GOP needs its own health ideas summit before Obama
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
In an Olympic February, there’s a lot of talk about speed.
Dashing for gold medals is one thing; unseemly haste in re-crafting one-sixth of the national economy en route to making limited health care reforms is quite another.
So, what to do about President Obama’s invitation for Republicans to meet with him and Democrats in a televised forum Feb. 25 and use the widely detested ObamaCare bills as starting points?
We’d advise they not show up. Instead, take as many weekend retreats away from Washington, D.C., as necessary to get square with what Americans really want to change.
Then put the plans on the Internet for the public to study.
Ideas we would nominate include allowing Americans to buy health insurance across state lines, making insurance portable through plans such as Cobra for when a worker switches jobs, stop denial of insurance to paid-up customers in good standing when they become seriously ill, allow pools to guarantee coverage at a reasonable price for men and women with high-risk conditions.
It will be a winner for Republicans to take these and/or other better ideas and put them out for study. All submissions should be in short amendments of 20 or so pages written in plain English.
When not, of late, inviting Republicans to meetings, President Obama and his congressional health care team leaders have spent months mocking them and locking congressional doors against them. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been particularly egregious in this practice.
Polls show two-thirds of Americans want nothing to do with the costs of ObamaCare and its offering of new entitlements when Medicare and Medicaid are going broke. Health reform, by the way, ranks down the list of priority issues with the public, far down from national security, control of taxation and spending and deficits. All have been millstones for Obama’s once soaring reputation as a political genius, if not a messiah.
If Republican leaders do accept Obama’s invitation — without having their ideas clearly posted as a vaccination against media distortions — they are leading with their chins.
The fact that Obama is willing to spend so much of his own political capital on health care imposes no demand on Republicans to jump in.
It is strange that so many otherwise canny Democrats have latched themselves to their strangely unbending leader as he charges forward.
Excepted are three so far who have left the field for Nov. 2010 — Senators Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and, just this week, Evan Bayh of Indiana.
Nebraska’s own Ben Nelson is sticking with Obama, after carpet-bombing the state with some $450,000 in Democrat-paid for television ads supporting his decisive 60th vote for ObamaCare and his tattered reputation.
A pre-Obama summit for the Republicans will help by giving them and the country time to absorb a lot of the Obamaism that has come on so quickly.
If there is one thing America does not need, it is for the Republicans to scurry unprepared to this meeting.
This writer hastens to credit Betsy McCaughey, writing in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, for the idea to slice the health reform ideas into manageable sections of 20 pages. She is the former lieutenant governor of New York and current chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.
High up on her priority list is avoiding any sit downs with a president who refuses to scrap the bills we have collectively called ObamaCare. Then, start over.
Certainly, the nation wants no more of those 2,700-page monstrosities crafted for Obama by House Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid.
It was an ominous portent that the infamous “Cornhusker Kickback” that has so undone Ben Nelson was found slipped into the bill on page 2,129.
How many more such tricks and traps Obama might have out there one can only guess.
It’s an open question on whether Obama — badly pummeled by devastating anti-Democrat election results in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia and political miscues on terrorism and spending — really hopes for consensus. What he might want is the appearance of newfound reasonableness as a play toward independent voters, who have greatly abandoned him.
ObamaCare is likely dead, other than as an albatross around the necks of Democrats running next November.
Look for White House desperation, however, because if even the House of Representative slips to the Republicans, Obama’s “hope and change” as he envisions it is gone too.
The House is where the money is.
February 19, 2010
