In the New York Times today, Lamar Alexander claims that the White House was never really interested in a bipartisan healthcare bill. Matt Yglesias isn’t buying it:
Chuck Grassley is not just some guy, he’s the top Republican on health care issues. And the Grassley courtship process took a long time. And Grassley abandoned it in a blaze of hypocrisy, eventually slamming Democrats for embracing an individual mandate to purchase health insurance that he had long supported.
The larger context is that the president laid out some goals for health reform. He wants a bill that expands coverage in a way that’s deficit neutral in the medium-term, doesn’t disrupt people’s existing health insurance in the short-term,
and bends the long-term cost curve. A lot of different ideas were put forward in Congress about how to do this. None of them were put forward by Republicans.
You know what this country needs — aside from strict rules limiting the volume of commercials on TV? A really good tick-tock about the seemingly endless healthcare negotiations this summer among the “Gang of Six” on the Senate Finance Committee. Did Republicans put forward any good ideas? Were they truly trying to find a bipartisan compromise? Was the president deeply involved in any of this?
There’s no question that Republicans had some ideas about healthcare. But that’s not the correct measure of whether they were working in good faith to fashion a bipartisan bill. Given that Democrats control both Congress and the presidency by wide margins, it was always going to be the case that the fundamental structure of healthcare reform would be a liberal one. So the real measure of Republican good faith is whether they provided suggestions and compromises that worked within that structure but would have made it more acceptable to conservative sensibilities.
That was never my impression, at least in the more public arenas. Republican contributions, such as they were, essentially boiled down to tossing out the liberal framework entirely and pretending that conservatives had won the 2008 election. These ideas were transparently DOA, designed primarily to rally the base, not to produce a serious conversation on healthcare.
But is that what happened in the Finance Committee negotiations? Or did Enzi, Snowe, and Grassley really, sincerely try to figure out a way to take a liberal superstructure and modify it in ways that might make it genuinely acceptable to at least some Republicans in the Senate? Inquiring minds want to know. Is there anyone out there with the sources to take a serious crack at writing this story?
