A Growing Snowball Despite the Heat of August – What’s That All About?
Last week, the healthcare reform rhetoric heated up and a snowball began to form. The whole discussion seemed more like a campaign than a policy debate. The President, members of the Administration, and Democrat leaders all participated in a full court press to support Healthcare Reform. The coordinated town hall sessions, radio talk shows, roundtables, and media ads were intended to dispel growing concerns among the American people about healthcare reform. In fact, public concerns appear to be a growing snowball in the middle of an August heat wave. A Washington Post-ABC News poll published on Friday revealed the magnitude of the snowball when it found that independent voter confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions had dropped 20 points since the Inauguration – from 61 percent to 41 percent.
But, despite the coordinated effort at the beginning of the week – the players all seemed to be going in different directions by weeks end. On the Sunday CNN review, Senator Lieberman (I-CT) declared it was time to settlefor “three-fourths of what needs to be done.” Senator Schumer (D-NY) meanwhile called for the Dems to “go it alone”. Senator Specter (D-PA) and Senator Conrad (D-ND) seemed to embrace the fact that a move to a push passage through a reconciliation vote was "the last, last, last resort,"(Spector) or "an option but… not a very good one."(Conrad). McCain pointed to Kennedy's absence as making a "huge, huge difference"in the tenor of the debate (See below). And, none of the Senate Republicans stepped forward to clear a path for bi-partisan legislation.
And, in the House – where legislation has passed with support from three committees before the summer recess – the “public option” was again championed. Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her opposition to other middle-of-the-road ideas on Thursday by stating, “I don’t know how you would scale [coops] down. There’s no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option.”
Are we headed for a stalemate? Quite possibly. Instead of the Big Bang, it could be the Big Collapse with the snowball of growing healthcare reform opposition rolling out of control despite the heat of the summer…
The views and opinions expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Dell Services or its affiliates.
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