Maybe Max Baucus will believe it if he reads it on WaPo's op-ed page, courtesy Harold Meyerson.
Over at Senate Finance, judging by the reports coming of the committee, a solonic gang of six -- three Democrats, including chairman Max Baucus of Montana, and three Republicans, including ranking member Charles Grassley of Iowa -- are turning out a bill whose resemblance to anything the president has championed is accidental and incidental. To secure Republican support, they oppose a public plan. To secure Republican support, they oppose employer mandates, even on the largest corporations. (And many of America's biggest employers are retailers with a proven record of not providing coverage to their workers: Wal-Mart, our largest, employs 1.4 million Americans, 48 percent of whom it does not cover.) The solonic six may end up requiring employers to fund subsidies for employees who need them, but that could create the bureaucratic nightmare to end all bureaucratic nightmares -- 700,000 Wal-Mart employees, say, bringing their tax returns to work so management can investigate ("You sure you reported all your income?") and stall ("Doesn't your spouse work at Home Depot? Why don't they pay the subsidy?") and investigate and stall.
Sounds like a plan to secure universal coverage by the middle of the next century.
The solonic six, in other words, seem on track to produce a plan that falls short of universal coverage, omits the savings that a competitive public plan would create, and might actually make health care harder to get. The only justification for such a bill is that it might win some Republican support. Why that is a goal worth pursuing at the expense of decent reform, however, is not at all apparent.
Problem is, bipartisanship ain't what it used to be, and for one fundamental reason: Republicans ain't what they used to be. It's true that there was considerable Republican congressional support, back in the day, for Social Security and Medicare. But in the '30s, there were progressive Republicans who stood to the left of the Democrats. Nebraska Republican George Norris, who for decades called for establishing public power companies to compete with price-gouging private companies, was the father of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In the '60s, Rockefeller Republicans supported civil rights legislation and Medicare....
Max Baucus, then, isn't negotiating universal coverage with the party of Everett Dirksen, in which many members supported Medicare. He's negotiating it with the party of Barry Goldwater, who was dead set against Medicare. It's a fool's errand that is creating a plan that's a marvel of ineffectuality and self-negation -- a latter-day Missouri Compromise that reconciles opposites at the cost of good policy.
Meyerson picks up a lot of what we've been talking about here in the blogosphere on this debate, not the least of which is that this Republican party isn't one worth negotiating with. The only thing these Republicans care about is destroying Democrats. Since the Reagan Revolution, the GOP hasn't been about governance, it's been about transferring as much public wealth as possible to a few private hands. They've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in making a handful of people exceedingly wealthy, but they've also shown the American people that their politcal philosophy is utterly bankrupt. And 2006 and 2008 proved that the American people get that.
Democrats should not be in a position of trying to enable a Republican party that has been so abjectly repudiated by the American people, a Republican party that has proven time and time again that it is utterly incapable of governing because it has absolutely no interest in governing.
In light of that, President Obama should heed Meyerson's bit of advice for him:
Obama should thank the solonic six for their work, and, as much as is politically practicable, ignore it.