Did Obama Screw Up by Not Offering a Plan for Health Reform?

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Wed Aug-19-09 11:57 AM
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Did Obama Screw Up by Not Offering a Plan for Health Reform?

Did Obama Screw Up by Not Offering a Plan for Health Reform?
By Marie Cocco
Washington Post Writers Group
August 19, 2009

The president's hands-off approach to reform has backfired, as overhaul of the health care system falls prey to wrangling in Congress.

WASHINGTON -- I missed the hot fun this summer. While much of America seemed to be screeching over the incredible -- in the truest sense of the word -- notion that angry citizens could tote a gun even to a town hall meeting with the president of the United States, I was pondering the relative merits of bike ride versus beach walk. The brouhaha that has stripped away the thin veneer of good will that greeted the start of Barack Obama's presidency is over health care revision, and specifically over something the media keep calling the "Obama health care plan." That one stumps me, too, because there is no "Obama health care plan." Nor has there ever been one. That's part of the problem. The Obama political strategy has been that the White House would not propose its own health care legislation, lest it meet the same fate as the Clinton initiative of the early 1990s. The Obama political operation believes the death of the Clinton plan was foretold because President Bill Clinton sought to impose a White House blueprint on Congress, rather than letting lawmakers do their own thing.

There's plenty of evidence that the look-ma-no-hands approach hasn't helped, and it probably made the painful politics of health care hurt more, not less. For one thing, the president has outsourced his signature legislative proposal to a political entity -- Congress -- that has a public approval rating of about 30 percent in most recent polls, far lower than the president's own standing.

With no White House plan to serve as a political marker, it's been every member for his or her self. That's why there are competing Democratic plans, and rifts within rifts in the party. Vacationing lawmakers have no single plan to defend or even explain to the throngs of detractors -- and, sometimes, supporters -- who are turning out in the heat to harangue them. Without the president even setting out clear lines about what will or won't win his signature, there is no political penalty to be paid by any Democrat who crosses Obama.

And who can even tell when he's been crossed? The White House is now in retreat from the president's often-repeated support for a public insurance plan to be offered to consumers who currently lack insurance, or who are unable to afford what they now have. It hasn't said publicly which of the competing tax proposals it will accept as payment for expanding coverage, a minefield set to explode in the coming months.

Thus far, the Obama White House has stood firmest behind its own agreements -- reached in secret, without public hearings or congressional input -- with lobbyists for the drug industry and hospital groups who have promised to deliver cost-savings at some unspecified time in the future. It even has backed the drug industry's insistence that Democrats be prevented from writing legislation that would allow the government to negotiate discount prices, a congressional goal since the Medicare prescription drug benefit program emerged from Capitol Hill as a slush fund for industry profits.

Please read the complete article at:

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/142020/did_obama_screw_up_by_not_offering_a_plan_for_health_reform/