As Steve Benen pointed out yesterday, while the health care debate on the Democratic side of the aisle has heated up, the quality of that debate has been light years ahead of the exchange between left and right.
And this morning, carrying over from yesterday, comes still more opinion arguing in favor of immediate passage of the health insurance reform bill -- more or less whatever it is that bill might, in the end, be said to be.
But I would be very interested to know what the reaction would be to the proposal Jon Walker made and that I echoed here yesterday, that the mandates ought to come out of the bill and be considered at some future date along with the other "fixes" being floated by folks who are otherwise in favor of passing this version of the bill.
First, I'd be curious what the reasoning is as to why mandates that will sit idle for four years before becoming effective must be passed right now.
I'm fairly sure that proponents will say that it's dangerous to tinker with the 60 votes, etc., but for one thing, it's by no means clear we have those 60. And of course, it must be admitted that no one has tested whether this same package minus the mandates can get to 60.
Now, it may well be the case that some Senator or another will say, "Well, the mandates are necessary, so I won't vote to take them out," and opponents of the proposal will point to that as evidence that we can't get to 60 on that. But that doesn't really answer the question either, because such an answer is improperly conclusory. Opposition is predicated on the the Senator's reluctance to disrupt a deal and not the merits or workability of the proposal, even though it's by no means clear that there IS a deal, and even less clear that a deal like the one Jon proposed isn't just as meritorious or workable.
And that doesn't even get to the point that if one other Democratic Senator said that he wouldn't vote for this bill unless we considered this proposal, then we're right back to searching for 60, and the first Senator's objection is now inoperative.
So the real question is, what would that first Senator say to the full proposition, that is, that we're taking out the mandates as a guarantee that we'll come back and fix things later, as so many of them are promising, anyway? The reality probably is that if a package passes right now that's got enough in it to satisfy the insurance companies, we're just not coming back to "fix" anything later.
A better objection is that the removing the mandates may dramatically change the bill's CBO score, because the whole thinking behind the mandates in the first place is that making the program universal (or "close enough for government work," as they say) is what enables insurers to bring average premiums down. (You may recognize this as a close cousin of the, "We'll pass the savings on to you!" argument. Can't blame you for being skeptical, but that's the basic idea, and we'll run with it for a moment.)
It's hard to say without seeing what the scoring effect actually is whether the impact would be great enough to significantly impact the chances of passage. But while we're waiting for the score, if you think the difference will be significant, then you can add the promise of future savings to the short but powerful list of reasons why holding back on those mandates might really help motivate Congress to get back to work on those "fixes" in the future.
Imagine if we had a "partner" (or perhaps "co-dependent") in this who's just as eager to see to it that we do get back to "fixing" this system promptly. Someone who, say, stood to profit enormously from it? And suppose the mandates also came with significant budgetary savings attached, as I anticipate will be said to be the case? Well then, we've increased the odds dramatically for getting back to the floor, haven't we?
Those mandates don't do anything for anybody for the next four years. Why do they need to sit idly in the books except as "insurance" to the insurance companies (while we get no such guarantees regarding the "fixes" we need)? Indeed, handing over the mandates now would appear to be pretty good insurance against the need for insurers to agree to allow the Congress to come back and "fix" anything.
The objection that "it won't get to 60 because... I won't let it" only takes us in circles, and sacrifices valuable and necessary leverage for insuring continued cooperation from the industry (to the extent you believe we have that). I don't see why anybody would agree to that, and we ought not to let self-fulfilling prophecy pass for a substantive answer.