HEALTHCARE REFORM IS ALMOST HERE!

Health insurance premiums in the United States have increased in cost by almost 100% since the year 2000, a growth rate three times larger than wage increases over the same period of time. At the same time, one out of every three Americans today is uninsured or underinsured. Moreover, health insurance premiums are more than double for Americans than they are for citizens of the second highest cost nation, Norway.

These daunting facts leave little doubt that healthcare costs in America have spun out of control and the financial health of each American, and the country as a whole, is dependent upon smart healthcare reform.

So I am exhausted by the people who as a last ditch effort to stall healthcare reform are now complaining about the size of the new healthcare reform legislation that the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives will soon sit down to reconcile their differences with and finally pass a healthcare reform package that President Obama can sign into law.

I have heard spin doctors on the right gleefully ridicule the Senate Finance Committee for producing a 2,000 page bill or complaining that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in cahoots with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and that they are combining the different versions of the healthcare bill passed in their respective chambers into some kind of consolidated bill behind “closed doors” as part of an overall strategy to hoodwink the American people.

I care nothing about how large the bill is. Examined closely, it becomes almost immediately apparent that most of the language is boilerplate and that the length of the bill actually is a manifestation of the complexity of the issue and the many parts of existing law that will be changed by this bill. Throwing stones at this bill because of its size is foolish and has nothing to do with reality. It does not matter how long any bill is—what matters is what it says.

Regarding private meetings between legislators as they attempt to reconcile the differences between House and Senate versions, what should we expect? Is it critical to have these discussions available and open to all? In my mind, the task of Congress is to create a healthcare reform bill that members from both their caucuses can support. These are not discussions that have a higher chance of success with politicians playing to the cameras. More importantly, the healthcare bill is not going to be passed in a cigar smoke filled backroom with only those in the room understanding how the final version came into existence. Already there have been months of public hearings, weeks of town hall meetings all over the country and days of press conferences. Further, in this day of electronic transparency, the final legislation voted on by Congress will be posted online and will be dissected by lawyers, reporters and political analysts from all different political persuasions—and yes—even bloggers will have more than enough data to review and criticize, whatever the final version is.

These attacks on the bill’s length are more about the attacker’s frustration than it is anything substantive. The sadness regarding these attacks however, speaks to the tried and true strategy of the right in this country to viscerally attack anything they do not believe in. It has been the strategy of conservative forces in America to viscerally attack issues and the people who believe in them that are anathema to their way of thinking. Relying on name calling, outright lies, outlandish accusations (President Obama’s citizenship) and finally simple ridicule, such as the number of pages in the healthcare reform legislation that they have failed to defeat, may have worked in the past, but it is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s information age.

Much of the misinformation circulating through the country today comes from a lack of understanding of health insurance and/or economics. In spite of the herculean efforts on the part of some scholars like Dean Baker, who has taken the complex and highly technical issues that to some degree drive the debate and managed to present them to the American public at-large in easy to understand concepts, we still today remain somewhat ignorant about issues like the need to balance a mandate on carriers to sell coverage to all applicants regardless of health conditions or pre-existing conditions. The real issue, and one much more complex and challenging, is making the balance affordable—an issue that is more than worthy of determined and civil debate.

All of this leads me to the realization that once the US Congress passes healthcare reform, then maybe we should turn our attentions to reforming the US Senate. Both Democrats and Republicans have come to believe that it is their right and duty to block legislation they object to, even when they do not have the power to do it by winning the hearts and minds of the American people to say nothing of their Senate colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

If one plows through all of the rhetoric in this debate, it becomes almost immediately obvious that both parties have become so used to the strategy of obstruction that they have lost sight of their purpose as legislators, that is to win legislative victory through governance. For my money (and admittedly I don’t have a lot), a Senate in which the majority can pass its agenda is a better one for it is a Senate in which the majority party could be held accountable for its actions and not for the utter inability to move forward made possible by current Senate rules.

All of us are asking for it. For legislators to work together with reason and civility—it just seems that nobody is home. In 1776 another powerful entity refused to listen, and we all know what happened in that situation.