By John Brummett
How hard is health care reform? Let’s tell a brief story, capturing but a snapshot.
It’s Thursday afternoon. U.S. Rep. Mike Ross of Prescott, suddenly a big Blue Dog in Washington this week, returns a call. He’s recently come from the House floor where there was some procedural vote.
He says it’s become apparent that it’s not only the centrist and fiscally conservative Blue Dogs who, among congressional Democrats, resist the House health care reform bill. He won’t provide names, but says “progressive member after progressive member” — Democratic House members more to the left than he, that is — came by to tell him and others in the Blue Dog coalition thanks for putting the brakes on the bill.
Ross asks: Have you heard the “bombshell?” It’s just out in the e-mail alerts of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.
The head of the Congressional Budget Office, testifying in the Senate, had said moments before that the House bill and a Senate bill floating around would not curb the inflation-transcending growth in health care costs and would exacerbate the already frightful deficit.
This pronouncement has made prominent Democrats mad and caused the driving of a hint of a wedge.
Majority Leader Harry Reid says maybe the CBO staff director, a supposedly neutral employee, ought to run for office. The New York Times reports that Reid’s complaining is akin to a baseball player’s arguing balls and strikes with the umpire. (It’s more like arguing with the scoreboard, actually.)
Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, Democratic chairman of the Finance Committee working hard on some kind of compromise, says it doesn’t help that President Obama detaches from the process, except to chime in from time to time to say he’s against something or other. Baucus mainly means the tax on generous employer-based health insurance benefits that Baucus favors to try to pay for all this.
Obama has a little campaign promise pending. It’s about no tax increase for the middle class.
But Ross happily says this CBO declaration “validates” precisely what the Blue Dogs, whom he serves conspicuously as health care task force chairman, have been saying.
This is why he and six other Blue Dogs, who happen to be loaded up on the Energy and Commerce Committee, intend to block the bill in that committee unless it’s changed next week. Among other things, they want a bigger exemption for small businesses from employer mandates and some kind of cost-containment that Ross is not ready to get specific about. He says he owes it to Chairman Henry Waxman to let him see that amendment first.
Is it possible that this CBO declaration will force the House leadership to pull the bill back? Ross, fatigued like other Blue Dogs that the House leadership pushed cap-and-trade two weeks ago so the Senate could promptly table it, says he’s given up trying to figure out what the House leadership is going to do.
Liberal bloggers want to know how Ross, with a poor constituency about 21 percent of which lacks health insurance, could possibly stand in the way of this bill.
It’s because 79 percent of his constituency has some form of health insurance and doesn’t want to ante up for the 21 percent unless there’s also something in it for them, like cost containment. It’s because what you hear from Texarkana to Arkadelphia to Crossett is that people are weary of these deficits and these bailouts and this supposed “socialism” that the dreadful Rush Limbaugh has them all worked up about.
If you want to understand why Ross does his politics this way, drive south out of Little Rock and uncover your ears.
Ross reiterates — tellingly — that the Blue Dogs aren’t against health care reform. This nation can’t long weather the status quo, he says. But that doesn’t mean, he says, that members must cave to White House pressure to pass something, anything, by the recess Aug. 8, so that conference committees can get down to the real work.
Can this ever get done? Actually, yes. The main reason everyone is freaking out is that, in truth, we are much closer than we’ve been since Harry Truman first proposed universal health care 61 years ago.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
