There’s something poignant about President Obama’s attempts to reason with congressional Republicans. He keeps hoping that facts, evidence, and logic somehow can penetrate the depleted-uranium armor of conservative ideology. As yesterday’s health summit showed, it hasn’t worked, but a public frustrated with Washington’s tribal politics will probably appreciate the effort anyway.

The summit nonetheless achieved its real purpose, which was not composing differences but illuminating the two parties’ starkly contrasting visions for health care reform so that the voters can make a real comparison. For the past year, Republicans have had the advantage of attacking (often dishonestly) Democrats’ plans without anyone paying much attention to what they have to offer.

The summit put them on the spot, and the clear answer was: not much. Here’s what we learned about what Republicans mean by reform:

First, they don’t much care about health care’s “have nots” – 45 million Americans without coverage. Sure, they favor a modest expansion of coverage to about three million people, but that only begs the question of why the lucky few and not everyone? The answer is that Republicans don’t really believe it’s government’s responsibility to make sure everyone can get access to affordable coverage.

Second, Republicans do care about restraining rising health care costs for those with coverage. But their preferred solutions — medical savings accounts, and allowing people to buy cheaper insurance policies out-of-state — are tilted toward the healthy. The former takes healthy people out of insurance pools, raising premiums for those who remain. The latter allows people to end-run state mandates on the medical services insurance companies must offer. That’s fine for healthy people who can get by with bare-bones coverage, but it doesn’t help the sick. In fact, Republicans generally oppose the insurance market reforms that would prevent companies from cherry-picking healthy customers or dropping people when they get sick.

Third, the GOP has no intention of helping Obama and the Democrats improve their plans, let alone pass them. They feel little pressure to do so, because they think they have the public on their side.

It’s true that polls show majorities are leery of the Democrats’ reform proposals, even if Americans still want Obama to “do something” about health care costs and coverage. Rather than crumble in the face of public skepticism, Obama adroitly used the summit to reframe the health care debate as a choice between action or inaction on one of the nation’s most vexing problems.

The spotlight now shifts to his party. Will liberals torpedo health reform because it doesn’t include the public option? Will moderates play it safe or take a risk for the larger good of their party and their country? Will health care reform be a casualty of that hardy perennial of the culture wars, abortion?

Can congressional Democrats, in short, summon the will and discipline to rise above their own centripetal forces and govern? It should be obvious that failure would reinforce the Republican narrative: the bill was misbegotten in the first place, an overly ambitious, big-government monster that couldn’t even pass muster with Democrats.

Obama has gone all in; now his party needs to follow.

So, it’s finally out there: the “President’s Proposal” for health care reform which Obama will explain and defend in the “summit” with bipartisan congressional leaders on Thursday.

It’s unclear to what extent this plan reflects completed House-Senate negotiations on various sticking points between the bills each chamber has already passed. But it certainly addresses many of them. Think Progress has a useful chart comparing House, Senate, and Obama provisions. The biggies in terms of “improvements” to the Senate bill that would be enacted via reconciliation include a significant watering-down of the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans; bigger subsidies for insurance purchases; a sizeable increase in the federal share of costs associated with Medicaid expansion (accompanied by elimination of the special deal for Nebraska that the Senate included to get Ben Nelson on board); and the closing of the so-called “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage. These do represent the most often cited problems House Democrats have cited in the Senate bill, aside from the more fundamental failure to include a public option.

The two “surprises” in the proposals were that it did not authorize national health insurance exchanges (probably because of fears that such a step could trigger an adverse parliamentary ruling as non-germane to a reconciliation bill), which could be a serious issue for some House members; and a new provision that would enable federal regulators to stop large health insurance premium increases, which was almost certainly motivated by the recent big Anthem premium increases in California.

Republicans, of course, have immediately denounced the proposal as “partisan,” and appear ready for total war at the summit. Interestingly, the only spurned Republican “ideas” specifically mentioned in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s official response to the Obama proposal were interstate insurance sales and a total ban on private abortion coverage for people receiving federal subsidies (the Obama proposal tracks the Senate bill on abortion, which requires separate accounts for supplemental abortion insurance, but doesn’t try to outlaw it outright like the House bill’s Stupak Amendment does).

For those readers most concerned with a late revival of the public option, it should be noted that this possibility remains strictly contingent on progress towards getting 50 Democratic senators signed on. At this point, including it in the Obama proposal would have probably been counter-productive, even among Senate Democrats, while creating a new distraction going into the summit.

So we’re now ready for some serious Kabuki theater on Thursday. Obama’s objective will be three-fold: to rekindle some momentum for final action on health reform; to explode some of the Republican “ideas” like interstate sales; and to force Republicans to show the back of their hands while identifying them with potentially very unpopular proposals like voucherizing Medicare.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

President Obama hopes his bipartisan health care summit on Feb. 25 won’t degenerate into “political theater.” Too late: the partisan jockeying over health care reform already has turned into a farce worthy of Moliere.

It’s bad enough that Democrats, despite holding the White House and commanding majorities in Congress, can’t pass their top domestic priority. They look as feckless as Moliere’s cuckolded husbands.

But now Republicans are trying to dictate health care policy, despite having been soundly whipped in the last two national elections. As piously as one of Moliere’s hypocrites, they profess their devotion to covering the uninsured and restraining health care costs in a market-friendly way, though somehow they never got around to pushing a serious proposal when they held power.

Republican leaders have warily agreed to attend the summit, for fear that a no-show would cement their image as the party of “no.” But they are telling reporters it will be a waste of time unless Obama agrees to jettison reform bills that have passed both Houses of Congress and start over from scratch.

“Why would they want to keep pushing something that the public is overwhelmingly against?” GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell asked rhetorically after meeting with Obama this week. “Really, right now, it’s up to the President and Speaker Pelosi to start listening to the American people,” chimed in Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. “If they don’t, there’s not much to talk about.”

They may be the minority party, but Republicans are effectively claiming a new mandate on health reform – from opinion polls.

True, public opinion has turned against the health reform blueprints that emerged after many months of haggling and horse-trading on Capitol Hill. Obama says Americans were turned off by the “process,” but then, he was the one who decided to offer only the most general reform guidelines and let lawmakers fill in the blanks.

But public opinion is mutable, even fickle. Most Americans were strongly for health reform before they were against it. And it’s highly unlikely they oppose it because they’re intimately familiar with the complex provisions of the House and Senate bills. The way they were put together – basically, by paying off powerful interests and hold-out lawmakers – no doubt was a factor, but polls indicate that worries about the economy and jobs were a bigger one.

Public opinion may yet be turned around by a decisive show of political leadership. That’s why Obama is right to keep pressing for reform, even if in the end he has to settle for less than he wants or the country needs. And the coming summit is shrewdly conceived to give Republicans a chance either to win some substantive points – Obama is already talking about adding tort reform to the mix – or to show their overriding motive is to defeat a Democratic president, not fix health care.

In any case, shifting polls, tea parties and a single U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts don’t give Republicans the right to speak for the country, much less shape the nation’s health care agenda. That would turn a farce into a tragedy.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/talkradionews/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Perhaps being snowbound for the third day in a row has left me in an ornery mood, but this 37-second snippet of House Minority Leader John Boehner speaking after yesterday’s jobs bill meeting left me fuming.

Asked to comment on the upcoming bipartisan health care summit that President Obama proposed, here’s what Boehner said:

It’s going to be very difficult to have a bipartisan conversation with regard to a 2,700-page health care bill that a Democrat majority in the House and a Democrat majority in the Senate can’t pass. So why are we going to talk about a bill that can’t pass?

First of all, health care legislation did pass. In both chambers. The House passed its bill. The Senate passed its bill. They were in the process of reconciling their bills when the Senate lost its 60th seat to Scott Brown. Now, because the Republican strategy calls for total obstruction of any major legislation that is not 100 percent Republican, a Democratic majority in the Senate can’t pass whatever emerges from a House-Senate conference even though Dems hold 59 out of a 100 seats. (And Rep. Boehner, it’s “the Democratic majority,” not “Democrat.” But you knew that already.)

But there’s another part to the clip that set me off. It comes in the last few seconds when a reporter outside the frame asks Boehner, “Do you think [Obama’s] sincerely listening to your concerns?” “We’ll see,” Boehner solemnly intones.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about our discourse today is the pretense among the media and the commentariat that these Republicans are open to discussion — that there actually is a meeting point in the middle, or even right of the middle, where the Republicans finally say, “OK, it’s a deal.” There isn’t. The Republican objective isn’t to shape policy with their own ideas — it’s to make sure policy doesn’t get made at all.

One suspects that many in the media know this. But for some reason, they have to engage in the kabuki theater of pretending that Republicans actually do want to participate in governing, when obstructionism in the pursuit of regaining power is clearly their game plan. Just once I’d like a journalist to ask of Republicans, “You have asked Democrats to drop some of their priorities to achieve compromise. Which of your priorities are you willing to drop?” Or, “If the president accepts your pet provisions for health reform, which of his provisions would you accept?” But in the current media narrative, all the onus to achieve bipartisanship is on Obama and the Democrats. Bipartisanship will be measured by how much they give in to a Republican Party that doesn’t have to budge at all.

President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans to demonstrate that their alleged willingness to work with him on big national challenges is not just a pose.

On one very high-profile track, Obama has invited congressional Republicans to participate in a public forum on health care reform. After some talk among GOPers of insisting on preconditions like abandonment of the current House and Senate bills, and of any intention of using reconciliation to enact health reform measures in the Senate, it now looks like Republicans will show up. That’s probably in part because a new ABC-Washington Post poll shows Americans blaming the GOP much more than the president for intransigence.

Despite Democratic fears that Obama is going to screw up the highly fragile prospects for final congressional action on health care reform, all he’s publicly said in the way of concessions to the GOP is that he’s willing to take action on medical malpractice insurance reforms if Republicans are willing to get out of opposition to serious action to cover the uninsured. That’s probably not a deal Republicans will seriously consider.

Meanwhile, on another front, the White House is pushing Republicans to make a deal on jobs legislation.

This is a really tricky proposition for Republicans. They’ve spent months attacking any jobs bill as a “second stimulus” bill, which in their vocabulary is a deadly insult. And they’ve certainly boxed themselves into a proposition that any bill significantly increasing budget deficits is a no-go.

But on the other hand, the administration has made it clear that targeted tax cuts for businesses creating new jobs would be the centerpiece of a jobs bill, and it will be difficult for Republicans to reject that in the current environment. At the same time, though, GOPers have consistently argued that across-the-board, not targeted, tax cuts, is what they demand, even though across-the-board cuts benefit big corporations and/or wealthy individuals, and tend to cost a whole lot.

It’s pretty clear the White House is playing chicken with the GOP: offering bipartisan cooperation, but in a way that either exposes Republican self-contradictions and hypocrisy, or makes them finally cooperate on more-or-less the president’s terms. This may represent a revival and intensification by Obama of his controversial “grassroots bipartisanship” strategy, just when most observers in both parties thought it was dead.

The stakes in this game of chicken are very, very big.

So lots of Americans, we are told, really wish the president would reach out to the Republican Party and come up with bipartisan solutions for our nation’s problems. This very day, the president is in fact trudging up to Baltimore to attend a retreat of the House Republican Caucus, an organization devoted to his complete political destruction.

But before anyone gets agitated about “bipartisan solutions” or the failure to achieve them, it’s important to take a look at where Republicans actually are on big controversial issues–like, just to pull one example out of the air, health care policy.

At the New Republic today, Washington & Lee University law professor Timothy gives us a refresher course on GOP health care policy, from AHiPs to interstate insurance sales. He concludes their proposals wouldn’t do a whole lot for the uninsured, the insured, or health care costs and federal spending. But the most important conclusion he reaches is that there simply isn’t a lot of “common ground” on which to build any sort of bipartisan compromise.

The two parties presently come at the issue in fundamentally different ways, with Republicans, in particular, being transfixed by the desire to encourage the purchase of individual health insurance policies, if not individual purchases of health care without insurance.

Maybe the president and House Republicans can find plenty to talk about in Baltimore today. But comparing notes on health reform is probably a waste of time.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

I’m with Steve Benen on this one: after listening to Republicans say all weekend that the president needs to surrender on health care reform and start embracing theirpolicy ideas, maybe it’s time to draw a lot more public attention to all that fine GOP thinking on the subject.

So where to begin? I guess that would be with the “plan” that drew 176 Republicans votes in the House in a test vote in November of last year, the so-called “Boehner plan.” Dissed by an official Congressional Budget Office analysis that suggested it would cover almost none of the uninsured, while controlling costs far less effectively than the House Democratic proposal, this plan followed the usual conservative template of focusing on tort “reform,” “interstate markets” for private heath insurance (e.g., elimination of state regulations), elimination of the entire employer-based system, and a two-pronged strategy of subsidizing high-deductible individual health plans for healthy people, and state-run risk pools for sick people. It was, as Matt Yglesias put it, an “un-insurance” plan that would take health policy, in some respects, back to the 1950s.

Another example of Republican “thinking” on health care policy is the idea of “voucherizing” Medicare, which was the central health policy element of the official House GOP “alternative budget” offered last April by Rep. Paul Ryan of WI. While “Medicare voucher” proposals vary, they all at the very least aim at transforming Medicare into a system of federal subsidies for purchasing private health insurance, while capping expenditures regardless of the impact on benefits. To put it simply, seniors would march through the streets with torches to protest any such plan if it were taken seriously.

And then there’s the most fully developed Republican health care plan, the one developed and implemented by the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and recently promoted by the party’s maximum “new star”: the Massachusetts health reform plan. How about allowing a vote on that in Congress? Oh, yeah, sorry, that’s pretty much the plan already passed by the U.S. Senate without a single Republican vote! It’s socialist!

Suffice it to say that while Democrats have been materially hurt by endless scrutiny and confusion about the substance of their ideas on health care, Republicans have massively benefitted from a total lack of accountability for their own ideas. Best I can tell, Republicans would probably be politically destroyed if people truly paid attention to GOP health proposals. So Democrats should find ways to help their GOP colleagues publicize their ideas.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Everyone should read Matt Yglesias’s post,”How Close Were We, Really?” which makes a point that I’ve been mulling. The fact that health care reform blew up so quickly after the Brown win implies that whatever consensus had been achieved between the Senate and House, it was significantly incomplete, weak, or both. House liberals apparently were not prepared to pass anything coming out of conference that didn’t reverse the problems they have with the Senate bill. But it’s unclear whether moderate senators or representatives would have stayed on board in that event. If the last week shows nothing else it reveals that a whole lot of members of Congress were decidedly un-excited about supporting anything resembling either chamber’s bill.

This seems like a job for Keith Hennessey: knowing what we know now about the uneasiness of moderates and the stubbornness of liberals, what was the likelihood that reform would have passed if Coakley had won? (Keith had the probability of collapse given a narrow Coakley victory at 10 percent — and two percent with a big win — before the election.)

If this interpretation is right, it implies that many progressives haven’t given enough credit to how far out on the plank many moderates actually went (which isn’t that surprising given how many of them misread the polls). Pre-Brown, moderates were betting that antagonism toward reform wasn’t so strong that their job — their chance to work on all of their other legislative priorities — was in mortal danger. The Brown win provided new information that clearly affected the calculus (as did the initial freak-out by Massachusetts’s own Barney Frank).

Perhaps one big reason why the Obama team (and everyone else) was caught flat-footed after the election was that they were unaware of how much moderates already felt they had stuck their necks out.

All this said, I think the consensus that Democrats having second thoughts ought to accept that they have no choice but to vote for the final bill is correct. Actually, I think these Democrats have probably reached that conclusion too. But it’s important to note that that wouldn’t be enough to pass something — if House liberals won’t vote for the Senate bill, it doesn’t matter what moderates do. What progressive bloggers need to do is start working the liberal legislators in the House.