker and weaker. Any momentum the public option had a few months ago seems to be gone and not likely to be re-fueled in the Conference Committee.
BooMan summed it up pretty well earlier this week.
Reid swung for the fences and struck out. Some people, including myself and apparently including Rahm Emanuel, warned that Reid was taking an unnecessary risk by buckling under to well-meaning progressive pressure to put the public option in the base bill. As we predicted, the bill got picked apart and held up for ransom. We could have had a trigger as a starting point in negotiations. Now, we will not even have that. The gauntlet has been laid down, and strengthening the bill in Conference will be pretty much impossible.<...>I tried to warn people that procedure matters.
Yep...idealism meets procedure and looses.
Whether or not a bill finally gets passed (a reminder that those talking "kill the bill" are a bit premature since the Conference Committee will not even get started until the Senate has passed something), we should learn from this experience.