The Ashford Zone Blog

The news much of the and blogosphere seems interested in scoring the summit, as if it were a "debate" (I've seen actual news outlets refer to it as a debate, which it wasn't).  I have no interest in that.  It wasn't about scoring political points.  To the extent that someone did, that's nice, but who cares?

Basically, the entire endeavor boiled down to this: Obama's question for Republicans was, "We're offering a bipartisan, comprehensive package built around principles you claim to support. Are you willing to work with us?"

And Republicans came with their own question: "Will you throw out all the work you've done and promise to let us kill reform with a filibuster?"

Both sides have the same answer to the competing questions: "No."

So was anything accomplished?  No.

There was news to come out of the summit though, which is best summarized by Obama's closing remarks yesterday afternoon.

"[W]hat I'd like to propose is that I've put on the table now some things that I didn't come in here saying I supported, but that I was willing to work with potential Republican sponsors on. I'd like the Republicans to do a little soul-searching and find out are there some things that you'd be willing to embrace that get to this core problem of 30 million people without health insurance and dealing seriously with the preexisting condition issue.

"I don't know, frankly, whether we can close that gap. And if we can't close that gap, then I suspect Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are going to have a lot of arguments about procedures in Congress about moving forward."

Translated?  I think Obama was giving the green light to Democrats, who are still in the majority (though they don't act like it) to push forward on health care reform without the Republicans.

In other words, bipartisanship is all but off the table.  And that's encouraging.

Part of the problem with getting health care reform done, is that both sides are arguing from a different set of facts, rather than opposing policy.  This, of course, shouldn't be: facts are facts.

Watch this disagreement between President Obama and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) on the issue of whether health care premiums would go up under the Senate Dems' reform plan.  President Obama cites the CBO to say that premiums will go down; Alexander cites the CBO to say that premiums will go up.

They're both citing the same source, so only one can be right.  Who is it?

President Obama:

Lamar Alexander and Barack Obama just had a contentious exchange on this point, so it's worth settling the issue: Yes, the CBO found health-care reform would reduce premiums. The issue gets confused because it also found that access to subsidies would encourage people to buy more comprehensive insurance, which would mean that the value of their insurance would be higher after reform than before it. But that's not the same as insurance becoming more expensive: The fact that I could buy a nicer car after getting a better job suggests that cars are becoming pricier. The bottom line is that if you're comparing two plans that are exactly the same, costs go down after reform.

I'm not accusing Lamar Alexander of intentionally lying or anything like that.  It's just that he doesn't understand the issue very well, and that's why he misread the CBO report.  And that's another, perhaps even greater, reason why health care reform is slow to get accomplished.  The people who are opposed to it simply don't understand it.

On the other hand, two other Republicans also took Alexander's (incorrect) position that the CBO said the premiums would go up.  Clearly, they are going from the same talking points.  And who is preparing those talking points?  Insurance lobbies.

UPDATE: See also PolitiFact on this issue:

On Nov. 30, 2009, the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, released a detailed analysis on how health insurance premiums might be affected by the Senate Democrats' health care bill. The CBO is an independent agency whose estimates for pending legislation are considered nonpartisan and rigorous.

The CBO reported that, for most people, premiums would stay about the same, or slightly decrease. This was especially true for people who get their insurance through work. (Health policy wonks call these the large group and small group markets.) People who have to go out and buy insurance on their own (the individual market) would see rates increase by 10 to 13 percent. But more than half of those people — 57 percent, in fact — would be eligible for subsidies to help them pay for the insurance. People who get subsidies would see their premiums drop by more than half, according to the CBO. So most people would see their premiums stay the same or potentially drop.

I'm not sure what the point of it is.  Ostensibly, the point is for the two parties to get together on national television for six hours and hammer out some concrete proposals for reforming health care in this country.

Early reports indicate that the Republicans are coming to the table with "No. No. No. No. No. Let's scrap everything and start over" even though Obama's proposal contains about 80% of what Republicans have said they wanted in a health care reform bill.

But then again, maybe that's the point.  To show that only one side is willing to work on serious health care reform, and the other side is commited to its destruction and/or delay.  If that's the White House's "hidden agenda" of today's health care summit, it seems that Republicans are playing into that rather well.

RELATED:  A nice "viewer's guide" to the proceedings today is here (PDF format), for those with the stomach to watch them.

A more neutral PDF comparing the three plans (the House, the Senate, and Obama's) is here if you care to wade through it.

This rocked the House yesterday, and this video is No. 4 on Youtube:

For those who don't have video, here's Firedoglake's description of the event:

Anthony Weiner just made a fiery speech in the middle of the House debate on repealing the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption. Angered by a motion to recommit, he lashed out, saying “the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry!” While continuing on this theme, Republicans asked that the words be taken down, an attempt to rule Weiner’s remarks out of order and ban him from speaking on the floor for the rest of the day. Weiner then asked unanimous consent to substitute remarks, and after withdrawing the initial ones, said “Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry!”

Republicans again asked for the words to be taken down.

At issue was a motion to recommit from the Republicans which would essentially scuttle the bill to repeal the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption. The motion would have inserted a massive loophole that would have allowed insurers to collude with one another. Weiner said “You guys have chutzpah… they say that, well this isn’t going to do enough, but when we propose an alternative to provide competition, they’re against it… they said they want to have competition, and when we proposed requiring competition, the Republicans are against it!”

Eventually, Weiner withdrew his comments. But then he concluded, “there are winners and losers in the way we distribute health care,” and the insurance industry are among the winners, and the motion to recommit would keep that in place. He basically reinstated his “wholly owned subsidiary” comments in slightly more palatable words.

This chart, shameless lifted from Kaisir Health News, shows rather dramatically how conservativism of the Republicans have taken hold over the past 15 years.

Seventeen years ago, Republican Senator John Chaffee (R-RI), a moderate (now deceased), proposed a health care bill.  In many ways, it is very similar to the Senate Bill passed last December (which in itself is very similar to the plan unveiled by Obama last week).

The final column shows the current Republican plan, a stark contrast to Chafee's bill of 17 years ago.

Ezra Klein puts the chart in context:

Boehner's bill, by contrast, is far, far more conservative (and useless) than what moderate Republicans developed in 1993. Conversely, the Senate [Democratic] bill doesn't look anything like the Clinton plan itself, much less like the more liberal efforts to expand Medicare to all Americans.

We've got a situation in which Democrats are essentially pushing moderate Republican ideas while Republicans push extremely conservative ideas, but because neither the press nor the voters know very much about health-care policy, the fact that Republicans refuse to admit that Democrats have massively compromised their vision is enough to convince people that Democrats aren't compromising.

And Steve Benen:

For all the hysterical whining from today's Republican Party and its right-wing allies, the Democratic plan couldn't be any less radical. Not only is it practically identical to what moderate Republicans wanted nearly 20 years ago, but its basic structure is the same as the plan Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and Tom Daschle were touting last year.

The fact that Americans have been led to believe the Democratic plan is an example of wild-eyed liberalism — a notion largely embraced by much of the major media — speaks poorly of our discourse and capacity to have a meaningful policy debate. It is, however, a reminder of just how effective the right-wing noise machine can be.

More like this, please, posted on the White House website (emphasis is mine):

The President believes strongly that Thursday’s bipartisan meeting on health insurance reform will be most productive if both sides come to the table with a unified plan to start discussion – and if the public has the opportunity to inspect those proposals up close before the meeting happens.

That’s why yesterday the White House posted online the President’s proposal for bridging the differences between the Senate- and House-passed health insurance reform bills. The proposal puts American families and small business owners in control of their own health care. It makes insurance more affordable by providing the largest middle-class tax cuts for health care in history, it ends discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, holds insurance companies accountable,   and reduces our deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years.

But you don’t have to take our word for it: the proposal is posted right here at WhiteHouse.gov for everyone to examine. You can read through the plan’s bipartisan ideas section by section, or you can select your health care status and find out what the proposal would mean for you. You can even submit a question for our policy staff to answer.

What you can’t do just yet is read about the Republicans’ consensus plan – because so far they haven’t announced what proposal they’ll be bringing to the table. To be sure, there are many Republicans who share the President’s conviction that we need to act on reform, and there are several pieces of Republican health care legislation out there. Previously we were told this was the House Republican bill. Is it still? We look forward to hearing whether this the proposal they'll bring. The Senate Republicans have yet to post any kind of plan, so we continue to await word from them. As of right now, the American people still don’t know which one Congressional Republicans support and which one they want to present to the public on Thursday.

President Obama has been clear that his proposal isn’t the final say on legislation, and that’s what Thursday’s meeting is all about. But after a year of historic national dialogue about reform, it’s time for both sides to be clear about what their plan is to lower costs, hold insurance companies accountable, make health insurance affordable for those without it, and reduce the deficit.  A collection of piecemeal and sometimes conflicting ideas won’t do.

As we said today, we’ll be happy to post the Republican plan on our website once they indicate to us which one we should post. We hope they won’t pass up this opportunity to make their case to the American people.

Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director

No response from the GOP, which isn't terribly surprising.  They are not planning to come out with a comprehensive bill.  Their "plan" (and it's from the House GOP only) really is just a handful of loose ideas (tort reform, for example) which fails to held those with little or no insurance coverage.