Bluedogs Have Made Health Reform More Expensive
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Related subjects: Healthcare Policy, J.E. Robertson, Legislation, U.S. Economy, U.S. Law, U.S. news, U.S. Politics Comments Off
Conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives have fought hard to make the public option, and therefore healthcare reform broadly, both less effective and more expensive. How and why they did so is puzzling: while claiming they wanted to contain costs, they went about attacking the most salient cost-cutting aspects of the plan.
The first, and most obvious, of these was the idea that the public option should be able to negotiate reimbursement rates, using Medicare —which is significantly more cost-effective and less inflationary than the private sector— as a guide. The Bluedogs were seriously opposed to doing this, and their critics suggest it’s because they are taking large sums of money from industry groups that don’t want costs to be cut. And they have done this while making incessant arguments in favor of “fiscal conservatism”.
They are using the insurance industry’s own language about fiscal conservatism, the language used by well-funded industry lobbyists and allies of the industry in Congress —also well-funded, by the same lobbyists and firms whose argument they consistently make—, a variation on the theme of government control which holds that only companies unconstrained by taxes or regulations can be empowered to dothe right thing or be truly “efficient”.
In the game of extracting profit from human illness, however, that rhetoric of fiscal conservatism is aimed at nothing less than preventing reforms that would reduce costs, meaning those who justify their obstructionism with such rhetoric are actually helping to make sure everyone, including the Federal government, pays more, not less, for healthcare in the future.
The problem the Bluedogs’ bad bill-making tactics have revealed is the problem of lawmakers taking confused ideological assumptions as gospel and mixing them in with specific measures designed to achieve the stated goals in a way they neglect to adequately study or understand. It’s not just that we don’t want to see the ugly process of lawmaking; it’s that even within that hodge-podge of compromise and half-measures, the Bluedogs have done something astoundingly stupid: they’ve undermined their own stated legislative goals, while maligning their own party and spoon-feeding wide grounds for critique of both themselves and their party to the opposition.
The Democratic leadership would do well to treat the ham-fisted pseudo-Machiavellian bumbling of the so-called “conservative” Bluedogs as what it is: a sign of their lack of gravitas or devotion to crafting viable, productive policy reform. But they should also consider that these members are perhaps not politically astute enough to both engage in an outflanking maneuver and get the job done in service of the public good.
This makes them a danger to the Democratic cause generally, and voters may already be looking for challengers who would serve them more honorably and more effectively. Ultimately, the disingenuous and haphazard protestations over healthcare reform proposals’ most vital cost-cutting measures in fact being “too expensive” has undermined the quality of the reform proposals, divided the Democratic majority and made the Bluedogs into spoilers.
Democratic voters will decide the next time each of these members of Congress comes up for reelection if they are fit to serve, but what is clear is that by undermining the cost-cutting provisions —like the public option— of pending reforms, the Bluedogs have also undermined their own chances of telling conservative voters back home they fought to keep costs down.
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