The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit

Published on February 27, 2010

By JOHN NICHOLS
Commondreams.org
International
Posted by Bulatlat.com

President Obama and congressional Republicans arrived at the White House health care summit with talking points — not just for the summit itself but for the after-summit jockeying to claim the upper hand coming out of a session that always had more to do with messaging than making progress to insure more Americans at less cost.

Obama got off a good enough line about “not campaigning anymore.”

Congressman Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican who has become a “party of no” pointman, showed up with Ross Perot-style props and plenty of gripes.

Ultimately, Obama summed things up pretty well:

I think we’re establishing that there are actually some areas of real agreement,” he said, stopping for a minute outside the gates. “And we’re starting to focus on what the real disagreements are.

If you look at the issue of how much government should be involved, the argument that the Republicans are making really isn’t that this is a government takeover of health care but rather that we’re ensuring the — we’re regulating the insurance market too much. And that’s a legitimate philosophical disagreement.

The problem, of course, is that most of the really meaningful disagreements went undiscussed.

The summit positioned Obama and a relatively united Democratic leadership against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and their “party of no” minions.

They got in the same room, and stuck around for a long time.

But they did not get along.

They did not offer much in the way of new ideas, let alone ideas that might actually meet the challenge of providing care for all Americans without breaking the bank.

What would have made the gathering at Blair House more interesting and, potentially, more useful would have been an airing — in this C-Span aired, high profile setting — of the range of ideas that members of Congress entertain with regard to health-care reform.

Unless Thursday’s summit was a conference committee meeting, a final session for reconciling differing House and Senate measures (perhaps with some prodding from an engaged president), the product of the session was never going to be a final health-care reform bill.

So why not talk about best responses to a very real crisis?

Why not consider not just Republican alternatives to President Obama’s proposal but the fix that Obama, himself, once suggested (as a 2004 U.S. Senate candidate) was the essential point of beginning for a just and equitable health-care system in a developed nation? Why not let the dozens of House and Senate members who support a Medicare-for-All, single-payer system into the discussion? Why not let House Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers, D-Michigan, Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and other members of Congress ask the questions that should be asked about Obama’s compromise plan?

Instead of Republican grumbling about how Obama is going to far, why not have a rational discussion about whether Obama is going far enough?

That rational discussion could have begun with a review of the response the presidential proposal by Physicians for a National Health Program, the organization of 17,000 doctors who support single-payer, Medicare-for-All approach to reform.

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