The health care battle

There is a battle waging within the walls of the White House over the shape of the health care bill. Even as we speak this titanic struggle is going on over what it is exactly President Obama will come out in support of during his big health care speech addressing Congress next week. What is the struggle? It's between those who want to hack out large sections from proposed bills and those who want to hack really large sections out of the proposed bills. It's really a struggle that wells one up with pride.

This is health-care reform's endgame, or close to it. Next Wednesday, Barack Obama will give a prime-time address before both houses of Congress. But that's not all he's giving Congress. The administration is going to put a plan down on paper. The question is what it will say.

Conversations with a number of White House officials make it clear that, at this point, even they don't know. The argument was raging as recently as last night, and appears to have hardened into two main camps. Both camps agree that the cost of the bill has to come down. The question is how much, and what can be sacrificed.

The first camp could be called "universal-lite." They're focused on preserving the basic shape of the bill....Creating a robust structure is the most important thing.
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The second camp is not universal at all. This camp believes the bill needs to be scaled back sharply in order to ensure passage....What that sacrifices in terms of structure it gains in terms of political appeal.

Yes because out of all the things we've learned about health care it's that coming in with a plan of "after we pass whatever, we'll be able to go in later fairly easily and make things better" is a great idea that will totally work. I mean after all we are talking about a place where the proven best ideas can't even dare to be considered, instead we have to hope that compromises of compromises can get passed. Which, as we're seeing, they can't. But I'm sure after this big fight, everyone will want to go back and tweak things to make them better. I bet there won't be any massive political fighting at all. Health care reform is always easy, that's why it's best to split it into large chunks that you hope can get accomplished over a period of years.

It's good though that the White House at least has a plan, even if that plan is "gut whatever came out of the House and HELP committees". And really who can blame their political acumen on this front. I mean they are the ones that decided to just turn over the legislation to Congress with only a loose set of guidelines, they're the ones with the bright idea to let Max Baucus go off into his corner to negotiate with Grassley and Enzi, they're the ones that decided it would be best to go campaign and hold prime time press conferences without even so much as a concrete idea or plan that they could discuss, and they're the ones that have decided not to get publicly involved until the absolute last minute. So really, why wouldn't you trust their plan "negotiate against ourselves and compromise....yet again"? Everything they've come up with so far has been brilliant, I'm sure the battle between White House factions over how much to cut will result in something brilliant as well.