What's the Rush?

Today's election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate could prove to be a watershed in the health care reform debate. That is, if the Democrats allow it.

House Democrats announced today that should their counterparts in the Senate lose their 60 (anti-filibuster) votes, with a win by Brown, they would immediately approve the version of the health care bill that cleared the Senate. This would allow the legislation to go directly to President Obama for his signature.

As reported by the LA Times this morning, "The move would end negotiations over how to reconcile provisions on which the two chambers differ."

This procedural move would be next in a series of unorthodox plays made by the Democrats backing the bill. I understand political strategy, but this move shows desperation.

For starters, many of the amendments to the bill eventually passed by the Senate were voted on and adopted during late night votes. The motion of cloture, to end debate in order to officially take up the bill came late on Christmas Eve. It is one of the only occasions in our history a vote has been called on the night of December 24th.

Typically, once bills are passed in the House and the Senate, they are unified in committees and caucuses before they are sent to the President's desk. Often, these committees are held in a public forum. These committee hearings are what a viewer might see on an average night on C-SPAN. However, the Democrats opted to forgo the process of joint committee hearings, and instead negotiated the terms of the final bill in private sessions with President Obama in the Oval Office. It almost sounds like the plot of an episode on the West Wing.

With Brown's victory in Massachusetts, the Dems have lost their 60 vote supermajority in the Senate. The Times article stresses the significance and the impact of this powershift by explaining that, "To placate House liberals, many of whom think Senate leaders made too many concessions to win over conservative Democrats, the Senate would then be asked to pass separate bills to satisfy some of the liberals' demands, including scaling back a new tax on high-end "Cadillac" health plans. These Senate votes could be held under special procedural rules that would prevent filibusters" from killing the bill. This is the reason why they are sending it directly to Obama without further debate.

What's even more perplexing is that without further discussion, the Democrats will opt to settle for the bill as is; without many of the provisions which they previously hoped to include.

Another option under consideration by the House Democrats is to rush the bills through the House and Senate, before the results of the election are certified. That move would arguably be worse than sending it to Obama straightaway.

The bottom line is that if meaningful change to the health care system is to be considered, then why not make it count? In its current form, the respective bills do nothing to address to underlying causes of rising health care costs.

Why usher a half-baked bill through the system so quickly? And why accomplish it all at once?

Obama is conceivably making the same mistake that Bush did on immigration: producing a big, mammoth, comprehensive bill when the public mood was for small, discrete steps in what might reasonably seem the right direction.

Last year the public would have been happy to see a simple bill that mandated insurance companies offer universal coverage to individuals and small businesses, without respect to previous medical conditions. The administration could have had that- and the victory of it- last year. Instead they were greedy for glory.

Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager of Health Care for America Now, a coalition of liberal grass-roots groups, including labor unions stated, "We will aggressively urge Democrats to do the best possible bill quickly."

Why not urge them to create the best possible bill. Period. This could be the largest governmental reform in history.

So what's the rush?