If the Republicans win the current debate to decide whether or not America will begin the process of reforming health care costs, coverage and delivery, every one of us will lose.
And we will lose something far more precious than rejection of one major reform initiative. We will have handed control of our government to one very influential special interest group: the health insurance companies. The NRA will be proud of their success.
President Truman urged the Congress to pass legislation covering all Americans with basic health care. That was 60 years ago. In 1972, the first speech I wrote for a U.S. Senator focused on the need for health care reform. That was 37 years ago. In 1993, President Bill Clinton urged Congress to move forward finally on health care reform, and again, the insurance industry rejected it flatly. Each time they succeeded by buying the votes they needed to gain total loyalty from a minority that could be counted on to defeat any and all efforts to move forward on the issue.
And now, Republicans stand on the threshold of defeating the current health care reform legislation supported by President Obama and a majority of the Congress. In addition to serving the interest of the insurance companies, the GOP opposition will hand a major defeat to President Obama ...and they live for that.
Why not use the reconciliation process to circumvent the opposition? That’s the question I am asked often. It might be done. Remember, only items in the bill that affect budget numbers – spending issues or tax revenues can be considered in reconciliation but that would include much of the bill. Excluded would be all of the oversight and regulatory provisions in the current bill.
Remember this: It was the Republicans who set up this process of passing legislation through reconciliation without the risk of a filibuster. And now that they are in the minority, they rue the day they thought of this mischief.
Until 1996, reconciliation was limited solely to deficit reduction, but that year the Republican majority adopted a precedent to apply reconciliation to any legislation affecting the budget, even legislation that would increase the deficit.
Under Bush 43, Congress used reconciliation to enact three major tax cuts. Efforts to use reconciliation to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling failed. That’s right – oil drilling! Thankfully, the idea did not pass.
They were in the majority and they were dedicated to perverting the reconciliation process to pass any and all bills they wanted. So much for the Senate rules. So much for respecting the views of the minority.
And they paid no heed to the warnings that the day would come when the Democrats would be kin the majority and use they same rule against them. Now they have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to say the Democrats should not use the reconciliation process to pass one of the most important bills of our time.
Make no mistake: They represent the insurance companies; they do not represent the interest of their constituents. Is this the form of government the “tea baggers” support? Maybe they don’t understand a representative democracy as defined by our Constitution. (Maybe they ought to read the Constitution.)
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