Health Policy Matters Post
The Democrats seem to be in the anger phase of grief over the collapse of their health overhaul, with a sharp and heated meeting between top White House advisers and Senate Democrats on Wednesday. Politico reports: "Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats. Five sources who were in the room tell Politico that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration's failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact."
What's New
The White House believes it has identified a new way to put Republicans on the spot on health reform — a big bipartisan summit that forces both parties to explain their ideas before C-SPAN cameras. The president reportedly plans to bring with him a copy of the merged House/Senate bill that was within days of being enacted before Scott Brown’s election slammed the brakes on their hugely unpopular legislation.
President Obama previewed his election year strategy during his 70-minute exchange with House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore last week, telling Republicans they have no business obstructing his legislation because he’s adopting so many of their ideas. His strategy will be to co-opt not only the rhetoric of the right, as he did during the campaign and last year, but also to show that he really is the leader in bipartisanship by adopting their policy initiatives into legislation.
President Obama failed to offer any path to break the Congressional stalemate over health care reform in his address last night, simply offering another rallying cry for his signature domestic policy initiative and repeating talking points he’s made in countless speeches all year. The president says people would like his plan if only they understood it. But the American people do understand it, and they don’t like it. The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll taken last week found 69 percent of Americans want Congress to either draft a new bill or drop the issue altogether.
The frantic push for health-care reform has come to a screeching halt, as members of the House and Senate have rebuffed appeals from both President Obama and their leaders to swallow hard and quickly pass the legislation that has consumed Congress for a year. The president and Hill leaders spent the weekend desperately trying to persuade members to disregard the Massachusetts Message and ram the Senate’s health-overhaul bill through the House, with a promise that the Senate would then use the 51-vote reconciliation process to fix it.
A new Washington Post poll taken in Massachusetts after Tuesday’s election blows apart the Left’s claims that the election was not about health reform. The poll, conducted by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University's School of Public Health, found that health care topped jobs and the economy as the most important issue driving voters’ decisions.
The Galen Institute, Inc., is a not-for-profit, free-market research organization devoted exclusively to health policy, promoting a more informed public debate over individual freedom, consumer choice, competition and diversity in the health sector.
