Go It Alone, Democrats, To Muscle Health Care Reform Through

That nearly seven hours of health care summiting yielded a huge goose egg for bipartisanship doesn't disturb me. This is because I, like probably many of you out there, anticipated that the Republicans weren't showing up at the summit to display a change of heart, not after spending a year trying, and succeeding, to discredit President Obama and Congressional Democrats by slandering and obstructing the health care reform process. Does this mean the summit was a big waste of time? Not if you're President Obama. He looked in charge, poking holes in the Republicans' arguments with the confidence of a veteran health policy expert minus the wonkiness. And score one for Obama for shutting up John McCain -- "John, we're not campaigning anymore, the election is over" -- in mid-tirade.

More significantly, the summit was, to use the well-worn cliché, his Hail Mary pass -- it was a bold stroke by the President to resuscitate health care reform and push Congress back on track to passing some kind of comprehensive bill. Did it succeed? If the Democrats pass a health care bill in the weeks and months ahead, then yes. And I emphasize the word Democrats. Because they better know by now that they aren't getting any help from across the aisle. If the summit achieved nothing else, it shined a spotlight on the Republicans' unreasonable obstructionism, making a clear case for Democrats to use reconciliation and pass the health care bills without the Republicans' help.

Despite Obama and other Democrats pointing out that there was "overlap" between the two parties' ideas, and that the current bills contain more than a few market ideas the GOP can support (like insurance exchanges), the Republicans stuck to their mantra to scrap the bills and start over. Let's, just for a second, entertain this idea that Republicans would actually do something if Democrats agreed to their demands. My question is: why should the public trust the Republicans to do anything to fix the health care crisis, or at least anything substantive, since they're essentially fine with the way things are? Yes, they complain that nothing's being done about fraud and waste. So they'd probably enact some kind of tort reform. And Obama even stated during the course of the summit that he's sympathetic to helping states find better ways to control the waste stemming from unnecessary malpractice lawsuits. But experts have gone over tort reform umpteen times and the evidence just isn't there that closing up abusive malpractice litigation will save the billions and billions necessary to curb the endless escalation of health care costs.

The Republicans' other big idea trotted out again at the summit is to let consumers buy health insurance across state lines. They believe this is the way to drive down the cost of health care plans by giving consumers choice and spiking up competition. But as Obama pointed out, the reality would be that states with the weakest regulations would attract health insurance companies to sell insurance on the cheap because they wouldn't have to provide the coverage and benefits that other states with stronger regulations require. Younger and healthier people from one state would be siphoned off by the lure of cheap insurance sold in another state, leaving behind the older and sicker people who don't qualify for the cheaper coverage to pay higher premiums in a high risk pool (and note to the "young invincibles" who find this idea of cheap insurance attractive ... can you be so sure you won't grow older and get sick some day?). As Obama made clear, Democrats aren't averse to the idea of selling health insurance across state lines. But some national standards must be in place to provide consumers basic, minimum benefits that ensure they'll get the quality health care they need when they need it.

The summit ended where it began, with Republicans saying no to just about everything Obama and the Democrats have proposed. The Republicans still want people to believe that they were shut out of the health reform debate, though the bills represent hundreds of hours of meetings and negotiations between the two parties over the past year. By hewing to their ideological platform and not giving an inch, they've made themselves irrelevant to the health reform process. The Democrats must now forge ahead with reconciliation and pass what they've got.

Photo credit: RightIndex