Forum or Spectacle?

by Keith Cooper

From Broader View Weekly, March 4, 2010

On Thursday, February 25, President Obama hosted a bi-partisan Health Care Summit at Blair House with Congressional representatives of both parties. To be honest, it was partly a political spectacle, televised as a forum for both sides to showcase their arguments about the current proposal to reform the health care system.

It might have been an opportunity for candid discussion of real issues, with solutions being offered and considered. It might have been a fruitful exchange of ideas and innovative answers to the dilemma everyone agrees the current system presents. However, politics, as usual, got in the way.

I’m not excusing the president from his contribution to the game playing. The public nature of the summit represented an attempt to control the message and not just a gesture of transparency that (contrary to the opinion of many on the right) has been a focus of this administration. Bringing cameras into the arena of discussion, while risky in a bi-partisan setting, provides a megaphone to the administration at a time when the opposition is striving effectively to drown out Obama’s message.

The White House and the Democrats weren’t the only ones playing to the camera. Republicans came prepared with talking points, theatrics and visual aids (like stacks of alligator-clipped paper to represent the lengthy health care legislation). For instance, Senator John McCain found opportunity to continue the jabs he tossed out during the 2008 Presidential campaign and call attention to an unpopular potential use of the reconciliation process by Democrats to pass reform. While McCain may have opposed the use of the Nuclear Option during the Bush administration when the GOP held power, it seems interesting to hear many of his colleagues, who threatened its use to ram through Supreme Court nominees, criticize the same tactics now.

McCain also saw fit to portray the lead-up to the current iteration of House and Senate bills as “unsavory deal-making,” even though both bills were crafted in bi-partisan committees and contain hundreds of GOP-authored amendments.

Democrats may have sounded silly insisting there was common ground and agreement across party lines while Republicans spent much of the time arguing that none existed. This despite the fact that all in attendance seemed to agree that reform was required; that costs needed to be controlled, that larger pools of coverage would reduce premiums (among other commonalities), and that many differences amounted to semantics.

Talking points were in generous supply during the six-hour-plus sessions. House Republican leader John Boehner called the proposed reforms a “dangerous experiment.” Some Republicans spun Congressional Budget Office figures to argue against reforms, while others marginalized the same reports to support their own cases. Both parties stuck to the same lines as before the summit, which left little room for useful compromise.

There were highlights and glimpses of hope. When Senator John Barrasso made the statement that those with catastrophic insurance coverage (in which those covered pay out-of-pocket expense for most services) make better consumers of health care services, Obama asked if he thought Congress should have only catastrophic coverage. When Barrasso replied he did, the president asked if he would feel the same if he made $40,000 instead of $176,000 a year.

There were other times during the day that Democrats refocused the discussion on the health care problems faced by those in greatest need. Senator Tom Harkin told of an Iowa farmer struggling with sky-rocketing insurance premiums. Several other members of Congress described situations where coverage was dropped and where treatment was denied. These are issues that are often buried in the political rhetoric that characterizes the health care debate.

Unfortunately, the proposed legislation – with its concessions to corporate demands and those of insurers and the pharmaceutical industry – falls short of addressing many of the issues of those in greatest need. If the GOP’s requests to start the process over and go back to the drawing board would yield solutions to real health care problems, I would support it. However, I am convinced this ploy would merely be a stall tactic to prevent any real change from happening while the Democrats are in power (although ten years of Republican dominance failed to bring any needed reform).

Perhaps, some day, politics will take a back seat to policy and the American people can truthfully boast about our health care system (instead of making baseless claims about its quality). However, it will require us to stop cheerleading our chosen party members and instead hold our representatives’ feet to the fire.